.Music as Memoir

By Sean Rusev

Musician David Bazan, aka Pedro the Lion, is not a Santa Cruz local. Now 48, he lived here during eighth grade. Yet his recall is formidable: the enchilada sauce with the #8 at El Toro Bravo he had with his grandparents after church; surfing at Sewers.

For Bazan, Santa Cruz occupies a monolithic space in his mind: “The water and the clouds, the geography and the geology, that whole cycle of the shifting fog and then it burns off, it just felt like something was going on.”

He spoke reverently of our fair city the day after Fourth of July, on break from a tour supporting Santa Cruz—the latest in his current five-album musical memoir project—that will bring him to town this week.

Autobiography is often a balance between guarded confession and relitigation—what to share vs. what to withhold vs. why you lived the way you lived. Some things are best left under shallow topsoil, exhumed when enough time has gone by for you to understand, or for another person to understand you.

Bazan sees his memoir project—beginning with his other monoliths, Phoenix (2019) and Havasu (2022), now Santa Cruz and likely Paradise next—as something closer to therapy. “I could write three albums about each of these places easily. There’s no way to get to it all within the format that I’m working in.”

This format sprung from “a very low place,” the “longing, discomfort, bewilderment” of coming home in Phoenix while on tour in 2016, but he decided to drill down into the raw crude of his unprocessed memories to ask himself: Why did he feel this way? In the span of minutes, his self-exploratory plan bloomed from a discrete journaling exercise to a book to not just one record, but a range. He professes to cook up ambitious dream projects all the time, “but that one felt like it was going to stick, and it did.”

His primary interest is to convey sights and sensations from a child’s POV, the reverberations of places rather than interactions with people. The kid in him remembers Phoenix by “the size of the streets, how long the yellow lights are because the intersections are these massive things.” His “domain was the middle of the day” for playing in the harsh desert, but it “didn’t feel like there was much company in the climate, and in the terrain.”

Not so in Santa Cruz. “It was just pretty magic from the beginning. It felt like company.”

You can feel him aching for company throughout his new record. Even when he finds connection, it’s fleeting, because his Christian vagabond parents keep decamping to parts unknown for jobs uncertain. His main friend seems to be his headphones (fitting since he has also released music under that moniker), a Narnian wardrobe to escape unwelcoming classmates and visit worlds his folks or fellow flock forbade him to witness, but also where he could hear the first material peers wrote and recorded, and experience the ecstatic rush of creation long before the world did.

Pedro the Lion has been dogged by the slowcore descriptor since inception, but besides the funereal opener “It’ll All Work Out,” the mood and groove of Santa Cruz keeps pace with the mantra in the album closer, “Only Yesterday”: Grief is energy. It continues the full-band sheen of its predecessors, the bass here sometimes encircled by synth to plumb impossible octave depths. Bazan’s twin talents of baritone and falsetto have never been more masterful, exploding on aptly named “Little Help” into Beatles-esque harmonies when he’s poked right in his third eye by the White Album.

When I tell him I’m jealous that single “Modesto” gives that city such a barn-burner to its name, he chuckles proudly.

Why not name the record after that? Bazan wanted the listener’s experience to mirror his own.

“I had the expectation ‘We’re going to Santa Cruz.’ That was the headline. This is what’s next and this is where we’re gonna be.”

He already had family in Hollister, San Juan Bautista and Monterey, so he was convinced that proximity would drive their tent stakes deeper than usual. Instead, it was just a brief stop, and Santa Cruz follows his personal highway from ages 13-21, from dish pit drudgery to first love transcendence, and all the detours in between.

This is not his first concept record rodeo, even if it’s his first execution at this scale. “The Whole EP, the very first thing I did, Winners Never Quit, Control, are records that have links narratively between songs.” Records that have links between each other is another matter.

Was Sufjan Stevens’ promise to write an album for each of the 50 states a template? (Never mind that the whole thing was later revealed to be a brilliant PR fib.)

Shortening his name affectionately, Bazan said, “I knew Suf had made those couple of records [Michigan and Illinois], but this felt a little different, ’cause the point was very much a self-healing narrative work, which may have been what drove him for those—I don’t know. For me to reveal the masking I was doing all that time, it felt like a major challenge the way the My Struggle book series [by Karl Ove Knausgaard] kind of felt, even though I wasn’t going to go into that much depth.”

Bazan had no childhood diaries to draw from, but he did dust off old yearbooks. From those he might build exposition from “a dozen different little moments, and some had a sting to them.”

“One of the first memories that came to mind to process was from the song ‘Quietest Friend’ on Phoenix, in the fifth-grade lunchroom, me letting down a buddy for not sticking up for them when everybody was making fun of them. Anytime I think we go back and sit with those feelings, we heal them a little bit. And if we express them, write them down, or read them back later, there’s like a re-parenting that can happen.”

He’s a fairly stern parent on that song, but there’s a soft bear hug in store for his inner child on the title track of Santa Cruz as he endures his first day of school after transfering.

Long intimidated by our city’s legendary “patina of cool,” he sings of making the cardinal mistake of wearing “the stupidest backpack.” He hits that “s” hard, stretching its sibilance the way we might admonish ourselves in a mirror. He “loved it in Phoenix at the mall with my Grandma,” but this is back before the immediacy of the internet flattened American regional fashion trends, and his “neon green acid wash” affair stood out here.

The chorus experiences Santa Cruz in elemental terms, basking in our “magnetic vibrations,” but Bazan doesn’t want the potency of that culture clash line to get lost. Adults have the nasty tendency to “minimize a moment like that for the rest of your life,” but Bazan seeks to break the loop, instead “dramatizing [it] in honor of the experience of that kid. This is a big deal, and you’re not stupid for thinking this is important.”

Pedro the Lion will perform songs from Santa Cruz and his other releases at 8pm July 22, Felton Music Hall, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton, Ages 21+, $34.50/adv, $39/door. (831) 704-7113. feltonmusichall.com.