It’ll All Work Out — Pedro the Lion
#365Songs: June 17th
I’ve shape-shifted through life, squeezed myself into places I didn’t belong, shed skins in favor of skins that fit others’ expectations of who I should be. A character actor in my own life, trying on identities, jobs, cities. Perhaps an identity crisis is nothing more than a reassembling of the parts, a resurrection of the self that went missing along the way. I suppose it begs the question, can we really understand ourselves if we don’t have dark days, if we don’t see a stranger in the mirror, if we don’t fall apart, rewind a little bit to pick up on those lost details?
I love when songs feel like little memoirs. Those same songs fuel my little memoirs, the posts I write each day that are meant to be about music but are more about my life and the world around me. My favorite art is almost always about the artist working something out, trying something new, expressing a feeling about something. To me, the more personal the better. Albums like Sufjan Steven’s Carrie & Lowell and Javelin, Florist’s self-titled album, Mount Eerie’s Now Only, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the Mountain Goat’s Sunset Tree, Kendrick’s Good Kid MAAD City, Frank Ocean’s blond.
This won’t have to stay hidden forever
But it has to stay hidden for now
Maybe trading stories
With a future friend
A few weeks ago, the artist Pedro the Lion dropped Santa Cruz, a third memoir album in a purported series of five — a follow up to 2022’s Havasu and 2019’s Phoenix. I’ve been listening to frontman David Bazan’s music for over 20 years. He was first introduced to me when I was bartending in a Chicago theater bar, alongside fellow theater kids, a few of the servers throwing Bazan lyrics at one another. He’s political, spiritual, angry at times, personal as hell, and never shy about weaving stories about his own life. I can’t always listen to him, but I have a lot of respect for his vulnerability. The son of a preacher, Bazan moved from city to city across the West, and now each album is a chapter of his life — from early childhood to pre-teens, and now, with Santa Cruz, those angsty puberty years.
If I lay down
And I keep my eyes on you
It’ll all work out
The opening track, It’ll All Work Out, feels like a church confessional, a lost, scared boy in search for forgiveness, of guidance and direction. Bazan, as far as I know, is not queer, but there’s a queerness to his journey, to being an outsider, to the way he masks to hide himself, the way he can’t quite find himself in a sea of people who don’t see him properly. I see myself in these songs, in that way of always searching for self and belonging, of always questioning what’s real and what’s not. Art is my Church, where I can see my own sins and resurrection through the words and images of others who’ve been there before.
If I make myself friendly
If I put others’ needs before my own
Don’t let my heart be hardened
If I make myself friendly
Put others’ needs before my own
Don’t let my heart be hardened, Lord
~
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