Meeting up after a reasonably successful Jade Tree showcase at SXSW in March, Bazan and his significant songwriting other, Tim (TW) Walsh, sat down to discuss their process and revealed that "the album of their career" has a shadowy dimension behind it's shiny facade.

Bazan, a happily wedded man who has written songs about adultery and other perils of married life explains the not-so-sunny subject matter of his songs. "There are scenarios that you play out in your head, and you question them out in songs, it gives you an opportunity to teach yourself something along the way, without actually having to go through the real life experience."

"On the surface, it's all fiction," he continues, "but I imagine that with anybody who's writing fiction, it is deeply personal. You imagine the characters that you do because of things that you read, or the way that you perceive people…on a friendship level, socio-political, spiritual, all that stuff. All of it is my response to those things."

Despite the solemnity of Achilles Heel, "This album has a more balanced mix of who we are," asserts Bazan. "We're serious, but we also tell a lot of jokes, and we laugh a lot."

And while the lyrics often define Pedro the Lion songs to their listeners, they wouldn't be there without the music. As Walsh says, " You have a lot of ideas, and they're not necessarily worthwhile in and of themselves, and the only venue for it is to combine it with the music. Neither of us is a brilliant novelist; if we were, we'd probably write novels."

"And the lyrics, in the context of the songs, really change sometimes," adds Bazan. "It's not as strong to have dark lyrics with a desperate sounding song as it is to have these really psychotic lyrics in a pop song. There's just something more compelling about that."

So what comes first when Pedro the Lion sits down to write some songs – the music or the lyrics? "They both come together right out of the gate," explains Bazan. "And then music noses out in front, and then the lyrics, and then the music, and hopefully the lyrics are done by then."

Apparently, the formula (or lack thereof) works, because Bazan and Walsh have so many songs and even more ideas for songs, that they're planning to start yet another band, called Broken Arm, in addition to their current efforts.

"We want to play shows a lot, and you can only play so many shows as a band," explains Bazan. "People are like, 'Oh, I just saw them last week.' So we want to play more shows, and we want to put out more records. If we put out two records a year as Pedro the Lion, that would just be too much. So different labels, different band names, different publicists, different everything."

"It will be different instrumentation, too," adds Walsh. "The same rock combo, but I'll be playing drums, and [Bazan] will be playing bass, and another guy will be playing guitar."

"We've got enough songs, we just want to play rock 'n' roll," concludes Bazan.

The pair of songwriters has been working together for about six years, when Bazan hired Walsh to join him on tour. Their meeting was prompted by, of all things, Walsh becoming a fan of the band he would later join. "I just read a review of a Pedro the Lion record in Tape Op and I went out and bought it, and I looked into it, and it was the best and most original thing I'd heard in a while. I don't know if Dave would describe his music as being original, but it was really compelling to me in a way that I hadn't heard in a long time. I sent a demo tape to the label that he was on, and the guy who ran the label liked it, and wanted to put out my record, and so we met through that record label – Made in Mexico. And then we did a couple of tours together."

These tours were what eventually led Walsh to move from his home in Boston to Washington state. "All signs were pointing towards doing it," he says. " There were a lot of circumstances where I was trying to make money and have a normal career, and then the bottom dropped out of the stock market, and I lost two jobs in a row and couldn't find another job, so I decided to take a leap and see if Dave would be up for working together, and he was."

What could have been a difficult transition for Bazan, who was used to toiling away on his own, just wasn't. "There were advantages to writing alone for awhile," he says, "and I suppose if I was a little more organized and a little more stable, I could have done better, but I definitely did the hit the ceiling of going it on my own."

"It's been a lot more collaborative recently; we're writing constantly," he continues. "And as we're writing, we're also hanging out."

Although the two stick to a straight 9-to-5 weekday work schedule, it hasn't hampered their creativity. "We have set hours when we work, and we just work – all day," Bazan explains. "Recording or writing or cleaning the studio or wiring some shit up or whatever. [Walsh] doesn't write at home, and neither do I."

"I'm just not allowed to have guitars in the house. My wife needed some boundaries, because she was playing second fiddle to the band for a while, and that was bullshit on my part. We just made a couple of rules – including no guitars in the house."

Although, officially, Bazan doesn't work out of his house, the studio's only 150 feet from his front door. "We've done most everything in the home studio," he says. "Sometimes we'll go and do isolated things like mixing or drums or overdubs in a real studio, but I really prefer being at home. When you're in your own place, you're not paying by the hour, and there's no deadlines, so you're done when you're done."

The situation isn't always that ideal, though. "You compromise something, 'cause we can't afford to have $800,000 worth of awesome gear that you would have in another studio. But time is a really valuable commodity to us. It's really worth a lot to have unlimited time."

This time is what undoubtedly made Achilles Heel so satisfying an experience for the duo.
"It's sort of a cumulative expression of what we've done before," says Bazan. "It hearkens back to the first album a lot, but with the forward momentum of maybe the last album and the third album. But it's not edgy, like Control."

"I think whatever flaws we find in the current record, at the same time, they're charming, too," explains Walsh. "They're a little weird, but in a cool way."

So will the next CD for Pedro the Lion be more of the same? "We spent a little time floundering, figuring out the direction for the next album, how we were going to do it. Now I think we're probably a lot more sure of where we are and what we're going to do. I think we're really happy with Achilles Heel, but maybe this thing will just be more convincing."

"Now we know where to start from, we have a little more focus, and we'll have more time," adds Bazan.

One thing time hasn’t altered is their would-be audience's perception of Pedro the Lion as a Christian band. "I thought we had sort of escaped that for a little while," says Bazan. "I was being vain and a little bit naïve, and when I realized that wasn't the case, I got pretty bummed out."

"I think there are people who would like the band, but there's just this stigma for some people, depending on who their friends are. We hear it a lot – 'I wanted to buy your record a couple of years ago, but my friend said 'Oh you don't want to buy that shit - they're Christian.' So they didn't, and then two years later they buy the record, and they really like it, and they wished they'd been listening to it for two years. We're just guys writing songs, and they're just people listening to records. That's all it is."

And for a band who listens to such varied contemporaries as The Shins, Wilco, Death Cab for Cutie, and Spoon, they rely on an eclectic audience.

And eclectic influences. "I've gotten compared to Evan Dando and Low Barlow a lot, and Sebadoh a lot on the first record, but not so much recently," says Bazan. "For a while, my view was just, like, go ahead and rip people off because you're not going to do it the same way."

And Bazan even covers his own songs. "Sometimes you play a song differently every night, particularly if you didn't take it very seriously the first time around. If you're playing this song that just reminds you what a lazy asshole you are, you kind of fix it, because you want to make it good – fun for you to play and fun for everyone else. A song shouldn't be compromised because of some decision you already made about it."

"Sometimes songs that I wrote eight, nine years ago are ironic now, and I sing them with that irony in mind. Or maybe they were ironic then, and now they're not. That was a long time ago, and I was kind of a different person then – and in a lot of ways, we all were. You learn a lot in your twenties."

This kind of change may not make Pedro the Lion king of the music industry jungle, where overplayed repetition dominates, but their adaptability will certainly ensure their survival.