Pedro The Lion
Are We In Narnia?


David Bazan is a nice guy. He cleans up his messes, calls his wife sugar on the phone and signs autographs for dolting fans who've been watching him eat pizza for an hour. If you try suggesting that he take advantage of the fact that his band, Pedro the Lion, is the main attraction for the evening and the reason a line of kids have formed outside the venue, he'll tell you he doesn't want to, "be that kind of rock band," and go on acting like everyone else, except nicer.  Parked in a dull-grey, full-size van out in front of Detroit's Magic Stick on a sweaty June afternoon, he speaks thoughtfully about music, religion and politics, yet without the arrogance that often accompanies such sentiments. And he shares his beer.

Bands with managers are going places

So sings Bazan on the opening track to his latest record, Achilles Heel, a dark collection of short story-songs that listens something like Hemingway's indie-rock. If Bazan is lacking in cruelty in real-life, he makes up for it with how he treats his characters in song: murder-plots, alcoholism, severed limbs, lost love and a regretted child-birth to name a few of the torments on this album. He considers it the logical follow-up to the band's 1998 full-length debut.

"It's with the sensibility of 'It's Hard to Find a Friend' but with the new cynicism of all of the rest of them," he said.

The rest of them being critically acclaimed concept pieces like "Winner's Never Quit" and "Control," which won-over many of Bazans devoted faithful. With the success of 'Friend,' Bazan said he felt more comfortable expressing himself however he wanted to and didn't concern himself with the expectations of the Christian music community he came from. At the same time, he said he went through somewhat of a musical identity crisis after that. While he wouldn't take back the albums that followed, he said he wanted to get back to the time when he was the most content making music.

"By the time I started writing [Control], I was becoming really successful at not considering an audience at all. That was a real desire of mine, to just write for myself, sort of believing that there are enough similarities between me and other people that some other people might think, 'oh, I like that too,' but it couldn't be dependent upon that, it just had to be what I liked."

"Without even meaning to, I feel like I've written a way better version, lyrically, of Control - a less heavy-handed, more nuanced version of the themes that are on Control. It's the same shit every time," he said.

Bands with messy hair and smooth white faces

Out on tour this time around with Pedro the Lion is singer/songwriter John Vanderslice, who for all his band's precision and odd-timing, still can't excite the crowd the way Bazan can with his slow, overtly articulate pronunciations and child-song melodies that root themselves in your head and seep out slowly, often unprovoked. They are the type of songs that are perfect on mixed-tapes and even better on long drives alone.

Vans with 15 passengers are rolling over, but I trust T. William Walsh

While Pedro the Lion has been, for all intents and purposes, a revolving cast of characters supporting Bazan on tour and in the studio ever since the Whole EP, a new and promising collaboration has been struck with fellow songwriter T.W. Walsh, who is responsible for penning the quintessential-Pedro-sounding number, "Start Without Me," a standout on Achilles Heel and at tonight's performance.

"It's really great," Bazan said. "I've never done this before. I was really kind of dying for it. We've been friends for a really long time. I'm really hopeful about our future together. I've never worked with anybody like him."

While on tour this summer, Bazan and Co. also collaborated with Music for America to try and promote voter registration along with other issues which Bazan said he feels are threats to what is left of our democracy.

"We're gonna be playing to a couple hundred people every night," Bazan said. "Realistically, some of those people would vote for George W. Bush in the next election, and I myself would really prefer if he didn't win."

Instead of just giving some sort of political rant, Bazan wanted to try and do something that might last longer than one night.

"It's really easy to get up on stage and shout, 'Fuck George W. Bush.' and have everybody cheer," he said. "Even if he isn't re-elected, we'll still be in a really bad spot."

A self-professed, "liberal," Bazan sees his religion's affiliation with the political right in America as frustrating.

"There came a time last year when people would ask me 'are you a Christian' and I just had to say 'no'. To clarify, I believe in the apostles creed and the Nicene creed, but if you're asking if I'm a part of Christianity the way that I know you understand Christianity to be and what it means, absolutely not. I'm not on the same side of any issue with people that are."

"I guess I look at it like, at some point, people like Martin Luther decided, 'I'm not Catholic anymore.' I don't have any allegiance to that word (Christian). When I realized it, it was like, 'oh that's easy, 'no I'm not.'"

But you don't believe me, when I say that it won't be alright

That night, in a duet with Vanderslice on a vamped-up version of the fabelistic "Slow and Steady Wins the Race," Bazan pulls a fast one to make the admittedly suburban crowd smile singing, "I'll receive a mansion, right next to Mel Gibson's." All night Bazan has a good time and grins a lot on stage. He sings cover songs by Radiohead and Randy Newman amidst his cross-catalog set (receiving the most applause for his post-9/11 scathe, "Backwoods Nation" and it's Thome Yorke borrowed "You have not been paying attention!" tag-line). He fields questions from the audience and indulges in inside jokes with the merch-table crew. If he was looking for contentment, it seems that he's found it.