Even after a hard-fought career is realized and bucket-list successes are crossed off, long-dormant issues have a way of coming back. For emo and indie rock veteran David Bazan, the singer/songwriter behind Pedro the Lion, growing up meant moving constantly, attending Bible school, riding a treasured yellow bike, and trying to fit in with his peers, but sometimes failing.
The awkward teenage years are upon Bazan, and it’s the mindset and the setting for latest album Santa Cruz, out now via Polyvinyl. It’s the heart of a five-album series (following the first two, Havasu and Phoenix) that follows the multi-instrumentalist during his transformative years, from the tender age of 13 to the cusp of adulthood at age 20. During this time, he was often uprooted from friends and had no choice but to move from town to town with his family, living in Californian towns like Paradise and Modesto, and picking up the pieces.
In the title track, Bazan brings up a vivid detail—realizing the “neon green” backpack he got for school was a woeful mistake, and he resigns himself to the fact that the item would largely determine his fate for the entire academic year.
The song also finds him at a crossroads, questioning his faith. He was raised in a strict religious household (his dad was a music pastor in the Assemblies of God denomination). Though already in love with music, he finds that the promises told in Christian music aren’t as true as he once thought, and though he liked to “escape to my headphones …. Christian rock music / was starting to pale.”
Santa Cruz ends in Seattle, Washington, where he spoke with Treble about his early exposure to rock music, revisits painful feelings of loss and loneliness, and reveals how music can heal a troubled soul.
Treble: You had to sift through a lot of personal experiences for this album. How did you break them down?
David Bazan: It’s hard to get a bird’s eye view of your life as you’re living it. With this one, I wanted to definitely capture the way that moving so often felt—even just sort of tracing my family’s movements from Santa Cruz to Paradise to Seattle to Modesto—put things into perspective for me.
A lot of the record is going through and putting into a narrative form just little bits of my own history that I’ve only ever lived in my head. And then somehow getting them out reduces the amount of shame that I felt around them, or offer some sort of validation to the experiences that I was having that I had kept quiet.
In a lot of cases, it’s the first time that I would have ever really externally expressed these things. In the first song on this record, “It Will All Work Out,” I had never really verbalized it to anybody. And it’s almost still secret in a way, because it’s not like I’ve told a friend. I’ve just told a bunch of listeners.
There might have been a lot of loving, well-meaning people around but somehow (there) wasn’t the support or the perspective or the care that you needed as a kid. … Now I’m the grown up going back and offering that support in a way.
Treble: “Tall Pines” seems to be about having a secret relationship with a girl, as well as your dad changing jobs again.
DB: The arc of that song is like, “surprise, we’re moving to this place.” And then we live there a year, and then it’s like, surprise, we’re moving again. It’s one of those things that is like a young kid who is, in a very religious context, the kind of sweet moments that you can have in like a dating or romantic relationship (that) was always kind of tinged with guilt and shame. There was a special moment of connection between two people and putting it in a tin the way that I did, it just took it out of that realm. Obviously, we were lying to our folks, there was some taboo around it, but we were just two kids, connecting in this way that was very sweet and kind.
Treble: What did your parents think when they heard “Tall Pines”?
DB: I’m almost 50. And, you know, my folks are on the record. And I just thought, “oh, no.” I’m finally admitting that what happened back then, which they had some vague sense of, but didn’t really know the details and now they do. But I couldn’t have said anything about it 10 years ago, because the shame that I felt around any of that stuff was still intact from the way that I grew up.
Treble: You share a lot of memories on Santa Cruz. Have certain events in your life stuck with you more than others?
DB: It’s probably like, the times and events and scenes and realities in my life that I maybe needed the most help with as a kid but didn’t have it. In a therapeutic context, I’ve understood the idea of reparenting oneself through tough, maybe even traumatic moments that you experienced as a younger person.
