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
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.
Continue reading ‘“i don’t like autobiographical songs”: the david bazan interview;’
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