Walking the Line

David Bazan knows the trials of a tightrope walker. His band Pedro the Lion has long-been associated with the Christian rock movement, and his qualms about this association share an almost equally long history. While Bazan's lyrics often focus on the darker side of human relationships, avoiding the dreaded banality of "praise rock," his faith and association with Christ have made many prospective fans write off Pedro the Lion as just another cheesy Christian rock band, full of sappy sentiments and blind devotion. Not the case. Choosing not to push Christ like a dime bag of salvation, but at the same time exploring what it means to him to believe in the teachings of Jesus, Bazan is forced to walk a rather thin line. Thank God he's got balance. The Synthesis spoke with Bazan about this, and his forthcoming album, Achilles Heel.

Are you happy with your forthcoming album, Achilles Heel?
In a sense, yeah, but I know it's coming out. This time around, we obsessed far less about the process and the album, so there's not as much writing on it from me personally as there was for other records. We just enjoyed ourselves a lot, so that was most of the fun of it. I think we're getting better and better at making records, so while this might not be the best thing that we will do, it was just so fun and I like it.

What made the process go more smoothly this time around?
I depended on other people to help in it in a way that I haven't done before. I trusted a few of my buddies to do what they were going to do on it. I didn't micromanage the process near as much. The songs themselves were just a lot more easy-going to work on. There wasn't some set idea of how the songs were going to come off, so we just got to enjoy ourselves and have fun.

What was the last thing that you heard or saw that really made an impact?
Uh, I know this one… Right now I'm reading this book called The Idiot by Dostoevsky. It's really an amazing book, it's really kinda blowing my mind. It's so entertaining, but at the same time it really teaches a person. It has me contemplating the character of Prince Mishkin, the protagonist, his effect on people. The idea of the book is after having written Crime and Punishment, which is kind of a character study of a guilty person, Dostoevsky wanted to write a book where the protagonist was a truly beautiful person. He found that to be extremely difficult because it's really unbelievable; arguably, there isn't such a person.

It seems like it'd be hard to find an unflawed character in real life. And that reminds me of something that seems to be a through-line in some of your songs; a person who wants to do good but ends up doing the opposite. The characters that you're writing about in your music, what makes them falter?
I suppose the simple answer is my imagination, but my imagination is based on what I perceive to be possible and true. When you're writing fiction, you try to do something that is accurate or just believable to yourself - characters that could be real. I think from the time that I was a little kid growing up in Christianity, I guess I was aware of how incapable I was in living up to even my own idea of what is good and right. There's this Bible story I heard when I was five about this guy named Enoch that was apparently so good, he walked with God so closely that he went to heaven without dying. I remember thinking, 'oh that would be so great, I'd really like to do that,' and then seconds later realizing, 'oh wait, you're such a terrible fuck-up, you couldn't possibly…' At five, I already had my own history to look back on and realize that wasn't possible, so I think that kinda comes with that, my socialization process, how I view myself and others.

I've read previous interviews with you where you said you get trouble from both sides: other Christians who don't think what you're doing is representative of Christianity, and non-Christians who dismiss you immediately because they think you're a Christian rock artist. If you could disassociate yourself, or rather, your music from Christianity, would you?
Yeah, I absolutely would. In general, it's a tough issue. Sometimes I liken it to Catholicism just prior to the Reformation when corruption was really rampant. The church itself had gotten so far off the course of anything that Christ was about personally or had taught about, that to associate yourself with the Catholic church at that point was almost to disassociate yourself from Christ. I think it's more insidious these days, but I feel the same way. I feel like to associate yourself with Christianity is almost necessarily to disassociate yourself with any possible perception of who Christ was. So both personally and in rock 'n' roll, I would gladly disassociate myself from Christianity because I just don't feel it has anything to do with what I read about Christ.

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