Pedro the Lion

photo by Megan Holmes

You’ve been lied to. Achilles Heel, the new album from Pedro the Lion, was supposed to be the anticipated and triumphant third act in a human drama played out across three recordings. Artistically beautiful, the first two were thematically (and respectively) dark and darker. They served as a halfway house for troubled characters and sad stories. Guitars, drums, bass and the occasional synth sometimes hummed like a beer buzz, sometimes raged like an alcoholic and sometimes pulsed like a hangover’s headache. Winners Never Quit, a 21st-century mini-saga , incorporated elements of the powerlust infecting America’s political landscape, and the relational dynamic between brothers hinted at in the biblical account of the Prodigal Son, not to mention the unmitigated carnage of a Shakespearean tragedy. All in the span of eight tracks. Next came 2002’s Control, yet another domestic doom drama, this time focusing on marital infidelity, trust-fund babies, materialism, revenge, existential dread and, as an uplifting little sidebar, corporate greed. But sadness always seemed lyrically tagged by promise. There was tongue planted behind every tear-stained cheek—turns of phrase that made you smile. And the final chapter of Bazan’s rumored trilogy was to be the redemption, or at least resolution, the faint glow that might beat back the impending darkness long enough for listeners to enjoy a peaceable night of (unmedicated) slumber.

Instead, Achilles Heel contains songs like “Transcontinental,” in which a man lies pinned beneath a train, waiting for the inevitable, and “A Simple Plan,” wherein a factory worker sits alone in his bedroom with a loaded shotgun. In “I Do,” the song’s narrator—while witnessing the birth of his child—insists that if the baby knew what it was like out here, he’d climb right back in.

Yikes. Not quite the redemption you expected? It’s not even what David Bazan, the creative force behind Pedro the Lion, thought it would be. He set out on this three-part journey more than five years ago, and you’ll have to forgive him if he’s altered the original course.

“I tried to abandon the second part,” Bazan admitted. “I was sitting down and writing bits and pieces to what I thought would be random songs, but the songs ended up sharing a theme, and as a group they followed on the heels of Winners Never Quit and so I found a way to go with it.”

Control’s pervasive darkness had even Bazan crossing his fingers for the next album. “I thought that to do Control, which was so heavy-handedly down, there’s got to be an up that follows it. But I think I just told myself that so I could actually finish the [Control] record.”

Still, he’s unapologetic about where the journey has taken him.

“As I came to writing the songs that would become Achilles Heel,” he said, “I basically realized that whatever positive messages I have to communicate, it will all come out when it’s supposed to come out, and when it’s real. I don’t think there’s any overt attempt at redemption on this record—potentially in a future record. Redemption is too profound a thing to make a fake of.”

After two dozen band members have come and gone in the last eight years, Bazan believes he’s found a permanent fixture in T.W. Walsh. Besides drumming, Walsh collaborates in the studio and has begun contributing songs. On Achilles’ Heel, Walsh’s “Start Without Me,” contains the line, “I can’t say I prescribe, cause I don’t know what it is.”

“We toyed around with changing that line because it didn’t fit,” Bazan says. “Once [T.W.] explained what it meant, I liked it and knew we had to keep it. That was his feeling about matters of faith and Christianity for a long time. He couldn’t even say what it was if you asked him. There are so many different forms of it. So much that is mystery, it’s as if to say, ‘I’m not even sure what it is I would be prescribing to you.’”

And that preoccupation with the enigmatic nature of faith has encompassed Pedro’s catalog. With each album, Bazan presents an increasingly grim view of human nature. But he isn’t excusing himself from the chopping block.

“The title [of the album] is a reference to weakness,” Bazan explains. “Particularly when you read it as, ‘Pedro the Lion’s Achilles Heel.’ It’s somewhat self-deprecating, somewhat tragic.”

Some longtime fans who first encountered Pedro during the band’s tenure on the Christian festival circuit have responded to the gothic bent of Bazan’s songwriting with caustic letters or angry encounters at shows, accusing him of abandoning his faith.

“What drives me is a belief in the creative process,” he says, “a belief in discovery. To ‘do creativity’ is redemption. I feel like I’ve been shown there is value in discovering things about ourselves, about the world. The creative process is discovery. You set out to tell a story. You learn about the characters and you learn about yourself. The process should be trusted.”

Bazan and wife Ann-Krestene are expecting their first child in the fall and he concedes that the new life will “absolutely” result in new creative births in the studio, but not necessarily the long awaited redemption album. When you ask for redemption in the song, you need to be reminded that just being in the song is redemption enough.