Dan Bejar's Personal Best

02 April 2025, 09:00

Original Photography by Nicolas Bragg

(Destroyer) (Personal Best)

With the arrival of Destroyer's 14th album Dan's Boogie, Dan Bejar talks to Samuel Cox about his five favourite songs from a kaleidoscopic career.

“I’m sick of reminiscing,” drawls Dan Bejar on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”, the opening song from Dan’s Boogie, the most recent addition to the perpetually shapeshifting Destroyer canon.

And indeed, when asked about the format of this interview – a plunge into the labyrinthian depths of his twenty-nine-year recording career as Destroyer – he is reluctant to cast his gaze towards the rearview mirror, letting slip with a smile that this is his “least favourite” kind of interview. “Maybe because I’ve made so many records and because I’m of a certain age now, and I’ve been doing this for so long, people want me to look back and reflect on the catalogue.”

Destroyer, a project which began life as a homespun, low-budget solo project in late 1990s Vancouver, Canada, has slowly but surely transformed into a many-headed monster with a rotating cast of band members and collaborators; from long-time producers and musicians John Collins and David Carswell to American artist Kara Walker and ambient composer Tim Hecker. That famous Mark E. Smith aphorism about grannies and bongos seems an apt way of describing Bejar’s relationship to the Destroyer moniker. Bejar’s is a body of work well worth gazing back misty-eyed upon, but equally understandable is his unwillingness to do so. His recent run of albums have, after all, relied upon the ability and willingness of himself and Collins to repeatedly tear up the book of rules stating what a Destroyer album should look, sound and feel like.

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Take 2011’s Kaputt, which could quite easily have become a template from which Bejar dutifully borrowed in the decade-and-a-half since. Its splashes of breezy, sophisti-pop brass, its measured and meticulous Gaucho-era Steely Dan grooves, and its refracted mutant disco danceability all serve as a trojan horse for Bejar’s dense and fevered poetics and for the album’s more avant-garde moments, namely its eleven-minute closer ‘Bay of Pigs’ – but more on that later. The result was Destroyer’s most commercially successful album to date, a record which broke through into something at least vaguely resembling a mainstream. Bejar, however, eschewed the simple route of repeating the formula, following up the album’s success with Poison Season, a lusciously arranged suite of crooner ballads and earthy, baroque pop-rock that plays more like early Scott Walker or a heady reimagining of the Sinatra songbook than anything on Kaputt and its predecessors. Needless to say, 2017’s ken, the follow-up to Poison Season, reoriented Destroyer once more.

Dan’s Boogie shows Bejar once again refusing to cut and paste. The manic, villainous characters inhabited on many of the songs from 2020’s Have We Met and 2022’s Labyrinthitis are largely absent this time around, replaced by more irresolute and languorous voices. The pitch-shifting narrator of Labyrinthitis standout “June” snarls about a snow angel being “a fucking idiot someone made in the snow”, while Have We Met opener “Crimson Tide” casts withering looks upon “chicken-shit singers” and a “dead rich runaway”. It’s hard to imagine the narrators in Dan’s Boogie being so self-assuredly petty. “Who knows what’s out there, really?” Bejar sings on “The Ignoramus of Love”, a lyric which could have been written by a wide-eyed young Brian Wilson. On the title track, meanwhile, he asks “Who do I turn to? / Where do I run to?” Perhaps this is a narrator from those previous records, simply looking around with his head pounding and realising that the sun’s come up, he’s the last one sat at the bar, and his tirades have finally alienated his usual crowd.

There are, nonetheless, moments which any seasoned player of the Destroyer drinking game would recognise: fog and rain, intertextual song references, glasses that need filling. And there are, if you listen closely enough, musical moments which glance backwards too, from the synthetic brass on “Sun Meet Snow” that recalls 2004’s MIDI-masterpiece Your Blues to the piano on album closer “Travel Light” which half-mimics the chord sequence on Poison Season opus “Bangkok”. Perhaps another maxim about Mark E. Smith and the Fall is applicable here: always different, always the same.

Bejar agrees that there is just enough room for a little nostalgia on Dan’s Boogie. If it’s not quite a case of having one eye on his musical past – the new album is stuffed pleasingly with new sounds, new personas, new Bejarian gags – there is at least a tacit awareness that he has a past at all, and one which is worthy of embracing: “I think this new record reaches back into older Destroyer songs. Not in a direct-reference way, but it seems the most Destroyer-y sounding record that we’ve made in quite a few years. So in that sense, I don’t really mind trying to make sense of it in the larger scheme of things.”

