Destroyer’s Dan Bejar Still Isn’t Sure What He’s Doing
Thirty years ago, Dan Bejar picked up an acoustic guitar and started performing as Destroyer. Since then, the project has consistently evolved: into a full band on 1998’s City of Daughters, toward pop music on 2011’s Kaputt, into the electronic realm on 2020’s Have We Met and 2022’s Labyrinthitis.
So where would Bejar go from here? First, nowhere: For more than a year, he stopped writing music. Eventually, he found his answer in front of the piano. Bejar had been messing with keyboards since Kaputt, but he wanted to take a more traditional approach with the instrument. “This was about balladry and getting back into chord progressions,” he says. “I was probably thinking of the only kind of music I really listen to, which is jazz vocalists from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.”
Those sessions led to the band’s 14th album, fittingly titled Dan’s Boogie. Though it feels like one of the bigger pivots in Destroyer’s discography — from the dark electronics of his previous two records to something more organic and expansive and often brighter — Bejar disputes that it’s entirely new territory. “When we finally played back the masters, I was like, This is the most Destroyer-y record I think we’ve ever done,” he says. “It sounds so much like terrain that we’ve covered in the past, but I wasn’t freaked out by that.” One approach that is new: There’s a lot more humor on this record, like “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” which features some of Bejar’s most madcap ravings. “I would never feel comfortable with that in the past,” he says, “but as you age, I guess you stop censoring yourself.”
You stopped writing songs for over a year after Labyrinthitis. Where did that idea come from?
From reality? It came from just not doing it. It did feel like an extra-long time. I noticed some people, especially people my age, take years between records. But I’m not used to that. Going five years without writing a song would be panic-inducing for me. So one year was a good exercise.
Instead of just walking around and expecting to walk through the magical mist and all of a sudden you’re visited by songs, this album was more workman-like. I eventually forced myself to sit down at the piano. Not for very long. I wasn’t that forceful, I did it for about a week or two, and wrote these exercises. Then I dove into whatever lyrics I thought I might have — which I first thought was nothing, but it turned out to be something — and just spat it out over that piano and organ music.
When you weren’t writing, did you find yourself looking for other outlets for creativity?
I’m not good at that. I think about it, because I’m not a good musician and I’m not a classic singer and I don’t write books. The hubristic side of me thinks that Destroyer is just an angle that you can play anything. At some point, do I picture, like, Here’s my little instrumental piano numbers that I wrote, and here’s the book that goes with them, and have at it, world? That could be something to aim for. But that’s harder said than done. I’ve never really done anything else. Singing’s got its hooks in me. Though I’m loath to say it, I probably identify myself as a singer more than anything else in the world, so it’d be impossible to picture me abandoning that — even though it’s ludicrous that that’s what I’ve ended up doing with my life.
When I first heard “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” the line, “A priest mistakes me for a priest / Mistakes me for a Houston Rocket” stood out. Do you watch sports? Because I thought of the song “Crimson Tide” on Have We Met too.
I don’t keep up with sports at all. I was just grabbing language out of the air in real time and creating images that I thought collided off each other in an interesting way. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna say next, which is not at all typical for Destroyer. Usually, I know exactly what I’m gonna say, and over the course of working on a song for even ten months, it never changes at all — it’s the one thing that’s super static. I went into a studio to sing into a fancy mic through a fancy preamp and a fancy compressor for all of the songs on Dan’s Boogie, but not “Hydroplaning,” because I was like, I have no idea how to do this again. I know how the words go, but the flow of it and the space of it, I don’t think I could re-create that. So what you hear is me coming up with it.
That’s what I was going to ask next, if there’s an impulse to polish it at all.
There totally is. “Cataract Time” was the exact opposite. Almost from beginning to end, it was the first song I sat down and was like, Let’s try and make music, even though I’m scared of what comes out of trying, because it doesn’t feel natural. And it was this very emotional song. It seemed to give it all away, way more than most Destroyer songs do. But that one landed so perfect with John’s production that it was the easiest thing in the world to go in and re-create in one take.
“Cataract Time” is such an indelible phrase. How did that get into your mind?
