Dan Bejar on aging, the end of movies, and the very Destroyer-y new Destroyer album Dan's Boogie
There's a moment about eight minutes into Dan's Boogie, the expansive 14th studio album by Destroyer, when Dan Bejar drops the niceties and gives into his Freudian id: "Women fill out, men crumble inwards," he pontificates with an audible smirk. "There, I didn't want to say it but I did!" The lyric came to mind as I watched Destroyer perform at Brooklyn's Kings Theatre in late February. Bejar, dressed in denim and a tweed blazer with his all-access pass dangling from his neck, hunched over the microphone stand, which he had lowered to waist height in such a way that it resembled a cane. Was this his version of crumbling inwards?
"Crumbling inwards is a big part of it," Bejar told me the day after the Kings Theatre performance, one of two New York shows supporting Father John Misty ("We're both brutally words-forward," he observed of his tourmate). "That's a habit I got into when I first put the guitar down and started touring with a giant band for Kaputt. I didn't know what to do with my hands. I started using the mic stand as a cane, more or less — a showbiz cane." Showbiz, by the way, is "like sports," he explained. "You're supposed to age out. It's rigged for that. Part of me used to enjoy sparring with that. Now that I'm actually old, I'm just confused and disoriented."
Dan's Boogie, Bejar said, is a record about getting older. "There are topics that I've always loved — the world erasing itself, decay — that stop being academic and get really real when you get old." He stopped before he could elaborate further: "If I had a handler, they'd say, ‘ixnay on the age-ay!'" Luckily, it was just Bejar sitting at a bustling café in Fort Greene last month, wearing jeans, a navy cable knit sweater, and the same blazer as the night before. As we sipped our cappuccinos, he described aging as a process that was as disorienting as it was artistically freeing: "I can't censor myself anymore. I don't know how." The resulting album is, to Bejar, "the most Destroyer-y sounding Destroyer record in a long time."
Bejar's career trajectory has arguably bucked the "showbiz" expectation of expiration: Over the past two decades, Destroyer has gone from a quiet home recorded solo project to the sophistopop heir apparent. Since the "possibly despicable jazz" (his words) of 2011's Kaputt, his ninth album and the only one to chart on the Billboard 200, he no longer composed on "the despicable guitar," which he found limited his imagination to "the same stinking 12 chords."
He stopped listening to rock music, preferring a diet of film scores and jazz vocalists from the 1950s. He writes at the piano these days, coming to the words almost subconsciously afterwards. "Traditional songwriting just doesn't interest me at all, as opposed to 25 years ago when it was all I cared about," he said. "I like to just compose my shitty sonata, and then write my shitty poems," he added, characteristically self-deprecating. "If the two should meet, that's fine, but I can also give people the sheet music and a little tiny notebook and see what they make of it."
For much of Destroyer's discography, the person interpreting Bejar's sonatas and poems has been John Collins. Collins, who also performed with Bejar in the New Pornographers, has been his primary
collaborator since Bejar first stepped into Collins' studio to record 1998's City Of Daughters, which Bejar considers the "first proper Destroyer record."
Their process generally follows a pattern: Bejar sends demos written on piano. "John's first job is to envision a rhythm section. That really changes things. He is an incredible bass player, and he has an obsessive ear for drums. He hears lots of things I don't hear. Once John gets involved, things get more grandiose and broader." For the past two records, they came into the process with musical motifs in mind: "For Have We Met, we said—and I despise this expression now, because it's everywhere — 'Let's make a Y2K sounding record, a trip-hop sounding record.' It was just a starting point, and a nonsensical one, because neither John nor I knew what any of those things meant. Then the same thing happened with Labrynthitis. We said, 'Let's make a house record.'"
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On Dan's Boogie, they just wanted to sound like Destroyer. "The band feels more present," Bejar said. "The piano feels more present, which is a very Destroyer-y instrument. There's fake strings, which reminds me of Your Blues. In a lot of ways, it's a Poison Season/Your Blues mash-up, and I'm not freaked out by that. It sounds like us, and it doesn't need to be some concept or some bold new step forward."
But, as Bejar declared on "Hydroplaning Off The Edge Of The World," Destroyer is still "entering a new phase." Many lyrics on the album were fragments of poetry combined as Bejar listened to the mix. On the sprawling yet minimal "Cataract Time," he improvised the lyrics on the spot. "I had never done that before. I had this little keyboard riff, and a really basic chord progression, and I just opened up. For me, that song's special. It's what I was feeling," he said. "It captured my mood at that time, which was dark but hopeful at the same time. The fact that I could sing at all became the hopeful strain of it."
