"Achilles' Heel" - Pedro the Lion
but like everything I do, it's misunderstood
My cousin Kevin has always been one of my go to music recommenders. He introduced me to Weezer and Nirvana when I was a young kid figuring out what kind of music I loved, he showed me Elliott Smith when I started picking around on an acoustic guitar, and when I was a freshman in high school he called and told me and my other cousins (his younger brothers) we needed to get to a show that evening, his favorite Seattle artist Pedro the Lion was opening up for an up and coming Bellingham outfit called Death Cab for Cutie.
I had never heard of either and I didn’t have much time to dig into either before I could get to the show that night, remember this was before the days of Spotify so, you couldn’t just go search an artist immediately and have their entire discography at your fingertips, sometimes you just had to take someone’s word for it.
So, that night my Uncle Bill brought me and my cousins downtown to the Big Easy, Spokane’s newest and at the time one of the only real proper large venues for out of town bands to play at. I looked at the stage and saw a small drum set and an electric guitar amp setup near the middle of the stage. When David Bazan (Pedro the Lion’s frontman) started those first few lines of “The Fleecing” I was immediately hooked, by the time he was singing the chorus, “I could buy you a drink, I could tell you all about it!” I was basically a Pedro the Lion fanboy.
I bought an album that evening and went home and listened to it non-stop. I was a budding songwriter in the early 2000’s and reading through Bazan’s lyrics was like getting a crash course in lyrics with double meanings, religious existentialism wrapped around love stories, infidelity in the musings of a state by state breakup in “Arizona,” capitalism’s pitfalls in the form of an upbeat indie-pop jam in “A Simple Plan”. Bazan is a master of the written word and his ability to distill big and heavy topics into easy to digest lines is something I aspire to do every time I put pen to paper.
The more you explore Pedro the Lion’s catalog the more you get an opportunity to move through all these messages. Bazan has made a career in brutal honesty through his lyrics and if you’ve had crises of faith, alcoholic tendencies or a bruised ego from relationship failures than you’ll have a lot to relate to with when you put on a Pedro the Lion album, and if you’re going to start somewhere, I suggest starting with Achilles’ Heel.
Pedro the Lion is undoubtedly one of the most important artists to come out of Washington State in the past 25 years, with his songwriting being a major inspiration for likely every one of your favorite artists this city has birthed since the new century turned over, so if you want to call yourself a true Washingtonian, you gotta get some Pedro into your catalog.