Pedro The Lion – Quietest Friend
Pedro The Lion presents the Official Music Video for, ‘Quietest Friend’
In August 2016, throughout what he now acknowledges as his lowest level, David Bazan was touring the nation alone in an getting older minivan and located himself in his hometown of Phoenix, AZ. In want of a break from the highway, he spent an evening off at his grandparents’ home. Before leaving city the subsequent morning, Bazan gave himself the reward of a fast detour previous the home he grew up in, and skilled a breakthrough – one that may lead him each ahead and again to a different residence he had constructed a few years earlier than.
Bazan recorded and organized all the skeletal accompaniments for his obsessively introspective lyrics and spare melodies for Pedro The Lion. Each participant would then study their elements and, collectively as a band, they introduced the skeleton to life. While bandmates performed on a number of recordings, Bazan typically performed all or a lot of the devices himself.
By 2002, after recording Control, the excessive price of turnover within the band lastly prompted Bazan to ditch his “pure course of” in favor of a collaborative writing course of. When this transfer did nothing to stabilize turnover, Bazan was perplexed. In November 2005, Bazan determined to cease doing Pedro the Lion altogether. For the subsequent decade Pedro the Lion felt off limits, even forgotten, like a childhood residence Bazan had moved out of.
“I had deserted my pure approach of working within the hopes of making house for a constant band to put in writing with…and it hadn’t labored. So I obtained a rehearsal house and actually leaned into my unique course of once more. Before lengthy I spotted it additionally felt like Pedro the Lion.”
In June 2018, with Bazan on bass, vocals, and association writing, Erik Walters on guitar and backing vocals, and Sean Lane on drums, Pedro the Lion went into Studio X and Hall of Justice with producer Andy Park to create Phoenix, the primary new Pedro album in 15 years.
The result’s a twisting, darkly hopeful introspection into residence and what it means to return, when you ever can. It is rock and roll wrapped in tissue paper, its arduous edges made barely gentle. Every melody is cautious, a fragile upswing buoyed by guitar strains that maintain every tender feeling collectively like string earlier than ripping them aside to see what’s inside. It is an ode to the place he nonetheless loves regardless of how alien it may seem to him now.
The “Quietest Friend” video is an inventive experiment that pays off in a giant approach. It’s a pure extension of the “Yellow Bike” video, with comparable stylistic execution and characters. Director Jason Lester shot your entire video on 16mm movie, counting on good previous cinematography expertise and high notch manufacturing expertise to create a haunting, introspective clip.
The video begins with Bazan pulling as much as a dated Southwestern motel, chock stuffed with cheesy decor and dusty carpets. He wanders the halls beneath flickering lights, clearly attempting to find one thing. Or somebody. A bit of boy mysteriously rides a bicycle via the halls like a ghost from a previous life (see “Yellow Bike.”) David additionally encounters one other acquainted face within the halls; himself. He might have come again to this place to confront his previous, but it surely looks as if his current self nonetheless has one thing to say about all of it.
