Pedro the Lion | Justin McRoberts Blog

I’ve been writing a series of blogs on the songs that make up my most recent release, a covers project entitled “Through Songs I Was First Undone.” The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this album have been sacred moments. These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God and humanity.

Here is part two of why Tom Waits’ “Georgia Lee” is on the album:

The song’s opening line “cold was the night, hard was the ground” is an echo of Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting 1927 recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, When They Laid My Savior Down,” a song of lament for the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

I find the layers of contrast and tension created by Wait’s word choice here captivating and at the same time unsettling. Waits begins a song about the apparent inattentiveness of God to the death of a runaway by referencing a song about the death of God Himself in Christ; a song that, in turn, is written and performed by a man who, like Georgia, was poor, black and largely unnoticed until after his death.* All of this in one line. Genius.

So, in a nod to Waits’ choice to nod lyrically to Blind Willie Johnson, my recording of the song begins with an audio-nod to Pedro the Lion’s “The Longer I Lay Here.” Listeners will hear 6 beats of click-track to begin the song. The click is normally hidden but, like Bazan who produced “It’s Hard To Find A Friend,” we left the click exposed. Bazan chose to let the click track remain throughout the entire song.

The parallel here is a reflection of the way I receive Georgia Lee as a listener, which is much of why I covered it for the album. Listeners like myself are drawn to songs of like Georgia Lee and the larger bodies of work by David Bazan/Pedro the Lion because these songs provide words and shape to a very real experience of God that has little media attention paid to it: His absence.

The suffering of children at the hands of foul men or corruption of any kind often leads us along a line of questioning which comes to a tumbling, awkward end in an eerily empty space… eery because it is the space we thought we would find God, smiling knowingly, with a cup of hot chocolate and all the answers our shaken hearts desire about suffering, death and the like.. but many do not. Though this doesn’t at all represent a loss of faith, it is nonetheless a place of desperate, soul-wrenching tension… a place in which one must choose against ones “better judgement” when responding to the question “Why wasn’t God there?”

(At another point, I’d like to take a more philosophical look at the experience of God’s absence or disappointment with God in the context of faith. For now, I’m going to stick with the song’s place on the album in the light of that same tension.)

Waits’ song doesn’t answer it’s own question. Nor should it be required to. It is enough for the song and artist to ask it; to create space for the tension between assurance and doubt. In fact, the temptation to answer such questions prematurely is partly what makes some contemporary christian art seem so disconnected or shallow. It communicates a disregard for what I have come to know as an authentic and vital aspect of faith: doubt.

The empty spaces we sometimes find ourselves in are part of a mature emotional and spiritual landscape. It is about these spaces that works like “The Dark Night of the Soul” or “The Cloud of Unknowing” have been written, assuring those on a journey of faith that there is nothing broken; that this is part of what the map looks like. In “Caring For Words In a Culture of Lies” Marilyn McEntyre notes that it is in the silence after a sentence or the space left at the end of a line where a reader actually has the ‘space’ to engage, to receive and to process… to more fully know what was just written (or spoken, or sung). She calls this “the hospitality of our own silences.”

Wait’s “Georgia Lee,” and the space that follows it, has been a hospitable silence for me.

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes

If you knew what would happen and made us just the same,
You, My Lord, can take the blame.

So the evening began in song with David Bazan; the same way that my engagement with his work has always been. His challenge to the “assumed goodness” of God pushing me to search my own heart for similar untested assumptions, contradictory premises, doubts, frustrations… his courage in doing so freeing me to find the darker corners of my own mind with less fear and, in that way, greater faith.

Bazan was in Grand Rapids (as was I) to participate in the Festival of Faith and Music (of which I will write a bit more in the near future). Along with playing a set on Thursday night, Bazan talked with NPR’s Jessica Hopper about… well… faith and music. He reflected on his own history as a songwriter as well as the music he’s listened to over the years. He continued to point at moments in songs or albums that unsettled him in relationship to christianity.

Between times and during late nights, I had the pleasure of finally talking with him quite a bit about his new record, house shows, his Pedro days, christian bumper stickers and festivals we’d never play again. Those conversations only made the songs from his next release “Curse Your Branches” (August 09) more intriguing to me. He is calling “Branches” his first truly autobiographical piece. It’s an autobiography I’ve been hoping to hear for a while as it is specifically focused on his distancing from christianity.

The title track is highlighted by this masterful chorus…

..falling leaves should curse their branches
For not letting them decide where they should fall
And not letting them refuse to fall at all

While he has always been comfortable in a critical posture towards christianity for it’s … well.. being all “christian” and stuff, Bazan, in song and in conversation, does not seem at all settled on the distance between himself and God. He directs his discontent back toward the space God previously occupied, singing:

In my throat, there swells a darkness
It fills my mouth, and coats my lips
And even as the threat of Hell is disappearing,
The threat of losing you is blowing up..

For those of us who have been listeners of Bazan’s since early Pedro the Lion, this tension he creates by directing his frustration and confusion at a God whose character is awfully confusing, a God he is not sure exists and is the root of his frustrations to begin with is exactly why we love his music; because for many of us, this has been at least part of our experience of faith. For many of us, christian art, whose songs of doubt are generally tamed with an overly obvious and predictable happy ending of unwavering assurance or whose stories of tragedy are most often girded with the glaring undertone that “everything is going to be just fine in the end,” not only misrepresents our experience thus far, but leaves us with a sense that something is very wrong with our own weak faith.

Similar to writers like Frederick Buechner, David Bazan provides a place for skeptics, poets and the religiously frustrated to find some normality. A place where doubt is not a disease or a phase that needs to be medicated, grown out of or explained away but actively wrestled with; a place where frustration with God and confusion at who He is becomes part of the journey itself; where the decision to continue engaging, even if it’s only to shout into the dark space we thought God had been living all this time, is an act that is full of faith.

In William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” he uses one of his character’s voices to critique the religious compromise we make with doubt, writing

“…sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.”

Bazan’s life and work have given shape to Sin and Love and Fear for many of us who could find few if any fleshly, mortal connections with these realities in the artistic expressions of faith offered by popular religious culture. The art he’s produced in the throes of doubt, alcoholism and folly have served as the tragedy that some of us have lacked the vitality to suffer for ourselves; in the light of which art, our own process of redemption or restoration has fuller meaning rather than being the half-lived half-truth that is the result of the half-thinking compromise we strike with our often half-conceived idea of God.

The following night after Bazan’s show, Cornell West highlighted the role of death in christian life; particularly the death of ideas, prejudices and suppositions. That same night in the middle of a conversation about the history of either losing or letting go of things he had previously thought necessary for life and faith, Bazan listed a few of the influences that had been his guides along the way; just about all of them being songwriters. He paused for a moment and then said “I guess it is through songs that I was first undone.”

All posts tagged Pedro the Lion

Georgia Lee (Part 2)

“David Bazan’s Black Cloud” or “It Is Through Songs I Was First Undone”

Twitter Feed