David Bazan first saw only the lower legs, severed by an engine.
As his pen swooped the final ‘s’ of a solitary line — “engine severs lower legs” — Bazan became a crime scene investigator. He was tasked with extrapolating the story from this first piece of evidence, a pair of disconnected limbs. The DNA of a song, says the Seattle-based songwriter, can often be found in one line of lyrics, so he began to look closer.
But instead of examining the tragedy post-mortem, he found this man alive on the railroad tracks, his dismembered legs still twitching, his bruised heart still beating and his spinal cord still intact. He must have passed out on his way home, Bazan figured, and woke up to find himself dying.
As he delved deeper into the story, the then-member of Pedro the Lion stepped inside the man’s head just as the man was scanning his brain for possible ways out: “I remember as I bleed, certain tales of bravery,” tales, the man thought, of someone having to sacrifice his lower legs to set free his torso.
“The luxury of having been spared the hard part, you’d think would be enough for me to pull this off. But I’m left to bleed to death, now all the man I’ve ever been.”
And so goes “Transcontinental,” a song that’s no chronicle of heroism, no tidy retelling of a man who conquered adversity. Rather, the song is a realistic narrative, universal in its dealings with chaos. Off the 2004 album Achilles Heel, Bazan’s final full-length with Pedro the Lion, “Transcontinental” represents only a sliver of songs penned by Bazan that feature broken characters coming to terms with what they can’t control.
It’s a lesson Bazan himself has recently relearned, too, through touring the country with side project Overseas. For more than 150,000 miles, the vehicle for Bazan’s music was a 2002 Chevy Express 3500. The van carried him to hundreds of house shows under his own name. It enabled a solo career that followed the disbanding of Pedro the Lion and intervening band with added synths, Headphones. And it made possible the first couple dates of a fall 2013 tour with Overseas, the band Bazan formed with Will Johnson of Centro-matic and Bubba and Matt Kadane of Bedhead and The New Year.
Until this October, the van often served as a hotel with its own bed and a kitchen with its own pantry in the back. But just as the nameless couple in the Headphones song “Slow Car Crash” could do nothing to postpone the unavoidable wreck ahead of them, Bazan’s van hit a deer on I-5 just north of Redding, Calif., on Oct. 13. The insurance company declared the van totaled soon after, and Bazan bid farewell to the crash just a week later.
“It was pretty surprising the amount of emotion and connection that I felt with the thing,” Bazan says. “I guess I remember pretty vividly every time I would get back in the van, just how much I enjoyed it. I’d think this is kind of my home in a way. When I had to say goodbye to it unexpectedly, it was pretty emotional. I thought this is something that I feel grief over, and I need to take that process seriously.”
Since then, Bazan has been traveling to his many intimate living room shows via rental car and staying in proper hotels. This Thursday, Dec. 12, he’ll break from the usual format of playing homes to perform as an opener for Cursive and Criteria at The Waiting Room in Omaha.
Bazan on musician Damien Jurado, who he’s known since high school:
“There’s something about the spirit of Jurado’s songwriting that has been influential, especially earlier on, but there’s a playfulness and an intuitiveness that at times I find really moving. And so, it wasn’t influential directly. He’s in tune with his ability to make compelling art. That was very inspiring to me especially early on, just how simple and potent a song could be.”
Bazan on the artists he turns to during periods of writer’s block:
“Radiohead, there’s three or four moments on each of the last several records I’m really fascinated by. I’m really turned on by Deerhoof and the way they construct their songs. I always go back to the Beatles. And Evan Dando and the Lemonheads, the economy and apparent simplicity of the songwriting.”
For all the commonplace catastrophe in Bazan’s songs and occasionally in his own life — compounded by the Thanksgiving weekend air travel-caused loss and recovery of a guitar — he’s stressed that cynicism isn’t always at the root of emotion. He calls “Slow Car Crash” a love song for example, and as the story takes place over the course of only a few seconds, just before a couple’s car collides with a jackknifed semi, it ends with a final pair of “I love yous.”
“If I’m in a situation that there’s peril, I’m always looking for my phone and I’m thinking how quickly can I dial Ann [Bazan’s wife] so that she knows that the last thoughts that I have are just of her,” Bazan has said. “I want her to know in that ultimate that she’s it, she’s everything.”
In his day-to-day life off the road and with family, Bazan says he strives to keep banker’s hours with work so that his songwriting, recording and planning for tours doesn’t bleed into the time he needs to spend with his wife and two children. He says the line does get blurred more now as his workspace is back at home.
“Sometimes it’s crunch time with a record, and the whole banker’s hours just goes out the window,” Bazan says. “My wife, if it goes too far, she’ll resent me not taking that whole thing seriously enough. But if it’s just a little, it’s never a problem.”
Curiously, family life has bled back into Bazan’s songwriting, causing a small rewrite of the 1998 Pedro the Lion song “When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run.” Whereas one line used to read, “Husbands in winter, they know the truth,” Bazan revised the pronoun to “we” after getting married himself.
And although Bazan allows for editing of songs long after they’ve been released, sometimes he can’t pinpoint what small alterations need made. When asked why he chose to include direct quotations from three separate parties on the song “Priests and Paramedics,” from 2002 album Control, he first said he wasn’t aware of the change as a device at the time. It just seemed natural.
“I guess if I’m thinking about it, there’s always been something to me that wasn’t quite right about that song,” Bazan pondered, “but it was mostly right, so I’ve played it a bunch and I’ve enjoyed it. I wonder if it is that switch that kind of bothers me.”
Just as Bazan ends the song on an unresolved chord that doesn’t land back at home, though, perhaps it’s better off with tattered edges. Because reality wouldn’t want to tie up all the loose ends.
“You always have to imagine what is going on with the character,” Bazan says, “and you try to represent that as honestly as possible.”
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. He’s nearly three years past losing a car to a snowstorm, and he still misses it. Reach Michael at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.