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Not looking for a perfect fit.
I spoke to David Bazan over the phone this week about the many twists and turns hes taken sinceFriend.
What was the journey toHavasulike?
And a few of the ideas that came up then made it onto the record.
I was just trying to collect impressions of the place and remember feelings and memories.
So I put the record away for about a year.
I still was working on it in the background, but just not every day, front of mind.
I wound up picking it back up in November of 2020 or so.
And its your first surprise release.Yeah.
The label had the idea.
We thought it was something to try.
Three months feels like a year sometimes, these days, just with all the stressful news.
I dont know why …
It definitely feels like more is happening, or were aware of more thats happening than ever before.Yeah.
You put the songs in a certain order, thematically or sonically or whatever, to have a flow.
Havasu is your second release now covering growing up in Arizona.
Theres a nice balance of end-of-childhood songs and these teenage memories.
When did you live there?I was 12 and 13.
It was my seventh-grade school year, from summer to summer.
That was 88, 89.
Lake Havasu has such a curious history.
Its sort of like a terraforming project.
Its a really typical American story.
How did you like the place?Its completely synthetic.
The lake, as you say, is this man-made thing.
They transformed this kind of desolate place, manufactured a town from nothing.
Well, we had grown up going to some other desert lakes with our grandparents for camping.
So there was this kind of vacation-spot feel.
The locales around those vacation spots we saw werent as developed as Havasu is.
In the summer, its so, so hot there.
I was there one time when it was 129 degrees.
The rest of the time, its just very pleasant, really beautiful.
As a kid, that was a big deal to me.
They didnt have the amenities the bigger metropolitan spots did.
It felt pretty isolated, but there was a romance to that, too.
I think this is a way for me to process some of it.
Ive done therapy, too.
But these places are so vivid …
I thought,Im going to do an art project about it.
Then I realized I make records.Maybe Ill make records about it.
Once I got the idea, I was really inspired and motivated.
Thats a neat challenge and not something you could really measure the success of.
Havasuis maybe the quietest Pedro the Lion record.
I remember trying to learn how not to be so serious in Lake Havasu City.
There was this battle.
There was this pull.
But now, the character being studied is you.For now, it is.
I might edge back into some more fictionalized writing in the next couple of records in the series.
The foundation here is pretty dang autobiographical, which is a new thing for Pedro.
Im not sure if thats intentional or if its just growth that were seeing.I think its more the latter.
There are little nods inPhoenix.
A lyric from a Bazan record ended up in there.
There definitely is an awareness of the possibility of tying it all together.
I dont really experience the brands as that different from one another as Ive gone on.
Now that Im using the Pedro name again, it just makes sense.
In a way, it was always all Pedro.
Was it heavy picking the name back up?
I can see how coming back to that title might be daunting.It was.
Its been a journey to understand the dynamics of that stuff.
For whatever reason, I couldnt go through with it anymore.
It was a way to connect with myself.
I couldnt hold onto it for the same reason I never could.
It wasnt popular with the people that I was around or living with.
It made sense to me.
I dont discount those guys for wanting that.
This is how this project has to go.
I didnt really have enough of a connection with myself to do even that.
It was confusing to me, too.
Pedro the Lion is a band name.
It always meant having a band.
I got mixed up over the years about what it meant to me.
Its been tricky, but coming back to it just feels real good.
I love playing the drums and bass.
I like the guitar and making little arrangements.
Theres more of a knowledge about personnel now.
We didnt use to read credits as much as people do now.
It wasnt like that in the 2000s.
People like us who combed over that stuff back then were outliers.I feel that way too.
I thought I was the norm, because I just couldnt get enough of it.
It mustve been a curious spot being in that band.
You had this growing audience of secular fans, and you also had territorial Christian scene fans.
That had to be a trip.
Im here to play drums.
I dont want to talk about the Trinity.Right.
That was a thing.
People in the band were getting questions about Christianity at shows from people hanging around.
They were like, Thats not anything to do with me.
And that was definitely a weird thing for people.
People at the merch table would really get it.
I could see that.
It was a weird fit.
You wrote the song The Longest Winter about a guy afraid of growing old alone.
I thought those were my prospects back then.Yeah.
I see how this played into me abandoning myself over and over again in my life.
Its definitely one of the guns that might go off in a later act.
Certainly, Powerful Taboo and Quietest Friend, and that phrase the devils bargain comes in.
I dont name it, but its there in Old Wisdom.
I think itll get developed more in the next three records.
I assume Santa Cruz is next?
I wanted to play sax so bad.
I was obsessed with that song Axle F, like most kids.
Between that and The Heat Is On … that saxophone riff.
I really loved it.
It was fuel for my desire.
But I switched gears pretty quickly once I got that drum set.
This isnt that dissimilar fromDave Grohls origin story.
He wasnt seeking the drums out.
They kind of found him.
He got a few lessons and never looked back.Hes a fantastic part writer.
He conceptualizes other instruments, like the guitar, as a drummer.
Everything is sort of in sync in his head.
Theyre not so different.
you might obviously do that in a group, with other people, passing stuff around like that.
Thats my favorite part of it, making little arrangements that have these interlocking pieces.
Hes making a joke in a way, kind of mocking something.
I was kind of like, Ouch, thats what I like.
Thats the music Im trying to make, for real.
Theres a line in First Drum Set where you describe music as sports about feelings.Thats specifically about drums.
Drums are so physical.
Its like a full body workout, especially if youre Dave Grohl.
Coming into 2005, 2006, there was a huge audience for the kind of music you were making.
Bands were getting snatched up by the labels.
Newer bands were popping up all over television.
You toughed it out, but you did it a hard way.
It took a long time!
It was a personal decision.
There was a path in my mind.
But I didnt have the courage to do it.
Its like theSpongeBobpeople moving the show to the surface.
Then you quit the church!
I love that a lot of your Christian fans have stuck with it.Me too!
I was really naive.
What I did was fine.
I was doing my best and I really was trying to just understand what was going wrong.
And like I said, I got there, it just took forever.
Now, youre giving us five consecutive records.Yeah.
Alls well that ends well.
I turned out alright.
My collegelanded in hot waterfor its LGBTQ policies years after it wouldve done me any good.
I hadnt found my ability to be myself and to think what I thought about things.
I was scared to even admit my thoughts about that.
I knew that there was nothing wrong with it.
It was the family-values era.
I didnt talk about that stuff either, for obvious reasons.The stakes were enormous.
Im so glad that song resonated.
Was it a sad song for you?
Did it bring comfort somehow?
I was exactly double the age I was when I wrote it.
Its like,How did I know this?I shouldnt have been that sad, that upset.
Well, thank you for telling me about that.
I dont understand everything I write, and thats good.
Its probably better that it retains some mystery when youre putting it out there.
Eventually, your subconscious might find understanding.
Sometimes its through people saying stuff.
Oh, did you ever think about this song?
Did you ever hear the story about Tom Pettys therapist asking him about Wildflowers?
I havent.His therapist asked him who it was written for.
And Toms like, I dont know.
And the therapist says, I think it was you.
I think youre writing to yourself.
What do you think about that?
And Tom Petty was like, Yeah, that sounds right.
He had no idea.
I love asking musicians why they wrote things.
Often, theres no answer.
Sometimes its filler that you might tell is filler, stuff they thought up on the spot.
Thats kinda funny to me.
And so I would take a stab at tell people what my version of it was.
I realized thats how this goes.
Once its gone, once its out of me, people get to choose.
It can take a long time to come to that realization.
That can be intriguing too.
But yeah, I feel all that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