There might have been a lot of loving, well-meaning people around but somehow (there) wasn’t the support or the perspective or the care that you needed as a kid. Now as an adult, you can go back and spend time with those versions of yourself. Now I’m the grown up going back and offering that support in a way. That’s how it works with the tunes. And so now I can go back and give that kid the attention and the awareness and the wisdom that I’ve now kind of fought hard for, that I had needed then.
Treble: What did you need support for?
DB: So many of my emotions felt like they were unmentionable, that I needed to kind of mask them. The first song on the record (“It’ll All Work Out”) talks a little bit about this feeling that I had, which is, “I’m in a lot of pain, this is rough.” And there are little events that happen, on the Havasu record or whatever, that were my own secret episodes of feeling abandoned or betrayed or just left out in a profound kind of way that I wasn’t sharing with anybody. It was just something I carried myself.
Treble: You said your parents didn’t allow rock music, but you did hear The Beatles’ White Album at a friend’s house.
DB: It was only at my friend’s house that I was exposed to those things. And it was awesome. That was such a good thing.
Treble: Was the White Album your first exposure to The Beatles?
DB: Looking back, I realized that I had heard The Beatles before—“Twist and Shout this and that, but it was really consciously the first experience I had. It was “Birthday” and “Yer Blues” and “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide” were like the first four tunes I heard. I was very, very pleased.
I mean, a light bulb went on. And then “Strawberry Fields” after that and “Penny Lane” and “A Day in the Life” and all that mid-, later-era psychedelic stuff was my first introduction. I loved that. Really. It was life-changing.
Treble: Are there other musical themes that play into the rest of Santa Cruz?
DB: Along with the song “Little Help,” which is about The Beatles, there’s another song on the record that’s about a musical experience that was also pretty life-changing. And that’s, of course, the song “Modesto.” And that was about hearing the band Grandaddy for the first time. And I’ve been pretty coy about that up until now, because I wanted people to have their own experience with the two and to not ride Grandaddy’s coattails or whatever. But yeah, each one kind of gave me permission to include the other on the record, if that makes any sense. If I’m writing about my teenage years, it basically begins with hearing The Beatles, and then it ends with hearing Granddaddy.
And those are two very significant things in my life, and why would I pass up the chance to illustrate those extremely important moments on an autobiographical record? They’re both a source of a lot of positive energy and joy, which I get to experience, certainly, and I want to put that on a record of a bunch of bummer tunes. There’s sort of a bookend musical experience (in “Modesto.”)
Treble: Have you attached certain feelings or emotions to places you lived in?
DB: I think so. Not in a deliberate way, but in a stuck kind of way. Where the whole project began was me being in Phoenix on a solo tour. And just really dealing with the experience that I always had going back to Phoenix and Santa Cruz and Havasu and any other places I had lived, where it felt like there was … ghost feelings. When you turn a corner and see an intersection, and I just get all of this longing and feeling like something’s unfinished. I was experiencing this feeling again in Phoenix. And I was really thinking like, “Okay, what do I do about this? I don’t like it.” It’s uncomfortable. I’d like to feel settled about these things instead of kind of this feeling of suspense.
Treble: Have you started writing the final two albums?
DB: I’ve been stewing on them for a long time. And I’ve definitely jotted some things down. I have a very solid sense of the plan and the arc of them both. For each record, it’s like a big puzzle that includes pieces that I don’t know what the shape of them are yet. And so I have to think ahead about them a lot.
I’ve solved a lot of problems already. For instance, I had a pretty, for me, a bad drinking problem for a lot of years. And so the next record is gonna need to make some reference to that, but I don’t really want to write about drinking, because I feel like it’s triggering for anybody who drinks. I don’t want to write about that. But I do need to write about it. I’ve had a strong sense of, “I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to pull this off” numerous times during the process, but finishing the third one and feeling good about it within myself….I don’t really have that feeling anymore. Like yeah, I mean, I could still fuck it up. I’m not saying that. But I feel like this is something within my capability to land the way that I want. So that feels really good.
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