Pedro The Lion: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Nov. 8, 2018 | Lars Gotrich -- “I’ve made music under many brand names. It was a dumb idea,“ David Bazan jokes during his performance at the Tiny Desk, in his own particularly reflective and self-deprecating way. You can find that music filed under his previous “brands“ or incarnations as Headphones, Lo Tom (with TW Walsh and members of Starflyer 59) and his own name. But here Bazan returns to the one that first gave him voice: Pedro the Lion, a name he now says he intends to keep. No matter how dark or disastrous, there’s always been an undercurrent of grace to the music of David Bazan. Even in his most righteous anger, empathy seeps through. “When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run“ opens the Tiny Desk set with sparse instrumentation — Erik Walters on guitar, Bazan on bass, Sean Lane on brushes and snare — not unlike performances of yesteryear, when slyly clever-yet-quiet riffs put Bazan’s sardonic wit front and center. Twenty years after being released on Pedro the Lion’s debut album, It’s Hard to