Pedro the Lion has always been David Bazan, but it took a long time to get back there.In August 2016, during what he now recognizes as his lowest point, Bazan was touring thecountry alone in an aging minivan and found himself in his hometown of Phoenix, AZ. In need ofa break from the road, he spent a night off at his grandparents’ house instead of driving on toSan Diego. Before leaving town the next morning, after realizing that even the most familiarplaces can become unrecognizable, Bazan gave himself the gift of a quick detour past thehouse he grew up in, and on the way, experienced a breakthrough - one that would lead himboth forward and back to another home he had built many years before.From the beginning, Pedro the Lion didn’t work like the bands Bazan had played drums in,where each player came up with their own parts. Instead, like scripting scenes of dialogue foractors to play with, Bazan recorded and arranged all of the skeletal accompaniments for hisobsessively introspective lyrics and spare melodies. Each player would then learn their partsand, together as a band, they brought the skeleton to life. While bandmates played on a fewrecordings, Bazan often played all or most of the instruments himself.“I found so much joy working this way,” Bazan remembers. “It came naturally and yielded afeeling and a sound that couldn’t have existed by any other process. At the same time, I wasalso aware that not everyone wanted to play in a band where the singer wrote all the parts andmight perform them on the record. Someone even suggested it might not be a valid approachto having a band in the first place. Being insecure and wanting to find camaraderie, I becameconflicted about my natural process.”By 2002, after recording Control , the high rate of turnover in the band finally caused Bazan toditch his “natural process” in favor of a collaborative writing process. When, after a couple moreyears, this move did nothing to stabilize turnover, Bazan was perplexed. In November 2005,Bazan decided to stop doing Pedro the Lion altogether.Ironically, Bazan didn’t see “going solo” as a chance to revert back to his original process ofwriting and playing all the parts. For the next decade Pedro the Lion felt off limits, evenforgotten, like a childhood home Bazan had moved out of. He pushed forward with releasingsolo albums & relentless touring in living rooms and clubs, through every part of the US andbeyond, sometimes with a band, but mostly on his own. It took a toll on his family and moreacutely on himself. By the summer of 2016, he still hadn’t found the personal clarity or thesteady collaboration he’d been seeking and was at the end of his rope.“I had abandoned my natural way of working in the hopes of creating space for a consistentband to write with...and it hadn’t worked. So I got a rehearsal space, mic’d up drums, bass, andguitar, and really leaned into my original process again. It immediately felt like like home.Before long I realized it also felt like Pedro the Lion.”In June 2018, with Bazan on bass, vocals, and arrangement writing, Erik Walters on guitar andbacking vocals, and Sean Lane on drums, Pedro the Lion went into Studio X and Hall of Justicewith producer Andy Park to create Phoenix , the first new Pedro album in 15 years.The songs themselves are the result of mining your past for who you are now. On openingtrack “Yellow Bike,” Bazan encapsulates a core ache he’s been exploring since 1998’s It’s Hardto Find a Friend with the line:My kingdomFor someone to ride withPhoenix also deals with having to be better to yourself in order to be better to others on“Quietest Friend,” and harkens back to Control ’s “Priests and Paramedics” with a story aboutEMTs facing a gruesome scene, and storytelling as coping mechanism, on “Black Canyon.” Itbears witness to both what was around and what was inside, with the signature kindness andforgiveness that lightens Pedro the Lion’s darkest notes.The result is a twisting, darkly hopeful introspection into home and what it means to go back, ifyou ever can. It is rock and roll wrapped in tissue paper, its hard edges made barely soft. Everymelody is careful, a delicate upswing buoyed by guitar lines that hold each tender feelingtogether like string before ripping them apart to see what’s inside. It is an ode to the place hestill loves despite how alien it can appear to him now. It is the story of a life from the beginning,but not a linear one. This life is a circle, and Phoenix goes back to that first point, to show thatwhen we are looking for home we’ll eventually run into it again, whether it’s in the desert, in arehearsal space, or on a stage.