David Bazan

Leaving the Fold

 

Prodigal Son Decides He Can’t Go Home Again

By Matt Fink

Proving that there’s nothing quite so interesting as interpersonal drama, the breakup record has become its own kind of concept album, providing an emotionally rich vein of material that has been mined on albums stretching from Bob Dylan’s bitter Blood on the Tracks to the tangled melodrama of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Jarvis Cocker’s recent midlife crisis on Further Complications. Always a restless spirit while the leader of Pedro the Lion, using his album-long narratives to explore a cast of unsavory and conflicted characters, David Bazan hasn’t made the normal break-up album. With Curse Your Branches, his first solo album, the former icon of Christian indie rock has done the unexpected. He has broken up with God.

“It was devastating, actually,” Bazan says of the loss of his Christian faith. “Not only one sense of identity, but it was the loss of a person, you know? I lay in bed at night just grappling with that still. What do I do with this ghost in my head? Do I interact with that idea as a person? Has it faded to a point where it’s not meaningful anymore? And at some point I had to admit to myself that I was actively mourning the death of this really powerful and comforting idea.”

Those following his career arc already know that Bazan doesn’t shy away from controversy, having written unsparingly about adulterous affairs on 2002’s Control, corrupt politicians on 2000’s Winners Never Quit and the death of the American dream on 2004’s Achilles Heel, largely alienating himself from his original Christian following in the process. But his body of work generally played fast and loose with autobiographical detail, allowing the more open-minded of his listeners to assume that he was still one of them, just another faithful member of the flock chasing away his personal demons through allegory. But these themes represented more than narrative liberty, they were cracks in the foundation of Bazan’s faith, fissures that would push him closer and closer to the precipice of doubt.

“So I would get people coming up after shows with their collective finger in my chest, saying ‘What you’re doing is wrong!’” he explains. “Ironically, they were encouraging me to do autobiographical, confessional work because they thought that somehow this work that I was doing on Control was somehow dishonest. It was this old sort of 18th, 19th century view that fiction was somehow lying. But some of these kids were more than willing to agree to disagree, and they would see that I wasn’t some caricature of a dude who was trying to be up there stirring up controversy.”

That said, Curse Your Branches hardly pulls its punches, from Bazan’s critique of Christianity’s creation narrative on “Hard to Be” to his direct denunciation of God on “When We Fell,” a track where Bazan depicts God as a cruel scientist who set up a fixed game where humans would inevitably fail. These denunciations don’t come without repercussions, of course, and much of the album is spent exploring what Bazan has lost, with songs about his distraught wife and family who fear for his soul and the spiral of alcoholism that accompanies the loss of identity and security that faith afforded. Add it up, and it’s an engrossingly harrowing account of one man’s spiritual collapse, wrapped in buoyant Beatlesque melodies, but Bazan didn’t know if anyone would want to hear it.

“People either care about God and are obsessed with these notions and are Christian or they don’t care,” he laughs. “And I’m finding that that’s not really the case, that that’s too simplistic of a view, thankfully. But at the time, I thought, well, you’ve got to finish this anyway.”

“People are either going to point and laugh or cast you out, but I had to do this no matter what,” he continues firmly. “I couldn’t deny that I was writing these tunes and that they were really meaningful to me.”

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