The same way they all get into my mind: They just land, and I remember them because they’re strange. They don’t sound like things that you should remember, but for some reason, it’s a phrase that wants to be remembered. With “Cataract Time,” I wanted it to mean a moment of reckoning, which is not, I think, what anyone would get out of that phrase. I was thinking of other languages and their use of the word cataract. Like, in French, it’s a rupture, it’s a waterfall. Or in King Lear — which I always think about, especially as I get older — there’s a famous scene in which he’s finally betrayed by all his daughters and stripped of his entourage, and he rushes out in the middle of an insane storm. He’s like, “Open up, you cataracts.” And it’s this moment of reckoning, where you realize that the world is broken.
There are lines about horses on two different songs on the album.
Really?
There’s “You check out a horse’s ass, it’s not bad” on “Dan’s Boogie” and “I remix horses” on “The Ignoramus of Love.”
I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think I was going through a horses phase. Those lines are pretty different. The one is supposed to be a dirty old man who’s, like, you’re so out of it, you’re checking out a horse’s ass. And whatever “a horse’s ass” might mean, because that’s also an expression for an idiot.
The other one was kind of more personal. Talking about the coffers: “There’s nothing in there / Everything’s been burned / I remix horses.” It’s an older piece of writing, too. That’s cobbled from somewhere. I was wondering if I was thinking about being, like, a poet-rocker, or singer-songwriter, but not in any convincing way — more of a remixer of, like, Patti Smith’s Horses. I was also maybe thinking about “I Break Horses,” which is a Bill Callahan song. I feel like it was just my brain riffing on that shit. If I ever go through a real cowboy phase, people are gonna know it.
With “Bologna,” you brought in another singer, Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, which you don’t often do. It made me think back to Kaputt, having Sibel Thrasher in the background.
The weight of Destroyer music being just the sound of this one weird voice over decades is a little heavy. So, the desire to play with that is real. Before getting Simone’s vocals on there and Josh’s forest of congas, it seemed like we were hesitant to open it up, like we didn’t want to deal with it. In some ways, it’s more of a traditional song, like a torch song. And maybe the sad case is that’s not my forte. My main stumbling block was, when I heard myself singing the song in its entirety, it wasn’t meaning what I thought the song meant. There was something tokenly sleazy about it, or kind of glib.
We should talk about the title of the album. How did the idea of a boogie as a caper or a grift become interesting?
The title song started off as a kind of typical jazzy vamp that I started singing endless verses over. At one point, I was gonna do it like a ridiculous, ’80s Dylan style — just have, like, 18 verses over this one basic piano boogie. “Dan’s Boogie” was a placeholder for that song.
Then, sometimes, things that you give no thought to, over the course of ten months or whatever, start to stare you down. The more it started becoming, like, a psychedelic, Rat Pack–sounding number, the more I started to embrace the words “Dan’s Boogie” for that song. And then, as the album continued, it started to encompass the sprawl as a whole. Maybe partly because I was trying to own the fact that this sounded like music that I like and listen to, as opposed to the last few records. I also like titles with people’s names in them. Often, spy novels from the ’60s and ’70s, that was a popular sound for the title of a book. Which are not things that I read, but things that I think about all the time and contemplate reading.
You started performing as Destroyer 30 years ago this year. How’s that for you to think about?
It’s insane. It’s madness. I mean, I don’t remember being 22. The idea that this is something that has structured my life for that long is pretty weird. But not as weird as the rigmarole of the music industry. Being in the business, like, something that’s quite geared toward youth culture, and still trying to find your place within that, because you’re not famous, but you’re also not a struggling band. You’re just kind of cruising down the middle, doing a thing for decades. Usually people go up or go away. It’s strange to be still in the trenches, but everyone you know is gone.
Is it still just forward from here?
How I do it is so unconscious. I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I really don’t. I know I’m writing. Slowly, slower than I ever have, but I’m never gonna stop doing that. I still get off on it. In Dan’s Boogie, it sounds like I get off on it, maybe more than I’ve sounded in quite a while. But nothing gets easier as you get older.
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