“But the garden of my songs is what I’ve been building. “I was trying to evaluate what I have to show for 20 years of kicking my own ass,” Bazan quips about the strenuousness of full-time touring.
#DAVID BAZAN DISCOGRAPHY KAT SERIES#
He detoured to a more elaborate assortment of analog electronic equipment, then woodshed his original two-handed keyboard arrangements on fingerpicked acoustic guitar.Ĭoncurrently relearning his catalog for a weekly series of livestream concerts also renewed his gratitude toward songwriting. Bazan began writing on a simple synthesizer and drum machine setup. As he worked through the music that became Havasu, flexibility and curiosity informed the arrangements. I’m on a slow journey away from that,” he clarifies. That meant doing away with deadlines, and accumulating moments of play as he felt moved to-“Rather than squeezing stones every single time. To revisit his past with openness, Bazan modified harmful work habits he’d accepted as necessary. “That twelve year old still needs parenting, and still needs to process.” “I wanted to be there for that kid,” he offers. A revelation from the book-that Petty subconsciously wrote the song “Wildflowers” as an act of kindness toward himself-inspired Bazan to approach his own work with radical generosity toward his young self. “I was there to soak in it as much as possible.”ĭriving the inscrutable loops of Havasu’s lakeside, Bazan listened through an audiobook of Tom Petty’s biography, eventually dialoguing with Petty’s voice in his mind. “An intersection I hadn’t remembered for 30 years would trigger a flood of hidden memories,” he says. To write its sequel, Bazan traveled to Havasu four times over several years, driving past his junior high campus, a magical skating rink, and other nostalgic locations that evoked feelings long suppressed. Bazan collected his earliest childhood experiences for 2019’s Phoenix, the prolific artist’s celebrated return to the Pedro moniker and the first in a planned series of five records chronicling his past homes. “It’s this very synthetic, gimmicky place set in this soulful, desolate landscape,” laughs Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, who moved to the Arizona city for one year in seventh grade. Lake Havasu is a community of winding hillside roads, launched in the 1960s alongside a brick-for-brick rebuild of the original London Bridge. “Reflective and revealing, it’s a remarkable opening to a new chapter in Bazan’s musical history.” “…on Phoenix, Bazan turns the mirror on himself in ways he never has, scouring a childhood spent in the Sonoran desert for a real understanding of his deepest flaws and most fundamental beliefs.”