“The Making of Grief Point” by Loscil (2010)

BEST FIT: The first song you picked was ‘The Making of Grief Point’ by Loscil, the ambient project of former Destroyer drummer Scott Morgan. What was the process behind this collaboration? And did speaking the words rather than singing them change the way you wrote at all?

DAN BEJAR: I was trying to do it like a radio play, which is a format that I think about a lot. And I would aspire to do something like that in a long form, but I don’t have the discipline. It was at a time when I first started thinking about ambient music, about not doing rock music, about writing in a way that didn’t involve a guitar. It was during the making of a record called Kaputt and a song called ‘Bay of Pigs’, which was a really long, arduous process. I think it was really worth it, but at different times I thought it was soul-sucking and I wanted to capture the drudgery and the banality of studio work, the way that Sympathy for the Devil by Jean-Luc Godard does.

I wrote this kind of fake diary about the making of a song called ‘Grief Point’ that doesn’t exist. So a lot of it, you could say, was just me writing about my time in the studio. But I was excited, I’ve never done anything like that before, I haven’t really done anything like that since. I loved Scott’s music and the musique concrète part of it, the rain and the drones. I felt it was so easy to speak over and write over and it kind of is a standout as far as what I’ve done in music.

Did working on this song inform the making of Kaputt itself?

In Kaputt, there are some long stretches, drones, [but] there’s no real spoken word element, there’s no reciting. And there’s probably nothing as personal-sounding as that song, actually. Because in a lot of ways I see [Kaputt] as a very warm record but it’s kind of impersonal in its way. I was just feeling adventurous and I just wanted to do new things and that was probably a harbinger of that.

I might be reading into it too literally but you reference working on a song called ‘May Day’ on this track and I read an interview in the Village Voice where you say that ‘May Day’ was a working title for ‘Bay of Pigs’.

Yeah, ‘Bay of Pigs’ had a few working titles. One was ‘May Day’, one was ‘Christine White’, which is a line in the song. So yeah, it definitely goes hand-in-hand with a kind of faux behind-the-scenes reportage about the making of this song ‘Bay of Pigs’, and a debunking of that.

The Making of Grief Point by Loscil 2010

“Bay of Pigs” by Destroyer (2009)

BEST FIT: I really like the line where you say, “At some point when it’s made, I’ll explain this record word-for-word”. And as the next song you’ve picked is ‘Bay of Pigs’, I guess you can make good on that fifteen years later!

DAN BEJAR: I mean, ‘Bay of Pigs’ was a trial-by-fire song for the making of Kaputt. It was the first thing that we did, it took a long time, months and months and months. I’d never worked on a song that long before. Partially because we didn’t really know what it was supposed to sound like. It was supposed to sound like ambient disco and we were these three rock dudes who didn’t really know what that is. In the fall of 2008 that wouldn’t have been a term as omnipresent as it is now. Now, all I hear is ambient disco. Then, we weren’t really sure what that meant. We’d put on a side of The Wall to see if that was ambient disco [laughs]. Someone played side two of The Joshua Tree to see if that was ambient disco. We were just flailing. I knew this song had to be really long.

Firstly, because there was a lot of words, but also I just wanted to have long stretches. I think the version that first came out, the twelve-inch version, is thirteen minutes long. I kind of poured all of my conviction into trying to meld poetry and rock, which was the main project of Destroyer through the ‘90s and ‘00s. It’s safe to say that was Kaputt. I completely gave up on that and haven’t really picked up the mantle since in a lot of ways. I mean, I still write in this certain way but it’s not something I feel passionate about, this feeling of having severe, strange language constantly coursing through a song. That’s not in me, that’s not what I’m doing anymore. I would say ‘Bay of Pigs’ is the last stand of that and you can tell when you listen to it. It’s so chock-a-block full of images and strange situations, there’s no room for breathing, really. And then just the fact that I wanted it to be trippy and droney and also somehow dancey.

In the end we never really figured out how to make ambient disco, we just had an ambient half that then turns into a disco half, which is cheater-y but works for the sake of momentum. I’ve never really used the studio as an in-itself tool before. Before that, for the most part, you’re just supposed to go and document your song. ‘Bay of Pigs’ was the beginning of the end of that.

I’m curious about the vague allusions to the Kennedy administration in this song – I read in the Village Voice that you had Jaqueline Kennedy in mind when you began writing it. I’m not going to be so facetious as to say this is your ‘Murder Most Foul’ [by Bob Dylan] or anything but I don’t know, maybe it exists in the same psychic universe?

