Who is Pedro the Lion? And why is his new album called ‘Santa Cruz’?

It was a brief period in the course of a lifetime, only a year. But in the life of David Bazan, and in the history of the community where he lived, it was a monumental year. 

Bazan is a highly regarded indie-rock singer-songwriter based in Seattle who has long recorded under the name Pedro the Lion. He is perhaps best known for his moody, lo-fi sound and his forthright struggle with his Christian faith in his lyrics.

Raised in a Pentecostal church, Bazan moved around a lot as a kid. One of those landing spots was Santa Cruz County. Last month, Bazan released the latest Pedro the Lion album. It’s called “Santa Cruz,” and it’s a song cycle reflecting on his nomadic upbringing. He is set to perform songs from the new album Monday at Felton Music Hall.

Bazan, 48, spent his earliest years in Arizona, before embarking on an odyssey with his family that brought him to Santa Cruz, Paradise, Modesto and finally to Seattle. 

Bazan said he called the new album “Santa Cruz” because “that was the next place we were moving to [when we left Arizona], and I kind of thought and really hoped that was going to be the place we would stay.”

And the year he spent in Santa Cruz County will ring bells for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of local history. It was 1989.

Bazan was just 13, going into the eighth grade, when his father landed a job at Bethany College, a Christian-oriented institution in Scotts Valley that closed in 2011. The Bazans’ arrival in the area coincided a few months later with the Loma Prieta earthquake.

“My mom was down at the Pacific Garden Mall, standing in line and suddenly decided not to buy whatever it was she was going to buy,” Bazan said. “So she hopped in the car and took off, and it hit right as she was leaving the parking lot.”

The title track from “Santa Cruz” recounts Bazan’s first day as an eighth grader at Scotts Valley Middle School, regretting his choice of backpack — “I’ll never be cool here/with skaters and surfers.”

Surf and skate culture loomed especially large in the life of a 13-year-old in Santa Cruz in the 1980s. And the song “Santa Cruz” is full of impressionistic imagery from a kid plopped into a unique environment — “One with the weather and the cold waves/ A sea and a mountain, in their eroding embrace” — and then, only a year later, pulled out of that environment. 

“My impression of it was that it was a place where there are just way more people who are so effortlessly cool,” Bazan said in a phone interview while on tour. “It’s magical there. You can feel it in the air from, like, Monterey northward. It’s just different.”

Wherever someone, especially an artistic or sensitive someone, happens to be at 13 will often have an outsized presence in their memory and in their personality. And that was certainly the case with Bazan. Having grown up steeped in a rather closed loop of Christian and religiously oriented music, he discovered, among other things, the Beatles, while living in Santa Cruz, a discovery that is fundamental to who he became as a singer-songwriter.

“I remember walking through the house singing [the Beatles song] ‘Yer Blues,’ and my dad heard me singing ‘I’m so lonely, wanna die.’ And he was like, ‘OK, we gotta back off on this stuff,'” he said. “So, I was sent back into the Christian bookstore shelves for about a year and a half, until we moved to Seattle and I could listen to whatever I want.”

Bazan’s family roots go back even deeper locally. Though he didn’t come here until he was 13, his parents lived in Santa Cruz before he was born, and he’s performed locally several times over the years. “Yeah, we were moving back to my parents’ old college stomping grounds,” he said. “And there’s a restaurant that my grandparents always loved in Capitola-By-the-Sea called El Toro Bravo. Their enchilada sauce is my grandma’s favorite.”

In essence, Santa Cruz County has weighed heavily in Bazan’s imagination for years, and it led him in middle age to grapple with his youth. And, he said, the Loma Prieta earthquake served as a symbol for his emerging sense of self.

“The thing that made the biggest impact on me [after the earthquake] was going to the grocery stores, and there’s nothing on the shelves,” he said. “Everything went back to normal later. But it just made me realize, we are vulnerable in a way I never understood before.”

Pedro the Lion performs live at Felton Music Hall on Monday, July 22. Showtime is 8 p.m. 

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