SOUNDTRACK: PEDRO THE LION-Tiny Desk Concert #802 (November 8, 2018).
At one time there were a lot of bands that had the word “the” in the middle of their name.
I have even tried to remember all of them, and it’s kind of hard:
Cage the Elephant
Portugal The Man
Young the Giant
Jukebox the Ghost
I pretty much made the decision to ignore all of them. But over the years a few have either stuck out or remained for me.
Pedro the Lion was not one of them. Probably because they went on hiatus while main Pedro, David Bazan recorded under other names:
“I’ve made music under many brand names. It was a dumb idea. Don’t do that if you’re trying to make songs over your life and keep your creative personality intact and have people consume your music enough to allow you to do it you should use the same name.” You can find that music filed under his previous “brands” or incarnations as Headphones, Lo Tom and his own name. But here Bazan returns to the one that first gave him voice: Pedro the Lion, a name he now says he intends to keep.
I don’t know much about Bazan. He has a pleasing deep voice and his songs are pretty simple and catchy.
He opens with “When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run” a song that I rather like. It’s got a great melody, with a cool slide during the guitar riff. And I like that he’s playing lead bass.
No matter how dark or disastrous, there’s always been an undercurrent of grace to the music of David Bazan. Even in his most righteous anger, empathy seeps through. “When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run” opens the Tiny Desk set with sparse instrumentation — Erik Walters on guitar, Bazan on bass, Sean Lane on brushes and snare — not unlike performances of yesteryear, when slyly clever-yet-quiet riffs put Bazan’s sardonic wit front and center. Twenty years after being released on Pedro the Lion’s debut album, It’s Hard to Find a Friend, the cheeky song about hypocrisy (exposing the toxic male gaze through double standards of beauty) still rings painfully true.
The lyrics are pretty sharp, too:
Don’t like girls the way they are
So shave their legs and make them look like movie stars
Then we can pretend that it’s natural
Put on whatever makes you attractive
If it’s not you then do it for the sake of fashion
Your friends like a certain you
That’s who you’ve got to be
He says he wrote that song when he was 21 and he’s 42 now.
The second song “Yellow Bike” has been getting some airplay by me. I find the recorded version way too simple and obvious. But this version sounds great–it’s the roughness of his voice or the spareness of the instrumentation. It’s a sweet song full of nostalgia.
When it’s over he says “we never played that in public before.”
Evidently Bazan created many songs under his own name.
So what about all of those songs released as “David Bazan” from the past decade? Those are now Pedro the Lion songs! That includes “Kept Secrets,” originally released on 2016’s Blanco. Its slow, doleful sway closed out the Tiny Desk with a hidden hope washed in snow, “white with ocean foam.”
This song is much slower and moodier. It’s my least favorite of the three and I feel he sounds a but like the dude from Counting Crows, which is horrible. But again I love the fact hat he’s playing bass chords and the harmonies are pretty terrific.
[READ: December 11, 2017] “Cat Person”
This is a terrific story about meeting someone and deciding if they are worthy of dating. I particularly enjoyed that it was almost entirely from within the young woman’s head as she tried to figure out what to make of her new, older, suitor.
The story centers on a 20-year-old college student named Margot who gradually falls into flirtation with a man named Robert.
Margot worked at a movie theater. When he bought red vines from her she said she didn’t think she’d actually sold a box before. Margot used to flirt with customers when she was a barista–it got tips. But you didn’t get tips at the concession stand. Nevertheless, she was bored and Robert was kind of cute–not introduce-yourself-to at a party cute but cute enough. Robert didn’t really respond to her. But he came back the next week and when he got Red Vines again he said congratulations, you managed not to insult me this time. He asked for her number and she gave it to him.
They spend a lot of time texting. It was very jokey, but she seemed to be doing a lot of the work–he would respond, but if she didn’t say something funny, neither did he. (more…)
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