The Devil’s Bargain

I. On Motorcycle Island

It’s 2 p.m. in Austin, Texas, mid-March: the thick of the SXSW Music Festival. The seven-block stretch of Sixth Street between I-35 and Congress Avenue—lined with stale-smelling two-story bars hosting halfhearted daytime label showcases—is a slow-moving river of fashionable and hungover twenty- and thirtysomethings, texting “where you at” into cell phones, seeking shade and breakfast tacos as they refuse handbills for new vape flavors.

I’m not on Sixth Street, thank god. I’m a few miles east, gulping grape Gatorade and walking over dead grass, keeping my eyes peeled for what’s been billed to me as a David Bazan house show. In a parking lot behind the Bel-Aire Mobile Home Park, I find a young woman with a clipboard who motions me through a windowless door into a warehouse full of chrome parts and neon signs. A tattooed, bearded biker nods me down a hallway. It’s not a house show at all, turns out—it’s a motorcycle shop show. And there’s David Bazan, sipping a Topo Chico, leaning on a workbench, checking his texts or maybe scrolling through the afternoon’s set list on his phone.

At a distance, Bazan could just as easily be a motorcycle mechanic: he’s a slightly unkempt and mostly bald fortysomething, with a football player’s thick neck and a bearded jaw. He wears a strict uniform of black T-shirts and blue jeans, usually—as now—accompanied by a slate-gray hoodie. Bazan blends, especially in cities like Austin or his longtime homebase, Seattle, but from afar. There is no way to say this without sounding more like a disciple than an objective observer—and I am somewhere in between—but up close he’s got a quiet charisma that’s instantly disarming. When you engage him (or, maybe more likely, when he engages you), his furrowed brow loosens and his face opens up, dropping any suggestion of alpha-male bullshit. It’s a safe face, a face that mirrors whatever vulnerability you might be carrying when you meet it. You’ve got to think about what you want to say to a face like that.

I’m late, though, and David Bazan has a show to play. So I don’t say anything. I avoid eye contact altogether and make my way into a tall, narrow room with chairs arranged in a half circle. Bazan walks in a few minutes later, with abysmal posture, to friendly applause. He clutches the neck of his guitar with his thumb and forefinger and waves with the other three. There’s no microphone or amplifier. He doesn’t need them.

“If anyone feels uncomfortable, don’t hesitate to get up and move to a different spot,” he begins. “I’ve been at shows where I picked the wrong seat and spent...