“People used to compare him to Jesus,” says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. “But not so much anymore.”
He went on to explain that since 2004 he’s been flitting between atheist, skeptic, and agnostic, and that lately he’s hovering around agnostic—he can’t flat-out deny the presence of God in the world, but he doesn’t exactly believe in him either.
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Bazan’s Curse Your Branches, due September 1 on Barsuk, is a visceral accounting of what happened after that. It’s a harrowing breakup record—except he’s dumping God, Jesus, and the evangelical life. It’s his first full-length solo album and also his most autobiographical effort: its drunken narratives, spasms of spiritual dissonance, and family tensions are all scenes from the recent past.
“All fallen leaves should curse their branches / For not letting them decide where they should fall / And not letting them refuse to fall at all,” he sings on the title track, with more than a touch of fuck-you in his voice. On “When We Fell,” backed by a galloping beat and Wilson-boys harmonies, he calls faith a curse put on him by God: “If my mother cries when I tell her what I discovered / Then I hope she remembers she told me to follow my heart / And if you bully her like you’ve done me with fear of damnation / Then I hope she can see you for what you are.”
I need no other memory
He follows it with an even more devastating verse, confessing that his efforts to erase God have failed:
A shadow on the water
