“i don’t like autobiographical songs”: the david bazan interview;

Curse Your Branches – technically the first solo full-length from one-time Pedro the Lion frontman David Bazan – was one of my favourite 2009 releases (you can read my review here). I got the chance to catch up with him before last week’s show at Stereo, marking the album’s release on UK soil, and we spent most of the time talking about religion and roadtrips.

BUY: Curse Your Branches at Amazon.co.uk

Is it different being on your own on the road, rather than with a band like Pedro the Lion?
The basic stuff is: you don’t move quite as much air when you’re playing the show… The camaraderie is different too. This time I’m actually with other musicians who aren’t actually in my band [support act POSTDATA], but we still hang out, so that’s nice. But yes, it’s different in the ways that you’d expect – especially if I’m in the United States, and a lot of times I’ll be driving around just… alone for five or six weeks. That has its own charm though – just driving around anywhere is really pleasant.

What’s your favourite thing about touring?
The only thing I don’t like is being away from my family. I do like driving – I’ve been on a bus tour, before, where all the driving happened at night and it was also fun, but I missed seeing the country: just looking out of the window and stopping at all of the gas stations. When you drive at night, you just sleep the whole time and wake up in the city. There’s even something about going to towns and not getting to see anything in the town itself that is okay with me – just because I feel as if I have a purpose.

In my head, your album will always be connected with driving through America because I bought it when I was over there. There’s something about “the road” in US culture that we just can’t replicate over here because everything’s on a much smaller scale.
Yeah, you can drive for hours and hours between… anything. I like driving over there. I’ve never driven myself here – I’ve always been driven by somebody else – and that’s fun too.

So stepping back a little to your previous work with Pedro the Lion – do you find that the writing process is different when you know that the songs will be going out with your name attached?
The writing process has evolved over the years, but not really with respect to what “brand name” I’m using – with the exception of Headphones; that was a specific project where everything was written on keyboards. It had already become something else when I was writing Achilles Heel, and then it has continued to change with the first two Bazan releases. I played everything on the records, and that’s how a lot of the Pedro the Lion records were done too. It was different with Achilles Heel because I had some other people around; [bandmate TW] Walsh played some drums, some guitar – and then with Curse Your Branches there was also a couple of other people around. But in general, it’s morphed on its own, independent of whether I’m playing the songs solo or with a band.

I first heard “Harmless Sparks” on a 2007 Daytrotter session. How long did the album, and its specific theme which I hope we can address later, take to come together?
I think I actually wrote the melody to “Bless This Mess” in 2005. I had some filler lyrics, but I had written them not thinking I would really be able to use them because it didn’t seem like the sort of thing I could finish. In that sense, I’ve had some of the songs floating around since then when I was trying to write the next Pedro the Lion record after the Headphones record came out. Curse Your Branches was basically finished towards the end of 2008, and it probably took the better part of two years to write and record everything in the midst of touring 250 days a year and moving my workspace four different times. There was a lot going on then, but I was writing and trying to record that whole time.

Did those early songs feel like Pedro the Lion songs, or did they feel like a part of something different?
I always wanted to make something different anyway. I’ve always pined to make slightly less conventional music – slightly weirder instrumental arrangements or things that weren’t based on me strumming cowboy chords and then adding drums and bass. They did feel different – at least “Bless This Mess” did – but to me that was exciting and not incompatible with any band name I was using.

Obviously the religious element of the record is something that has been picked up on in reviews and press coverage. Did you intend that to come across so strongly, or was it something that came out in the writing process?
It was more the second – it seemed to bubble to the surface in every little tune. At a certain point, I gave up fighting or being resistant to the idea – if indeed I ever was. It wasn’t until I zoomed out that I realised all of the songs were about booze, and religion, and autobiographical – I never wanted to make music that way; I’m not a huge fan of the autobiographical style of songwriting personally. But when I would zoom in, and I would just work, that was what came naturally – and it wasn’t really on my mind that it was necessarily autobiographical. There was a point at which it came as a bit of a shock, but then I realised I liked playing those songs so much, and I connected with them in a particular way, so they stayed.

You probably hate when people say to you ‘you wrote this song, and it totally speaks to me’ -
No, I don’t. That’s amazing.
Good, because I was going to say that “When We Fell” pretty much sums up my own beliefs! Do you mind talking about what changed, for you?
It was a lot of things. I was very squarely a Christian in high school, and I was pretty aware that the American church I had access to didn’t look anything like the teaching that I would read about in the Bible – it seemed to cherrypick certain key teachings which jived with what it wanted to do and how it wanted to behave. And so I developed a sense of being a pretty strong critic of the church and particularly of the alliance that the American evangelical church struck with the political right. There are so many reasons why that is anti-Biblical, aside from it just being deeply unethical independent of any theological analysis. But while I was critical of the church I found solace in what, to me, seemed to be a really profound ethical system of truths or of faith that was there in careful consideration of scripture.

