Dan Bejar speaks with Paste about the decay of middle age, embracing his Rat Pack era, surrendering to failed ideas, his strange, 27-year partnership with John Collins, and how a short-lived New Year’s resolution galvanized the 14th Destroyer record, Dan’s Boogie.
“How are things at home for you?” I ask Dan Bejar. “They seem to be, more or less, that way I left them,” he replies, having just returned from a month-long string of gigs across the Midwest and East Coast. The shows were good, though they introduced a configuration of Destroyer that has already been retired: a, in Bejar’s words, “bluesy, New Wave power trio.” He says, “We’re gonna go back to our unwieldy seven-piece to try and learn how to play this record,” and he’s talking about Dan’s Boogie, the 14th album made under the mononym he’s been doting on since 1995.
In Vancouver 30 years ago, a 22-year-old Bejar picked up an acoustic guitar and made a record called We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge by the next Halloween. The instruments were always out of tune, as Destroyer spawned out of a low-fidelity tape hiss. When 1998 came around, Bejar and his New Pornographers collaborator John Collins turned Destroyer into a real rock band. And, in the mid-2000s, a triptych of records transformed the era: This Night; Your Blues; and Destroyer’s Rubies. (“It’s Gonna Take an Airplane” is one of the best songs of the aughts, after all.) Flash-forward a decade or so, and Bejar remade himself on Kaputt. And then again on Poison Season. And then once more on ken. By the time Have We Met unwound at the precipice of the COVID-19 outbreak in North America, Bejar’s creative glow was firmly generational—his body of work anything but paint-by-number.
After finishing Labyrinthitis in 2021, Bejar didn’t write a song for almost two years. It wasn’t an intentional break, because Bejar, now 52, doesn’t do anything intentionally. “That’s part of the problem,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s being in your 50s or what, but I seem to not be writing in my normal way and at my normal pace.” What did he do for that year-long dormancy? “A lot of it was just not being freaked out by that and thinking, ‘Oh, it’ll come,’ and then being slightly shocked that it just didn’t, or wouldn’t.” Eventually, Bejar forced himself to do what most traditional musicians do all the time: touch an instrument, an exercise he normally despises. His writing is a heady paradox, full of incoherent coherencies. Blocking off time for work feels like an antidote to his impulsive creative stupors.
In 2023, he severed his oft-antagonistic relationship with the guitar and made a New Year’s resolution to play the piano for an hour a day. Naturally, that lasted about a week, but out of it came etudes of piano language that morphed into six songs. “Cataract Time” and “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” he says, came forth in a “more heroic, nervous breakdown manner.” But the other four tracks arrived less akin to the hundreds of Destroyer songs that already existed: They were chord progressions Bejar flung words at. “It’s a way of writing I’ve been pretty suspect of for quite a while,” he reveals. “But I just did it, and I like the way they turned out.”
“Were you shocked that material wasn’t coming out immediately?” I ask Bejar, knowing that, when anyone gets older, work ethics can change. You can always just Google that. But the songs he wrote were reflective of his middle age, he tells me. “Because I’m not very inward-looking, it threw me more for a loop than it would with other people,” he elaborates. “It’s like, ‘Oh, this is a sign of decay. This is just one more of death’s talons on my shoulder. This is the third act beginning.’” You can hear that decay in the songs, in the apocalyptic, madcap, Patti Smith-techno render of “The Ignoramus of Love,” or the pensive, windswept ooze of “I Materialize,” or across the ghost-cluttered, Tom Thumb-sized blacktop of Rue Morgan Avenue in “Sun Meets Snow.” But it’s all less academic now, as Bejar’s third act isn’t pretend. “It was never really that lived or felt, which is probably a big beef that people might have with Destroyer music in general.”
One of the tracks from that period, “Dan’s Boogie,” captures Bejar vamping about blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sunrise-sunsets on a basic, pseudo-jazz piano progression which, in another not very long ago lifetime, never would have become a Destroyer song—let alone ever end up on a Destroyer album. “The fact that I embraced it and just went for it—and you can hear me probably enjoying it—was shocking to myself,” Bejar admits. The title, however, was a lark—a placeholder. When Bejar sent the demo to Collins, “Dan’s Boogie” was meant to be a warning about the “Rat Pack-alia” sound that awaited the producer/bassist. “I was going to do it Tempest-style,” Bejar tells me. “Just do 17 endless boogie verses. I was like, ‘Oh, people can just solo between verses and the song should just go on forever, because I’m really enjoying writing lyrics over top of it and singing over top of it.’” That’s the kind of music Bejar likes, a taste he doesn’t quite share with his bandmates. After the placeholder name kept staring him down during the nine months Destroyer spent at the Mango Pit and Afterlife Studios, “Dan’s Boogie” became an obvious title for the entire record.
