How Good Is Good Enough? David Bazan Week Pt 2

By the time of Pedro the Lion's second full length album Winners Never Quit in 2000, much had changed for me. I had become a secularist, a closet believer. I had taken a variety of classes at university on the philosophy of religion and more specified classes on Existentialists from Kant to Camus, plus others on Neitzsche, Heideger, and Hegel, among others. Needless to say I was heavily ensconced in my own head. Knowledge of God was just that, knowledge, without any kind of experience. By this time my religion was all but dead, even though I still thought of myself as a believer.

I was also becoming heavily interested in creative writing. I had officially changed my major to reflect an emphasis in creative writing (UCI did not offer a creative writing program at the undergraduate level) and was fascinated by short story writers like Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway. So when I got ahold of Winners I was stunned with excitement at how narrative the album felt. It read like a short story set to music. Until this moment I had assumed that in most songwriting the "I" of the narrator was synonymous with the songwriter. (From then on my own songwriting was forever altered to reflect this. Most if not all my songwriting tends to be allegorical where the I of the song is not me, Ben Heywood.)

Winners follows the narrative arc of 2 brothers, each sharing first person accounts of the story line depending on the song. I interpreted the album to be an examination of good and evil in terms of the blurry line between modern morality and immorality. One brother is "good" in the eyes of society; he is a politician and a Christian fighting for what he believes is right, yet is capable of cheating and lying to get his way. The other brother is the proverbial fuck up, a drunk who amounts to nothing, but has a stronger sense of morality than his successful brother. The story ends with the "good" brother murdering his wife and then committing suicide while the "evil" brother has ended up in prison. The only overt mention of God comes in the second to last track "Bad Things To Such Good People" where the "evil" brother reflects on the irony of seeing his father down on his knees "crying out to Jesus, 'But Lord I've always done what's right.' " His one "good" son was now dead and gone. The song ends with the refrain "And all the while, the good Lord smiled, and looked the other way."

I took the implication of the album to be connected to the Deist tradition that believes there is a God, but that He is wholly disinterested in human life, a dispassionate creator unconcerned with man's daily struggles. I immediately rejected that conclusion, even if it wasn't the conclusion meant to come from listening to the record. I continued to reason, to this day, in fact, that there was no point in believing in a God like that, and since at the time I knew or felt no other God, I essentially stopped thinking about the question all together.