Thursday, January 14, 2010

Descent Into Revival: David Bazan Week Pt. 4

Sometime around the release of Control someone began to anonymously send me sermons on CD from my old pastor, Ron Pinkston. It wasn't until nearly a year later in April of 2003 that I listened to one. I was struck by the title: "The Bridge Over The Church." After my three years of leftist zealotry (that included me registering to vote as a member of the Socialist Party, which didn't change until I realized I could not vote in primaries), I began to be troubled by a sneaking suspicion that my problem with God was not so much metaphysical as it was a personal resentment towards His followers. If the Church was God's representative and the Church had done nothing but let me down, what does that say about God? (Editorial side note: There exists in my mind a long litany of transgressions my family and I suffered at the hands of the Church in the name of God, but in order to stay on topic I'll direct the interested reader to revisit Summer Darling's previous 2 EPs which were almost exclusively about those experiences in some form or another.)

The long and short of it was this: when I listened to this sermon in which the pastor was critical of the modern Church's pension towards corporatization and ashamed and apologetic of the many ills the Church committed over the centuries and remorseful for the current state of people's church experiences, I felt revived. I was released from the burden of feeling like I had to agree with the Church in order to believe in God. Over the next five years I would work through and forgive my past issues with the Church and the specific people who had damaged my faith. It was a liberating time, and a painful time, as I had to re-examine the whole of my belief system and somehow integrate my liberal political feelings with my spiritual convictions. I was able to do this.

Meanwhile David Bazan seemed headed in the opposite direction. Pedro the Lion's last LP, Achilles Heel, does its part to walk the same line I lived, balancing faith with secularism, but I remember hearing an advance copy of the record sitting outside a recording studio in March of 2004 with my band-mate, Loop, and feeling sort of disinterested in the songs. I've gone back and revisited the album many times, but the simple fact is that the songs don't speak to me like previous Bazan releases. My obsession with Pedro The Lion faded just like the band. I enjoyed Bazan's 2006 electronic side project Headphones as more proof that no matter the subject matter, Bazan could write the hell out of song (see below) but I stopped wondering what kind of social or metaphysical statement, if any, was being made. (I've since had the conviction that the ascribed meaning I gave to old Pedro jams was my own and that the things I was sure Bazan was saying was very much my own experiences being recycled and reinterpreted through his music. It's actually a beautiful thing about music, see my post on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 for more on this subject.)

I even gave little afterthought to meeting Bazan for the first time in the spring of 2006 at a festival Kissing Cousins and Map were playing. He seemed funny and charismatic and drunk off his ass, but as those of you who know me know, I am certainly capable of imbibing on a regular basis past the reasonable amount of alcoholic consumption, so I wasn't in any mindset to judge the dude later that night when the poor guy needed to be basically carried to his hotel room. Having read some interviews recently about that time in his life, Bazan admits to having a tough stretch where he sort of lost the plot. But for me it was relatively smooth sailing. My tough time was right around corner.

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