But is Dan’s Boogie a self-titled album? “I like the idea of owning the record, if the record feels personal to me,” Bejar says. These songs are more of a flagship of the sounds he’s personally into, compared to Have We Met and Labyrinthitis, which were derived from concepts. Bejar’s style has become so distinctive it’s practically a genre; the hypnosis of his greatest raptures are recognizable from the first piano glissando in the title track. With Dan’s Boogie, there was no prelude. “It was, ‘Here’s the songs, let’s start making them and make them sound like things that we like,’ which felt good,” Bejar gestures. “It produced, to me, the most Destroyer-sounding record we’ve ever made, which a few years ago would have made me recoil.”
Bejar is notably not an autobiographical lyricist, so when he says an album is “personal,” he’s not arguing that it’s “emo” or “confessional.” What he means is that the music sounds like him, in the same way someone telling diaristic, heart-on-their-sleeve stories sounds like themselves. “And I’ll have no idea what that person is like or what they think of the world, or where they stand in the world, or what even the world that they’re standing in is,” he continues. “There’s different schools of thought on this in the singer-songwriter world. I’m 30 years into standing on the margins of that, at least in the American scene.” What I’m getting at here is that Dan’s Boogie isn’t some kind of put-on. The songs are dense but witty, sometimes chintzy but reliably cryptic and splendid. Characters are spoken of on a first-name basis; intercontinental locales ramble in the annotated vortexes of lyric pages. As soon as Bejar opens his mouth and sings “Your entrance was its own Red Scare” at the dawn of “The Same Thing as Nothing at All,” the gravitas of his own cranky hubris bursts with the familiar drama of an old friend.
The Dan’s Boogie cycle kicked off with “Bologna,” which features Fiver’s Simone Schmidt on vocals. Bejar didn’t write the track for Schmidt; it was originally meant to be his take on a Nino Rota, Italian soap opera-sounding, piano-driven, melodramatic song. But he “couldn’t sing it for the life of me.” “Even though I do love a torch song,” he continues, “I can’t seem to wrap my voice around—sometimes, for lack of a better way of putting it—things with that few words or things that involve sustaining notes with a certain amount of strength. It was sounding glib to me, or sleazy, like the song was about a one-night stand or something, which it is 100% not. It felt like there wasn’t enough at stake.” Bejar, a big fan of Fiver’s last album, Soundtrack to a More Radiant Sphere: The Joe Wallace Mixtape, was drawn to the darkness in Schmidt’s voice. “We were struggling with it until Simone sang on it—until Josh put this forest of congas on it, then John really dubbed it out,” he continues. “Until things started sounding Sandinista, we didn’t know if the song was gonna make it onto the record.”
Wells then drew up a “thoughtless, passing mix” and Bejar thought it was good enough to leave it alone. “We stopped touching it,” he says, “because it’s like, ‘We don’t know how it got here, so let’s just walk away’—because we weren’t conscious enough of what was going on to really continue working on it. It sonically ended up being a template for the whole album.” When the “Bologna” masters came back from Matthew Barnhart, Bejar and Wells wanted its vibe to dress the rest of the record. They never imagined a guest vocalist becoming a lead singer on a Destroyer song, but, predictably, Bejar’s voice doesn’t blend well with anyone else’s. Schmidt’s recording made Dan’s Boogie stronger and far more singular.
“Cataract Time” takes me back to the music that got me hooked on Destroyer in the first place, which was Kaputt. In French, “cataract” meant “to rupture,” but the gauzy, looping and loping piano turns in the song are anything but breached. The way that song waltzes through the “another day, another day, another day” outro, it splashes in the sprawling color of Dan’s Boogie. And, in the wake of Labyrinthitis’s blackened, high-octane disco and relentless pacing, Bejar made a conscious effort to slow LP 14 down. He wrote every song to reflect the fact that all he listens to is piano music and jazz vocal albums, saying, “I’m trying to fess up about that, about what my interests are and where the music is that I think my words land best.”
Labyrinthitis was supposed to be a house record. The haywire parts of “June” sounded like that, sure, but the germ of the project—a once-conscious aspiration to forge the music into a dogged, four-on-the-floor dance record—fell by the wayside. But there was something manic about those songs, like in the explosive middle of “Tintoretto,” or the adrenalized “It Takes a Thief,” or how Bejar played an armchair Jim Morrison for the “An American Prayer”-style monologue that let the dark out of “June.” “It was sometimes a strange costume that some of the songs wore. It was a cool costume, but a little bit ill-fitting,” Bejar says. “I think I was out of it, too. Something was going on with me where I didn’t have the focus to know when a song was veering into territory that sounded cool but was sinking the song.”
