Trouble getting over it
Is what you’re in for
So pour yourself another
‘Cause it’ll take a steady pair of hands
- David Bazan “Bless This Mess”

“Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.” – Madeleine L’Engle*

Breaking up is hard to do Neil Sedaka told us. It’s hard enough when the breakup is with your girl or guy. What about if it’s with your God?

That’s the way the Chicago Reader views David Bazan’s new album, Curse Your Branches: a Dear John (Jane?) letter to God. Paste Magazine sees it more as a therapy session, with Bazan lying on a couch complaining about (and sometimes to) God. Maybe it’s just that Bazan and God have finally had their DTR.

Long before Derek Webb caused Christian book store owners to reach for the smelling salts by daring to use the word “whore” in a song, David Bazan was Christian music’s bad boy. As the front face of the band Pedro the Lion, he called it as he saw it, and if how he saw it was as a pile of shit, then that’s what he said. More important–and perhaps more truly provocative–than his occasional potty mouth was his penchant for brutal honesty. He was telling truths that one just doesn’t speak aloud in evangelical Christianity: sometimes our faith doesn’t make much sense, and sometimes it just plain doesn’t work.

Somewhere in the twelve years between the last Pedro the Lion album and this month’s release of Curse Your Branches, the threadbare sweater of Bazan’s evangelical faith came unravelled altogether. In an emusic.com interview. Bazan fingered inflexible biblical inerrancy as a prime cause of his disenchantment with the religion of his childhood, but Curse Your Branches reveals that there was so much more involved.

What may be most striking about the album though is not so much Bazan’s Job-like list of complaints against God, but the obvious pain he’s experienced from making decisions that result in deep fissures with the communities around which your life has been built, most painfully your own family (Bazan’s wife, daughter, and parents all remain committed believers). This is the mostly-untold story of those who have “broken up with God,” being cast out of the Garden into…what? In the aforementioned emusic.com interview, Bazan hastens to make clear that he was not one of those who left the fold because he hated church. Quite the opposite; his experiences were mostly happy there.

The highly autobiographical and introverted style of Curse Your Branches is something of a departure for David Bazan. His Pedro the Lion songwriting was reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor; each song was a short story about a usually-flawed, sometimes downright evil, character who somehow revealed a glimmer of grace. In this first solo album (not counting the 2006 EP Fewer Moving Parts), Bazan takes a more direct approach, although he’s certainly lost none of his lyrical artistry and his gift for imagery.

The album opens with “Hard to Be,” a bouncy, Wilco-like tune that picks apart the absurdity of the Adam & Eve fall story as a satisfactory explanation for all the hurt in the world.

Wait just a minute
You expect me to believe
That all this misbehaving
Grew from one enchanted tree?
He lists some of the supposed results of the fall–painful childbirth, toilsome work for food, knowledge is evil–and sums them up a blistering indictment: “Every burden misunderstood.” So he made his decision:

So I swung my tassel
To the left side of my cap
Knowing after graduation
There would be no going back
The result of which is alienation:
And no congratulations
From my faithful family
Some of whom are already fasting
To intercede for me

All of that, Bazan laments, makes it “hard to be a decent human being.” One senses he’s saying that it’s hard whether or not you believe you have God’s “help,” but the scorn and rejection by God’s people make it that much harder.

I’ll interact with some of the other songs on the album in future posts, but for now let me conclude with a personal note. In my own journey, I’m not quite where Bazan is now, but I sometimes don’t feel very far away from there. My pile of questions about the Bible and the God it seems to portray (outside of Jesus) keeps growing, but in return all I’ve ever gotten is something like God’s non-answer answer to Job. In fact, in the album’s closer, “In Stitches,” Bazan directly addresses that frustration:

when job asked you question
you responded “who are you
to challenge your creator?”
well if that one part is true

it makes you sound defensive
like you had not thought it through
enough to have an answer
like you might have bit off
more than you could chew

Here’s where I’m different from Bazan, at least at present: I still think God is big enough to chew on whatever I give him to bite on. In other words, I believe God, if s/he is there, is big enough to handle all my doubts and misgivings and confusion without condemning me to hell for them. Of course, that means I can in no way any longer believe that every word of the Bible portrays God accurately. I’ve become fine with that; the Bible is a wonderful collection of people not so unlike me trying to work out who God is and what s/he’s after while living in the midst of whatever baggage their culture laid on them at the time.

For me, there’s a character curiously absent from Bazan’s album: Jesus. Jesus is the one I just can’t get away from.

* For more from Mark Traphagen, check out his site: League of Inveterate Poets.