Overgrown indie-rock kids, rejoice!
Two stalwarts of melodic, ‘90s-originated indie rock — Pedro the Lion and Grandaddy — are bringing their trademark blends of quirky, earnest songmaking to Bend this spring.
Pedro the Lion is celebrating 30 years of existence with a tour-pitstop at the Volcanic Theatre Pub on March 27. Grandaddy is touring in promotion of the 25-year anniversary of its 2000 album, “The Sophtware Slump,” with a performance at the Midtown Ballroom on May 20.
Fronted by Seattleite David Bazan, Pedro the Lion blipped onto college radio’s radar in the mid ‘90s and through the early aughts, soon to be mentioned in the same sentence (and, at times, on the same showbill) as Death Cab for Cutie and The Shins. Or, for that matter, Grandaddy, with whom Pedro the Lion toured last fall.
“Santa Cruz,” released by Polyvinyl in 2024, is the third of a pentalogy — five album chapters — each named for a place in which Bazan spent time growing up. Previous installments have been “Havasu” (2022) and Bazan’s native “Phoenix” (2019).
Although the five-album autobiography comes after a 15-year gap in performing as Pedro the Lion, Bazan remained busy, touring in promotion of five solo albums and a smattering of EPs and singles. Bazan is accompanied by Erik Walters on guitar and backing vocals, and Rebecca Cole, holding down the synthesizer, keyboard bass and also backing vocals.
For lapsed fans who are catching up with the revitalized Pedro the Lion discography (e.g., yours truly), there’s a lot here to celebrate. Delightfully, synthy echoes of Bazan’s 2005 side project, Headphones (think Postal Service), wind throughout “Santa Cruz,” adding a broody, electric dynamic to the band’s diaristic, singer/songwriter songs. More than ever, the sonic palette is brisk yet warm, like golden-hour light poring through a tree canopy in autumn. Bazan’s vocals alternate between lilting confessions and roaring crescendos, and his delivery is as nimble and nuanced as ever.
And in a certain way, Bazan has continued with the conceptual album structures that defined earlier LPs like 2000’s “Winners Never Quit” and 2002’s “Control.” But while those song-cycling narratives were fictive, Bazan’s contemporary, autobiographic songwriting is no less compelling. Bazan’s lyrics sift through adolescent awkwardness and adolescent inner-life with unflinching detail. Take the title track, for example: “First day of 8th grade / The stupidest backpack / Regretted it / As soon as I stepped out of the car / Neon green acid wash / To last me the whole year / I loved it in Phoenix at the mall with my Grandma / So I’ll never be cool here.” This emotional specificity might stray close to cringe, but Pedro’s gauzy, driving rock crunch belies that nakedness with manly conviction.
That Bazan and Grandaddy are both making a tour stop in Bend is something of a spiritual coincidence. In conversation with Vice in 2019, Bazan credits a lyric from Grandaddy’s “Sophtware Slump” album — “Did you love this world and did the world not love you?” for granting him the fortitude to lay so much out in his music. In Grandaddy, Bazan found kindred spirits, both artistically and emotionally.
“The first time I heard [the aforementioned] lyric, it really cut me,” Bazan told Vice. “Some of us need something from the world … connection with other people, that somehow, we’re not getting. I think that Pedro the Lion and, subsequently, [my solo work], was a way for me to express that and release some of that stuff.”
For those not acquainted with the Modesto, California-originated Grandaddy (another indie-rock bastion), imagine the Flaming Lips’ “The Soft Bulletin” blended with Radiohead’s “OK Computer” and you’re halfway there. (Throw in Elliott Smith, Pavement and Sparklehorse while you’re at it.)
In an interview, Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle cited the 1999 “OK Computer” as a genre-exploding example of how futuristically dark indie rock could sound at the turn of the millennium. Others took note of that album’s influence on Grandaddy’s subsequent album. In a retrospective review of “The Sophtware Slump,” a Pitchfork critic opined: “If Radiohead captured a feeling of pre- millennial tension, “The Sophtware Slump” captured the feeling of the disappointment that came afterward — the feeling that life was going to be more or less the same as it had been, only now we’d have to live with the fact that we once thought it’d be so different: the feeling of January 2, 2000.”
Rapid technological advancement, then as it is now, is viewed with unease. Case in point, the song “Jed the Humanoid” is a requiem for, ahem, a neglected robot who drinks himself to death. The funny, if sad, sci-fi conceit allows Lytle to explore his own excessive self-medicating, he later explained in a 2011 interview, without being on the nose about it.
While Grandaddy will perform “The Sophtware Slump” in its entirely at the Midtown Ballroom, the four-piece (whose lineup will forever include the late bassist Kevin Garcia) will perform a second set of career-spanning fan favorites, including tracks from their pedal steel-heavy, blue grass/new wave hybrid “Bu Wav” album, released by Dangerbird Records in 2024.
Despite these seemingly heavy vibes of both Pedro the Lion and Grandaddy have offered decades of catharsis; with the right accompaniment, our existential blahs are nothing we can’t exorcise.
Pedro the Lion
Friday, Mar. 27, 8pm
Volcanic Theatre Pub
70 SW Century Drive, Bend
tixr.com/groups/volcanictheatre/events/pedro-the-lion-174369
$32.43 + fees
Grandaddy
Wednesday, May 20, 8pm
Midtown Ballroom
51 NW Greenwood Ave, Bend
tinyurl.com/yswxw897
$32.50 + fees
This article appears in the Source March 5, 2026.
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