David Bazan ended Phoenix, his 2019 album as Pedro the Lion, with a big question mark. The album was a reflection on the singer’s youth in Phoenix, where he was born and grew up until moving away when he was in (or about to start) seventh grade. In “Leaving the Valley,” the last song on the album, Bazan faced the unknown as his family pulled out in a U-Haul. “Where the wheel stops, no one knows,” Bazan sang.
As it happens, the wheel stopped next at Lake Havasu, a vast reservoir in northwest Arizona, on the border with California. The biggest municipality in the area, Lake Havasu City, is probably best known as the place where London Bridge ended up, after an oil magnate bought it in 1968 and had the structure reassembled there, block by block. Bridge or no, Lake Havasu was not a place young David Bazan wanted to be, yet his stint there proved formative enough for him to write about it on Pedro the Lion’s latest album, Havasu.
If Phoenix had an air of wide-eyed, sometimes bemused nostalgia, Havasu is more conflicted—and not just about the location. Pedro the Lion’s latest is really an album about starting to come of age. Bazan evokes the tumult of emotion that accompanies the middle school years, sometimes so well that it’s uncomfortable, as he chronicles the year or so he spent in Lake Havasu before his family moved again.
He depicts the anxiety of being the new kid in school, the thrill of a first kiss, the longing to find his place and fit in—a quest made more complicated in Bazan’s case by a religious upbringing that left him in fear of eternal damnation. His lyrics here are unflinching throughout and feel honest to a fault, whether he’s taking too long to think of something cool to say to a new classmate on “Too Much,” or misreading all the signals from everyone and making a hash of things on “My Own Valentine.”