Destroyer is a band that’s meant to be imperfect. It coincides with the art Bejar likes; reference points don’t materialize and he lets them go. Abandonment is as essential to the record-making process as the record itself. “You have an idea, you go in, and you’re just perfectly executing your idea—I can’t even imagine that!” Bejar says. “I can’t even imagine getting the strength to wake up in the morning and continue doing that. If things don’t start coming at you from places that you didn’t picture, I don’t know how your interest gets sustained—unless you’re doing a performance that you want to be documented in the studio.” That is, in theory, his favorite kind of record to listen to, even though he’s never made one like it.
Labyrinthitis had songs that would have been better if they were just club songs, rather than dance-rock songs, Bejar says, nodding to how his interpretations of downbeat, sophisticated disco-pop and E Street Band theatrics three years ago mangled the Destroyer sound. But hindsight is an even more potent drug than surrendering to failed ideas. “Sometimes I think the album Trouble in Dreams had no business being a rock record.” When it comes to lyric sheets you can pull out of a record, Bejar argues that Trouble in Dreams was his “crowning achievement” 17 years ago, revealing that it’s the closest he’ll ever get to “the feeling of the writing that he gets off on.” And the fact that he couldn’t deliver those songs in anything but literary terms speaks to the grander tragedy of Destroyer. “The words that I’m most proud of are on a record that I’m not fond of,” he says. “For the most part, I like the weird paths they take, because I don’t really know what any of this is supposed to sound like.” Trouble in Dreams and Kaputt are night and day, Though Bejar contends that, while making Trouble in Dreams, he may have had one foot on the Kaputt side of singing without fully realizing it, the two albums are night and day—a contrast struck between Labyrinthitis and Dan’s Boogie more than a decade later.
But Bejar admits that “Labyrinthitis was kind of fucked” and disorienting—that, despite the cool-sounding experiments, you can hear how lockdown forced him and Collins to make the album in different rooms. Dan’s Boogie marks the first Destroyer release recorded in a studio in 10 years, not since the Five Spanish Songs EP in 2013. Songs like “Travel Light” and “Sun Meet Snow” feel close to the listener, if only because they’re intimately destructed and position Bejar’s vocals well into the foreground. “Cataract Time,” however, benefited the most from Destroyer’s newfound studio luxuries. “I went into a nice studio with a really nice microphone and a really nice preamp and compressor, and I just wanted the vocals to sound warm and luxurious and not fucking fried like on the last couple albums,” Bejar says, pointing especially at Have We Met, which he recorded the acapella vocals for while sitting a table in his house.
All of the singing on those songs came from first takes—performances so ground-zero that you can hear Bejar hesitating through his deliveries. “I liked the vibe of that album,” he admits. “It had this quiet, late-night vibe of someone at their desk, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to try and recreate that.’ Even though these vocals are really flawed and poorly recorded, which gave John the excuse to fuck with the sound of them to his heart’s content. That record is a hilarious example of hearing the process of the song being written from the very get-go. Everyone is there to listen in.” Have We Met was an album inspired, sonically, by dread but recorded months before COVID-19. “Sometimes, John would work on a mix and I’d be like, ‘No, it’s not depressing enough. There needs to be more dread,’ which, you know, we found in spades,” he says with a wink.
“Cataract Time” is the best Destroyer effort since “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” which was the best Destroyer effort since “Rubies.” But not only is “Cataract Time” an epic, long-winded song, but its groove is a buffet of show-pop so pleasant that even a line like “every day, we give up time” rings in hopefully. The track took Bejar by surprise. He had a plinky, basic version of the harp arpeggios that wound up on the final cut, and he finished the lyrics by grasping at scraps of writing and piecing them together in real time while the tape was rolling. “Cataract Time” poured out of Bejar. “It’s a really simple song that, for some reason, just had a feeling that was sustained from beginning to end, and it was the very first thing that John really gravitated towards.” After Bejar handed Collins the demo, the producer “made it square,” applied to it an unabashed, “very adult” mid-tempo groove that paralleled the vocalist’s walking pace of singing, and “kept tinkering with it in ways that probably I can’t even hear.”
Bejar affectionately calls Collins a “very insensitive producer” who can make 3/4ths of a record with his vocals turned off. “I love the way John makes a record,” he clarifies, “even though it’s infuriating and his methodology is completely unsound.” Perhaps that is because Destroyer is a lyrical project before it’s anything else, or because Bejar has never gone into the studio without knowing exactly what he’s going to sing from beginning to end. “I think it’s strange,” he admits. “That’s just not how I’ve heard it works. I don’t think that’s how Mick Jagger does it. I don’t even think it’s how Bob Dylan does it. It just happens to be how I do it.” Bejar tells me that his bandmates hate that, but that a part of him loves the fact that they hate it. “I feel like other artists would realize that and be like, ‘Well, I don’t want to fucking work with these guys anymore,’” I say to him. “They’re amazing, I love their playing,” he responds. “But it doesn’t totally jibe with my taste, which I think is interesting.”
