Pedro the Lion @ HI-FI

PEDRO THE LION W/ SQUIRREL FLOWER @ HI-FI INDIANAPOLIS 

DOORS: 7:00 PM, SHOW: 8:00 PM

GENERAL ADMISSION, LIMITED SEATING.

AGE RESTRICTIONS: 18+ WITH VALID ID

ALL TICKETS ARE NON TRANSFERABLE AND NON REFUNDABLE.

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About Pedro the Lion:

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Early into Santa Cruz, the poignant third album in David Bazan’s ongoing musical memoir of his sometimes-uncanny life, he discovers the Beatles. He is the new kid from Arizona in a new school in the famous California coastal town where his dad has accepted another post at a Bible college. He and his first friend there, Matt, are sitting on the carpet in Matt’s little bedroom, flipping through the records bequeathed by his father, when Bazan spots a familiar cover—The White Album, known only from a church documentary that warned children of the Satanic secrets of “Revolution 9.” Play it backwards, the propaganda said, and it would offer acommand: “Turn me on, dead man.”

So, of course, the kids played it forward and were fascinated by the sound, by the imagination, by the act of consecrated creativity far outside of Christian rock. Bazan was 13. “Treading water on the open ocean/Then you threw me out a life ring,” he sings, the smile obvious just through the sound as the beat picks up like a racing pulse, more than three decades later. “All I needed was a little help from a friend.” That is the moment where, in many ways, the remarkable songs of Pedro the Lion begin to take shape.

In 2019, after a 15-year break filled with solo records and side-projects, Bazan returned to the moniker under which he had become one of indie rock’s most identifiable voices and incisive songwriters, Pedro the Lion. He sort of stumbled into 2019’s Phoenix, a charged chronicle of his childhood there, while spending the night with his grandparents during a tour stop. But he soon understood that unpacking his peripatetic youth, where his music minister father shifted around the country like a Marine moving bases, was helpful, healing, and maybe even interesting. The gripping Havasu followed in 2022. Bazan was onto something, untangling all the ways his past had both shaped and misshaped his present inside some of his best songs ever.

That past truly begins to become the present on Santa Cruz, the most fraught and frank album yet in a planned five-album arc; this one covers a little less than a decade, from just after he turned 13 until he turns toward adulthood around 21. These songs ripple with the anxiety and energy of teenage awakening—of hearing rock ’n’ roll, of understanding that independent music exists, of making out with an older schoolmate in deepest secret, of falling in love, of finally starting to understand that in order to be yourself you’re going to need to be something other than your parents’ vision of you. It is the rawest, most affecting and affirming album Pedro the Lion has ever made.

Santa Cruz begins with a prayer that feels like a dirge, a synth-led funeral march to another town where Bazan knows no one. “If I lay it down/And I keep my eyes on you,” he moans, steeling himself through self-sacrifice. “It’ll all work out.” But when he arrives in Santa Cruz to begin eighth grade, the self-flagellation comes quickly, Bazan lecturing himself for the lameness of the neon-green backpack he picked out in Phoenix and the Christian rock that is his lifeblood. For decades now, Bazan has been known for his music’s deliberate pace, often linked to slowcore. Here, however, he renders detailed images in rapid-fire waves, his voice stapled atop the quick rhythm like never before in order to capture his nerves as he learns there might be life outside ofhis family’s Christian fiefdom—apocrypha, whispers of sex, mere games of ping-pong.

But every time stability seems to appear during these 11 songs, the family is off to another job. By ninth grade, amid the metronomic mile markers of “Tall Pines,” they are headed for little Paradise, where there are dreams of drum sets and clandestine shirtless make-out sessions when his parents are away. With the stirring “Don’t Cry Now,” as close to a dance track as Pedro the Lion has ever made, they’re bound for Seattle, where Bazan found his own fledgling music scene, deepening friendships, and the dawn rays of what would become his future.

