Catching Up With... Hello, Blue Roses

Dan Bejar (Destroyer/New Pornographers/Swan Lake) and lady friend Sydney Vermont have combined their love for music and each other to form the folk outfit Hello, Blue Roses. The happy and hilarious couple decided to create more intimate music in their Vancouver home in 2005 after first collaborating in the semi-defunct rock group Bonaparte. HBR's debut album, The Portrait Is Finished And I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty (Jan. 22), features songs penned by Vermont as well as her artwork on the cover. The musical results are just as charming as the back-and-forth this couple sustains in conversation.

"I feel like I'm always doing at least two things in my life because I'm doing art and I'm doing music and trying to create some kind of a balance," Vermont says. "I'm usually doing several things in art. Not so much music anymore. Trying to concentrate on one thing. Dan's always working, it seems."

"I'm drawn to not do anything, usually," Bejar responds. "But as the decades roll by, you know, you just drag these projects along with you like a glacier. This one seems pretty normal-feeling. Not very forced. So I don't really think about it too much or question why I'm doing it."

Paste: How did you meet in the first place?
Vermont: You guys played at our studio space.
Bejar: Around 10 years ago, Destroyer was practicing in Sydney's studio or a studio she shared with our guitar player and a couple other people, and that's when we first met. And then we were just good friends for a few years. See each other around, you know how it is.

Paste: Was it intimidating to step into the creative sphere with Dan?
Vermont: No. Not at all. Sorry, Dan.
Bejar: I was going to answer that for you and say: "Yes, I was incredibly intimidated. Mostly by his genius."
Vermont: Yes, his genius is intimidating on day-to-day business, but I've come to live with it.
Bejar: I think the answer is a thundering "no."
Vermont: I don't really separate those two things ever. We worked together on art projects before, so we have a little bit of experience making that crossover. I don't think there's a huge gap between the creative and the daily. For me anyway, it's just sort of organic and not controlled.

Paste: Have you reached a level of comfort with each other that you often finish each others' sentences?
Vermont: Have we been doing that?
Bejar: We're doing that just in the way that you would anytime you're huddled in the corner of the couch talking into a walkie talkie to someone, which is what we're doing now. I think you would probably finish my sentences incorrectly, and I would yours.
Vermont: It's true. That's the catch.

Paste: I ask because I was wondering if it would translate to the songwriting for the project.
Bejar: I think the songwriting is more delineated in that Sydney writes all of the songs. And then, I come up with... I kinda learn the chords and I come up with little parts here and there. She comes up with parts when she picks up the flute. The solo songs are pretty fleshed out and the demos and other ones are just me and Syd and Dave Carswell and John Collins who runs JCDC studios. The words, as far as finishing people's sentences, the words are all hers.
Vermont: That's true, but maybe what you're [asking about] is the translation process. Which, in that regard, is an interesting point. In the collaboration, there's a lot of times when I have a song and I think it's completely finished and great and perfect.
Bejar: And I go, "What the fuck?"
Vermont: And you go, "I don't know what that is. Is that a song?" And then it gets reworked.
Bejar: I guess that happens once in a while.
Vermont: That happened more in the beginning.
Bejar: Or I'll go, "Let's try and make the song the way Rod Stewart would have made it 35 years ago," and you look at me cock-eyed?
Vermont: Right. Yes.

Paste: How do you feel about singing together on the record?
Bejar: It's pretty cool. We do it old-fashioned style. Dave would set Sydney up on one side of the room, and set me up with a guitar on the other side of the room. Then we'd sing, occasionally gazing at each other from across a crowded studio.
Vermont: Trying not to laugh.
Bejar: Yep.

Paste: Only occasionally?
Bejar: Yeah, actually I don't sing too much on the record. Maybe I'd go into overdub and back up.

Paste: I was talking about the gazing.
Bejar: Oh, the gazing.
Vermont: I usually stare up at the ceiling.
Bejar: She's usually staring somewhere else. And I'm usually looking at my hand so I don't fuck up.

Paste: Why did you stay away from percussion on this album, for the most part?
Vermont: That was a pretty clear decision. There's one other song with a full band on the album. We're trying to do everything without a rhythm section. We're trying to do everything as self-sufficiently as possible.
Bejar: I think it was a really conscious decision not to have drums and bass and just appeal to not structuring the song around the band. Structure it around the song, for a lot more freedom. The original idea was to have instrumentation and arrangements that we could record ourselves and mix all of it. At the end of the day, I was going to do that, but I chickened out. Not quite ready to record something that sounds really good yet. Definitely I will never try to record a drum kit. That definitely eliminated the whole idea of trying to start up a band in our house, wherever we happened to be, whether it was here or in Spain where some of the songs were written. Does that make any sense? Drums: hard to record, limiting. There's some percussion I really like...
Vermont: Shakers.
Bejar: Shakers, tambourines.
Vermont: Sticks.
Bejar: Sticks. They were all present. I was more into that at the time. Still am.

Paste: I read that you write songs in the bathtub, Sydney.
Bejar: Here we go.
Vermont: I like water and if I'm not swimming then probably my most relaxed time is in the bathtub. And it's true, I write a lot of songs when I'm sitting in the bathtub. I kind of didn't realize. I also write songs when I'm riding on my bicycle. Now, it's not as specifically located as it once was. But maybe I just need to be perfectly relaxed and preferrably immersed in water to be able to find a melody.
Bejar: I think that's how most songs are written. Relaxed and immersed in water.

Paste: Now you have to figure out a way to bicycle underwater!
Bejar: Aha!
Vermont: That's true. I had not thought of that. There's a bicycle motion that you do in aqua aerobics. I've seen footage of this. It seems tiring, though. It seems too exhausting to come up with good work.

Paste: When you're not working on music, what do you like to listen to together?
Vermont: Lots of stuff.
Bejar: Sydney doesn't like it when I play Nuggets.
Vermont: I hate Nuggets.
Bejar: She does like it when...
Vermont: Actually, we have pretty different tastes when we come right down to it. I've been listening to Espers. I like folk.
Bejar: She's more of a folkie. I'm more of a rocker.

Paste: There has to be some overlap.
Bejar: There's lots. We like to listen to...
Vermont: Flamenco.
Bejar: We listen to Camarón together. He's good. And Carmen Linares. You like her, I like her. And you like Pharoah Sanders and I like Pharoah Sanders.
Vermont: We're both into Cass McCombs.
Bejar: We both like Cass McCombs. He's good.
Vermont: What else?
Bejar: We like Kevin Ayers.
Vermont: There's lots of stuff. We change it up a lot. We pretty much always listen to music together, I just might walk over to the iPod and press the arrow button when Nuggets comes on. I don't know why I don't like it. I just got sick of it. They just all started sounding the same after a while.
Bejar: OK, we said too much.
Vermont: Sorry, Nuggets.

Paste: How does it feel to be together creating like this?
Bejar: (laughing) Someday you'll find out, man. It's going to be amazing. I can't explain the feeling. There are no words, but I know you'll feel it someday.