He continues, “As someone in their 50s, for me not to make a proper adult contemporary record or to not make a proper roots record or Americana record, it’s fucking suicide. I’m tanking my daughter’s college fund by not just relaxing and making a record that’s more NPR-friendly. I just can’t figure out how to do it.” I don’t think Destroyer fans are all that interested in hearing Bejar make his own Two Against Nature, though he tells me that he’s ready to age into something that sounds “stately, contemplative, and simple.” Even then, who knows what the hell that would sound like. Decades into his career, Bejar is still coming to terms with the stuff he’s into—his idea of what contemplates a “mature, senior’s record” and what the rest of the world thinks that sounds like are woefully separate ideas.
Despite turning towards a syllabus of Rat Pack influence and film score treasures, Dan’s Boogie is still packed with Collins’ heavier background. After all, Destroyer has been a rock project more than it’s been anything else. There’s an angular, out-of-nowhere riff from Nick Bragg that cuts through the wandering second half of “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World.” Bragg’s contributions to Destroyer songs always fall under the umbrella of “sideways noise,” so much so that Bejar rarely blinks an eye when it happens. “Hydroplaning” needed that incongruity, as the final take was a “fancy-sounding version of the demo” that featured a lot of Josh Wells’ toms. Bejar says that “any kind of strange thing to poke through that felt really necessary, and that song is all about transitions, so Nick is always perfect for those.”
The narrators in Bejar’s music are often flawed, yet they are sometimes fictitious stewards of feel-good ephemera. Frank Sinatra was like that, pillowing complexity with the fauna of late-night auras, though I don’t suppose ol’ blue eyes could have come up with a line like “the family curse was our signature scent.” Dan’s Boogie is not culturally a jazz vocal album, but it achieves a similar swaying, trad-pop energy by pulling from James Bond-style, double-agent spy novels and an Ocean’s 11 swagger. It’s not a tentative record, but it’s shameless, cinematic, and proportionally sustained. Bejar’s writing comes from an unconscious place—the roots of “mirthless husk floating on an ocean” and “mad scientists trapped inside a rose” forever untraceable—but he pays close attention to what kind of sonic world his words need to inhabit. Part of being a musician means having to embody an attitude, even if it changes from record to record. As “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” suggests: Destroyer are “now entering a new phase.” But the concerning mystery of the band exists because Bejar’s hang-ups remain consistent: “I spit out the words and it’s a reflection of the things I like. I’m putting what I want to see into the world. It’s just a selfish act.” I ask Bejar what role editing plays in his songwriting. “I have no experience of that,” he stresses, his tone hammed up. “And the vocals stay in the exact same place, always. They’re immobile. I’ve never changed a lyric ever.”
Bejar and Collins had a sequence for Dan’s Boogie’s nine songs on day one and never strayed from it, which hadn’t happened once in the previous 29 years of Destroyer. “I’ve never cared about that shit at all, generally—that’s something I could figure out two hours before the record gets mastered,” Bejar says. “But I knew what the songs were called and I knew the order they were in from the very beginning. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again, and maybe it’s just in my mind, but it gives it this novelistic vibe, which feels new to me.” He told Collins that the record could sound as crazy as he wanted, but that the vocals were “going to be clear and they were going to be loud.” Bejar said to his bandmate, “You’re going to have to reckon with them much more than the vocals from the last few records. It’s going to sound like crooner music regardless of what madness lies underneath.”
Bejar threw down the gauntlet, because some of the Dan’s Boogie mixes were “fucking psychotic-sounding.” “But I think it worked,” he wagers, and, considering how the album begins with such a gallant, ornamental track like “The Same Thing as Nothing at All,” I’m inclined to agree. “It was a challenge for a reason, and I had confidence in the songs and in the way that I was singing them. That felt very natural and easy to me. I was staking my claim in them. I knew I would be, even if I was the narrator, talking over a shit storm. I felt confident being the guiding light.”
“Anxiety” was a word sewn into the Joyce-like characters bogged by amphetamine tangos and a baffling, verbose meaninglessness on Labyrinthitis in 2022. Those songs had nerves that could ring you dry. Bejar isn’t sure how he’d categorize Dan’s Boogie, though. “It’s definitely not a well-being record. It’s not a resigned record,” he says. “I’m really, really bad with boiling things down, in a way where I think I’m going to have to answer for it at some future juncture in my life where I completely cringe at the answer.” The mystery of this music, he argues, is for the audience to pull back the curtains on. “Let them speak.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
Listen to Destroyer’s Daytrotter session from 2013 below.