When his family splits for California yet again, he stays behind, living with a friend just so he can graduate from the place where he’s become so invested in drums, guitars, and songs that he’s barely maintained his grades. The day after he graduates, he stuffs everything he owns into plastic garbage bags and heads south with his mom, returning to the family flock, now in Modesto. “You sweetly slept in the passenger seat/I gripped the wheel, messed up inside,” he sings of his mother during “Parting,” his voice a true-to-life ad mixture of love and longing, of devotion and doubt.

The six-month stay in Modesto, though, would prove to be among the most transformative moments of his life, the slow-motion catapult that sent him into right now. After he quits selling vacuum cleaners to sad women, he nabs a gig at a guitar store. That’s where he hears a crisp piece of lo-fi wizardry from a local Modesto band, a moment that feels almost like a Beatles-sized revelation, a permission slip that says he can, in fact, make music on a scale as small as he wants. He writes the first Pedro the Lion songs there, and, in the cathartic and gorgeous climax of “Modesto,” vows to return to Seattle, to be in a band, to fall in love, to be himself. Its successor, “Spend Time,” feels like some skeletal and celebratory arena-rock anthem, with incandescent harmonies and sharp harmonics and slicing riffs. Back in Seattle, “back in his room, drumming with Paul,” he is on the precipice of the rest of his life, the life that you now know as a listener.

When Bazan began considering the times and the songs that would soon become Santa Cruz, he thought about fictionalizing it all. He could break with the narratives of Phoenix and Havasu to give himself and everyone else in the story some critical distance. These events are not old news, after all, and he worried about untangling the active threads of the rather recent past from right now. And would it seem like he was scolding his parents, two people trying to raise kids the best they knew how? The result does not feel like blame. It feels like redemption, like finding the way forward for yourself, however it happens. “Your grief is not a burden,” Bazan beautifully sings in one of the final verses. “It’s energy.” And it’s currently powering one of the most real, riveting, and powerful song cycles in memory, happening right now.

About Squirrel Flower:

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The music Ella Williams makes as Squirrel Flower has always communicated a strong sense of place. Her self-released debut EP, 2015’s early winter songs from middle america, was written during her first year living in Iowa, where the winter months make those of her hometown, Boston, seem quaint by comparison. Since that first offering, Squirrel Flower amassed a fanbase beyond the Boston DIY scene and has released two more EPs and two full-lengths. The most recent, Planet (i), was laden with climate anxiety, while the subsequent Planet EP marked an important turning point in Williams’ prolific career; the collection of demos was the first self-produced material she’d released in some time. With a renewed confidence as a producer, she helmed her new album Tomorrow’s Fire at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville alongside storied engineer Alex Farrar.

Before Tomorrow’s Fire, Squirrel Flower might’ve been labeled something like “indie folk,” but this is a rock record, made to be played loud. As if to signal this shift, the album opens with the soaring “i don’t use a trash can,” a re-imagining of the first ever Squirrel Flower song. Williams returns to her past to demonstrate her growth as an artist and to nod to those early shows, when her voice, looped and minimalistic, had the power to silence a room. Lead singles “Full Time Job” and “When a Plant is Dying,” narrate the universal desperation that comes with living as an artist and pushing up against a world where that’s a challenging thing to be. The frustration in Williams’ lyrics is echoed by the music’s uninhibited, ferocious production. “There must be more to life/ Than being on time,” she sings on the latter’s towering chorus. Lyrics like that one are fated to become anthemic, and Tomorrow’s Fire overflows with them. “Doing my best is a full time job/ But it doesn’t pay the rent” Williams sings on “Full Time Job” over careening feedback, her steady delivery imposing order over a song that is, at its heart, about a loss of control.

Closing track “Finally Rain” speaks to the ambiguity of being a young person staring down climate catastrophe. The last verse is an homage to Williams’ relationship with her loved ones — ‘We won’t grow up.’ A stark realization, but also a manifesto. To be resolutely committed to a life of not ‘growing up,’ not losing our wonder while we’re still here.