THERE ARE few albums that have nestled their way into my mind and thought process more than David Bazan’s Curse Your Branches. It’s a layered construction of circular theological questioning and time-old philosophical arguments. It’s the story of a father wrestling with the implications of his doubt, and one family trying to hold a home together. 

Talking to Bazan about the album was difficult. Not because the quiet-voiced singer is a bad interviewee—the 45 minutes that we spent talking went by quickly—but some of the questions he raised struck just a little too close to home. There is an element of human blindness and divine mysticism to our faith that we often want to gloss over. Curse Your Branches is a picture—terrifying in its settled lucidity—of what it means to wrestle with the divine.

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 Well, I guess the way I usually talk about it, is that I still have this perception that God exists in some form that I’m only mostly comfortable with sometimes. But there’s still a giant question mark over what form that could be. Is it as generic as a collective consciousness? Or is it a personality that exists in space and time and has intentions, a free agent, do you know what I mean?

A lot of the time, I’m concerned with, I’m still unpacking. It’s like my exit interview from Christianity is still ongoing, I’m still pretty curious about a lot of the minor points. I don’t believe that the Bible exists because God intended it to, so I’m curious what things transpired to make that document come to fruition the way that it has. If there is a God who is a free agent who acts deliberately with humans, is he present in that document occasionally? Is it all a distortion is only part of it? I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure it out.

I was grew up in a Christian home and there were plenty of nights I’d lay up in my bed and think about hell. Were you a kid who thought about those things?

Oh, I thought about its implications endlessly, but I never once questioned those fundamentals until I was in my mid-20s. There were plenty enough to think about before that where, if you think about the Bible and its teaching and things, and you look at whatever people say about it, you’re not seeing that.

You’re seeing a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of people who are part of a club, but don’t really give a shit about lot of the particulars of their belief systems and when they do it’s always geared to the political, or stupid superficial things like drinking and swearing. They could care less about the poor, but if you smoke and drink you’re in danger of hellfire. There was a lot of inconsistent sort of thinking about the nature of the religion. For years and years, I didn’t even think about questioning the fundamentals, because no one was getting the fundamentals right, so there was a lot to think about and mull over.

Were there any particular authors, books that had an impact on you during this time?

Uh, not really, I mean, like after the fact, I heard a bunch of interviews with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but I mean now, to my mind, I don’t care much for Dawkins. He’s an extremist.

Dawkins and those guys aren’t just like, “well maybe he doesn’t exist,” there’s militancy to their message.

They’re fundamentalists just the same as Falwell.

But just because you’ve rejected Christianity, it doesn’t mean you want to be placed in that camp?

People are going to do what they want to do. I’ve got my own concerns that I’m actively pursuing and I can’t worry too much about how it looks on the outside. Like I’m working math equations with all my wit and all I have, I can’t also worry about how it looks on some level. If people ask me what I think about Dawkins, I’ll say this or that. He does have some interesting points. Just like anybody, he’s a very intelligent, much smarter man than I am. But at the same time, his conclusions and his attitude strike me as being fundamentalist, and they are not compelling to me.

Going backwards, as you played with Pedro, was there a frustration with being put on some type of Christian pedestal. In “Bearing Witness,” you talk about being some type of prophet. What’s that like dealing with that pressure as you’re trying to deal with your own mind, much less other people?

It really didn’t come to bear on me too directly. I have pretty good boundaries as far as that stuff goes. I decided a long time ago it’s unreasonable for me to try and catalogue what type of music I make. It can’t work that way, it’s not a healthy or sustainable way to live. It’s entertaining to me when I come up against it, but it doesn’t figure into how I come to decisions. Like, I’ve lived my whole life, and I might run into that 3 percent of the time, in the old days.

You’ve been dealing with people wanting to put you into a certain camp, a certain doctrine, a lot of labeling, people wanting to talk about God. When it came to making Curse Your Branches, did you ever have a hesitation because of the fact you’d have to do a lot of interviews like this, talking about Him? Was there any hesitation about opening up like this?

No, because I’m not that much of a planner, I don’t consider. You know how in Driver’s Ed they tell you to aim high, look down the road? Well, I don’t do that. I aim pretty low when I’m doing stuff.

Musically, is this is the first time you’ve ever fleshed things out with production?

Yeah, it’s really fun. I always denied myself that, for whatever reason, and it’s fun.

You started this tour off with the small house shows.

Playing those shows was a hoot and the intimacy of the Q&A’s and the actual music, it was really fun.

Hardest question you got?

They don’t and I don't look at each of those little moments. It was just a conversation, and sometimes the conversation will be a little more intense or more substantive, and there was that. I don’t recall because I’m just talking to people, in that situation it’s way less of a gimmick and more of conversing.

In this album, your family plays a huge role, lyrically, in the narrative of this autobiography, how does that interjection of a private subject play out, with them, when you’re writing about people you see on a daily basis, what’s it like interjecting them into such a public expression?

Well, I have to make sure it works for them, to some degree.

No, negative feedback, you talk about your mother worrying about you, I don’t know?

There’s definitely some. It’s tragic to her, and she’s not even mad that it happened to begin with, she understands. She knows that I’m a conscientious guy who is being very honest with myself. I’m doing what’s right as far as I know.

That last song on the album, “In Stitches,” hurts to listen to. When you’re talking to your daughter, and she’s asking you questions about God, what do you tell her? When she asks you, “daddy, what’s this about?” what do you tell her?

I usually say I don’t know. And then, this is what your grandparents say, and then this is what another friend of ours thinks. A lot of it is little stuff like, she’s saying, and I was saying, “Look at those clouds kiddo, look at how fast they’re moving,” and she says, “God’s doing that,” and I said, “Well, it depends, you can think that, but if you believe that God created the universe, then you believe that he created weather systems but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s actively making weather all over, all the time.”

Sometimes it’s just helping her apply logic to those situations, not debunking the existence of God, or supporting the notion of the existence of God, but applying what she may believe to reality.