There is a lot to understand – it’s difficult to master all of those ideas and to understand them thoroughly, and so I would constantly go back and read and try to get a better handle on the theology. I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but I was still developing my own ethical system and was taking a lot of cues from scripture and Christ’s teachings – humility, and love your neighbour, and all these things that really implied to me that part of the practice of Christianity was to relinquish power, not to try to accumulate it. As I would get down to the bottom of certain things there were these assumptions that were underlying my entire belief system – namely that the Bible was the authoritative error-free word of God; that Jesus was God; that God existed at all – and as I started getting deeper into some of these questions as a way of solidifying my identity and my faith, at a certain point I realised that there were these other nagging questions that I had to be able to address. One of the first ones that came up was that the Bible was God’s authoritative Word, and under scrutiny, as far as I can tell even now, there is no reason to believe that.

I think on of the difficulties for me has always been that it has been written by man – so how much of it is one particular writer’s interpretation, and how much of it is “the message”.
Yeah. So that was one of the first things to go, and then when I started evaluating the logic of the story – from creation, through the Fall, to redemption – there were certain aspects of God’s behaviour that ostensibly didn’t play by the ethical system that was implied in this Book that God was supposedly the champion of and that we were meant to be as well. And so, because I didn’t necessarily accept those stories to be true, it just dawned on me that… they don’t seem true. These events seem made up. And not made up by somebody particularly brilliant or with a particularly transcendent view of things – it seems on the level of primitive mythology.

And that was difficult for me, because I had always believed that it was true. But it doesn’t match up to me that if there is a supreme being of the universe who created this ecosystem of the earth, and the universe, and our bodies, and these very intricate, elegant things then He wouldn’t have simultaneously cobbled together this history of his interaction with these beings that he had created. Much less – if my daughter disobeys me, which she does constantly, it would be wrong of me to cast her out even if my answer for doing that was that I was a righteous man who could not tolerate unrighteousness in my household. That is completely absurd. I made her – it’s my responsibility to deal with whatever comes along with that. There is an ethical system that the story of the Fall just doesn’t abide by, both in the Bible itself – which I don’t view as authoritative at this point – but also in the world that I subscribe to, from all around us.

All of that just to say that through the further development of my ethical system as I grew up, influenced by the Bible first and foremost throughout my adolescence – when I stacked up some of the claims of Christianity against that ethical system which I held dearly it didn’t jive.

Would you still describe yourself as a person of faith?
…yes. Faith is an interesting word, but yes. I have faith, for example, that Hell doesn’t exist. I don’t know that it doesn’t exist, but there is evidence to a certain point – not to the point of knowledge, but to a point where it seems reasonable to go the rest of the way on faith. People talk about faith a lot, and I don’t know if it’s widely accepted or not but it seems to me that reason always precedes faith in this way. In the United States, the way that usually works is that Christianity is such a powerful social norm that that’s the reason that drives people to go the rest of the way on faith rather than evaluating the truth of Christianity independently. So in that sense, yes, I am a person of faith… but not in the way that I think people would usually describe it.

To quote the song: what is “bearing witness” to you?
It really is not starting with some overarching conclusion through which you interpret everything. True objectivity is not possible, but lesser levels of subjectivity are: just trying to honestly pursue knowledge and understanding, and letting the chips fall where they fall and not attempting to manipulate the outcome – a desire to know what is, not what you hope is.

To get away from the heavy stuff – and thanks so much for that – what’s next for David Bazan?
I have two weeks off in between this tour and a five-week US tour, and between rehearsing the band and spending all the time that I’m not rehearsing with my family, my daughter has Spring Break that starts the day before I get home so I get to just hang out all week with her. Then I’m home for another two weeks, and the next trip will be house shows in America. That takes me through… the end of May? So I have about a month off in between now and June 1st, and the rest of it is lots of touring of various kinds.

Finally – what music are you listening to at the moment?
Today we all got our iPods out, and I played – let’s see: Randy Newman; Gillian Welch; Weezer; Deerhoof; Wire. On the last tour, the Bazan band stopped in at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago and recorded the songs that we were playing live, and I chose ten of them and my friend Tim is mixing those right now. So we listened to that, which I’m really excited about. And the Crystal Skulls, a now-defunct Seattle band – their first record Blocked Numbers is remarkable, and it’s a shame they’re not world-famous.