On Santa Cruz , the third in Pedro the Lion's planned five-part album series, David Bazan continues to understand himself and the world that made him. Ryan Russell/Courtesy of the artist hide caption This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this one, Tiny Desk exclusives, listening recommendations and more.
It’s common — you could even say foundational — for artists of all kinds to build their creative work on the sites of past trauma. Some, however, go further than simply mining those dark crevasses to confront how the pain and alienation at their bottom can distort the timeline of a life. Traumatic experiences create loops and blank spaces, blurring and disordering memories and fragmenting the present-day self.
David Bazan has made it his mission to explore such breaking points in his past throughout his career as an indie rock sage recording under his own name and, leading various combinations of collaborators, as Pedro the Lion . His past few releases under that band name have fulfilled this process deliberately, forming a multi-part memoir of his childhood and youth, the son of a minister whose church assignments regularly uprooted his family as they moved throughout the American West. These albums remind me of the early books in the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ongoing life-writing project, My Struggle , which also dwells on images and stories that veer from poignancy to humor to cringe-worthiness.