For the slinky and downtempo "Bologna," the band brought in Fiver's Simone Schmidt to sing lead, another first for Destroyer. "The song wasn't working with me. It was coming off sleazy. Why does it sound like this song's about a one-night stand? It's totally not about that, but I wasn't getting those verses across," Bejar recalled. "Simone has a tough voice, and in some ways a lower voice than me. It strikes at a gut level."
Destroyer records are so steeped in the proper nouns of Bejar's surroundings — his native Vancouver, the music and magazines of his youth, surnames and street names, layered into collages of fleeting references. As any devoted Destroyer fan would, I came to our meeting armed with annotations scribbled in the margins of the Dan's Boogie lyric sheet, hubristically determined to get answers directly from the Gen X prophet himself.
When he sings "I remix horses" on "The Ignoramus Of Love" — was that a reference to the Bill Callahan song "I Break Horses"? "I think it was a riff on ‘I Break Horses,'" he said, "and also a riff on me making a techno record of Horses by Patti Smith, and things that influence me in an obvious way. I just blurt it out in a nonsensical, throwing-my-hands-up kind of way. And the fact that it's preceded by ‘There's nothing in there/ Everyone's been burned' — it has this end of the line vibe."
Then there's a reference to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited on "Sun Meet Snow." "Is there?" he asked. Yes, there is: "I see you come through/ Down Rue Morgue Avenue." Doesn't Dylan sing about the same street on "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"?
"He does," Bejar nodded. "Do you know who else does? Lloyd Cole, off his record Rattlesnakes." Was he referencing either of those songs on "Sun Met Snow"? "I just spat that lyric out! A lot of that writing is instinctual momentum. On Dan's Boogie, the lyrics just coursed through me. I wanted a street name, and I wanted a famous one, and that's the one that popped into my head. I know it's incredibly specific though."
While we were on the topic — had Bejar seen the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown? "Are you trying to get me in trouble?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. "By saying mean things?"
He had watched it, he replied finally. "It's my fault for nerding out on Dylan and having gone through that phase in my 30s." Bejar was annoyed that the timelines didn't seem to line up with basic Dylan chronology: "Wasn't Sarah, his future wife, already a few months pregnant at the time of the Newport performance?" But that's just squabbling, he said. Besides, he added, "I don't like any music biopics aside from The Doors by Oliver Stone." Would he trust any directors with a Destroyer movie? "Yeah, anyone who's not scared to tackle the mundane minutiae of everyday life." (Your move, Jane Schoenbrun.)
What about the line on the title track about the "stockbroker" who "weeps for his '80s, makes beats for the ladies in grey." Was that based on David Solomon, the Goldman Sachs CEO who spun records in the Bahamas under the name DJ D-Sol?
"No, amazing! I don't even know who that is!" he replied, surprised by the coincidental resemblance. "I was thinking of a sadder version of that. I was thinking of the ‘80s, and how the stockbroker was such an icon. It's not even a word that gets used anymore. A movie like Wall Street is the ultimate ‘80s movie, and it's about stockbrokers. It would be impossible to think of a movie about stockbrokers right now."
He paused, then cryptically added, "It's kind of impossible to think about movies at all." How so? "It seems over, movies. American movies. It seems done. It definitely seems like going to the theater and seeing 2001 is not in the books for America again." In general though, "My hot takes on the states, those days are over. I don't understand it. Even though I was born and live 10 miles from the American border, one thing I've discovered in the last 10 years is that this place is more wild and confusing than I thought it was when I was growing up. It's also more banal. I'm not qualified to really make statements about it."
The previous night, Destroyer closed with "Notorious Lightning" from the 2006 album Your Blues, which ends with Bejar screaming, repeatedly, "And someone's got to fall before someone goes free!" Wasn't that a statement? It was definitely part of the Destroyer "burn it down" ethos, he agreed. "I wrote that song 25 years ago. Especially back then, though still, every song had a political bent to it. You need a political backdrop to romance for it to have any power, right?" There was also a more practical reason for its placement in the set list: "I definitely can't sing anything after it, so it has to be at the very end."
At 52, the Vancouverite is grappling with his status as both a singular lyricist with a cult-like following and a musician who opens for artists 10 years his junior. "I'm in this strange liminal mid-zone where I make a living through music, but I'm not a celebrity," he said. But, he clarified, "I would still make records even if no one was listening. I know I would." On Dan's Boogie, Bejar is confident and hesitant, uneasy yet unbothered. It's the sound of realizing you've been had, that the fix is in, that the royal scam goes all the way to the top. What else is there to do, then, but boogie?
Dan's Boogie is out 3/28 on Merge.