I was really trying to shrink it down as opposed to ‘Murder Most Foul’, which kind of blows it up. I don’t know why I placed the drama of ‘Bay of Pigs’ on the Kennedy Compound with kind of a drunk, melancholic woman trapped by insane, powerful men – or something like that. I’m not sure what the image was, it was just a grey day on the Kennedy Compound, trying to drink your woes away, surrounded by strife.

Has anyone named Christine White ever approached you since you put this song out? Are there legions of Christine Whites who are now Destroyer fans?

I can’t remember…I don’t think so. I don’t know why I was so hellbent on that name, sometimes things just come to me and they have some inflated purpose in my mind. Not exactly as if handed down from God, but that name was really important for the song. It’s an important moment in the song when I say that name and it anchored things because there’s a lot of images flying around. It’s interesting because it’s also the most – no offence to Christine Whites out there – but it’s kind of a shockingly generic-sounding name.

“Everybody’s Paris Pt. III (feat. Dan Bejar)” by Sandro Perri (2018)

BEST FIT: How much of a prompt did Sandro give you on this song? Was it just the title or was there more to it?

DAN BEJAR: I think I was trying to follow the melodic lead that he did and then of course there was a title and the word, “everybody’s this, everybody’s that”. But I played pretty fast and loose with it in a semi-improvisatory way, late at night at my kitchen table. And I enjoyed myself so much singing that song and writing to that song, it really sparked a lot of how I ended up doing the record Have We Met. John Collins’ production style and Sandro’s are quite different. The writing, I don’t know…it was a shot in the arm for me, that song. And I’m just really proud of it because it has a lot of lines I really like, delivered in a way I really like, from beginning to end. It means a lot to me. It’s a real downer of a song in my mind, but in a way that’s listenable, you know?

I was going to ask you, actually, about your singing in particular. I find the vocal on it very gentle but almost flippant as well. Did the texture of Sandro’s work inform that?

Yeah. It sent me down the path of not working on music and then setting up a microphone in the studio and singing your proper vocal track to the music you’ve been working on. It was more like “I’m here now, I don’t care, I’m just going to sing quietly because I’m in my house”. I just felt relaxed so you can hear me play around more than I had on the last couple of records. Just doing tricks and landing them. Not to toot my own horn, but when it comes to that song I will! Even just the way the song starts which is, “Did I really mean to do this?” That’s a line I like a lot and a way to start a song that I like a lot, and I think I made that up on the spot because I felt really comfortable for some reason.

“Your Blues” by Destroyer (2004)

DAN BEJAR: This is now a song that we made coming-on twenty-two years ago and that’s a long time. I know that I was knee-deep in my Scott Walker-obsessive state. I knew that I was going to try and sing this song acapella which for someone with a voice like mine, especially back then, seemed like an act of madness. But it felt like I’d written, maybe for the first time and also probably the last time, a set piece of writing that was a scene in an act in a play. I felt like it could withstand this very arch, dramatic – in the sense of theatre – treatment.

Your Blues, the record, was all about that really, and this song was even more so. But the main thing is that it has my proudest musical moment, and I don’t have any proud musical moments, because I can use a guitar or a piano to sling chords together and come up with little melodic bits, but there’s a MIDI trumpet solo on ‘Your Blues’ that’s my proudest musical moment of all time, which I made up on the spot. It’s the only time you can hear me improvising music in the history of Destroyer records, so let’s say in the last thirty years. It’s the only instance. And I really like it and I’m surprised I like it. Plus I really like muted trumpet solos. So the next best thing to a muted trumpet solo is a MIDI muted trumpet solo that I played on a keyboard. I shocked myself, probably because I wasn’t thinking about it. I think everyone just took a bathroom break and I just laid it down. So in the end that’s why I put that song [on the ‘Personal Best’ list], because it contains my one proud musical moment in the history of making music.

BEST FIT: On the use of MIDI on the album more broadly, I feel like a lot is made of that. Was that a budgetary decision or was it about wanting to experiment with the technology and push up against its limits?

No, I thought the hundred-and-one violins setting sounded like a-hundred-and-one violins. I was duped! I just wanted to have orchestras and obviously I did not have a budget for that whatsoever. Nor would we have known how to really wield that. I knew I didn’t want to make a record with bass and drums and guitar, even though acoustic guitar seems to still sneak in everywhere. It’s a really strange record. In 2004 it really sounded off, maybe it sounds even more off now, I haven’t really listened to it in a long time. But it has a lot of conviction, which I like. It’s the most insane that Destroyer probably sounded. And it was kind of the last record to be really into the craft of writing songs, there’s chord changes and there’s proper songwriting shit which I’ve definitely abandoned since then. [Destroyer’s Rubies] was all about abandoning that, probably for the best. Yeah…it’s probably the strangest record we’ve made. In a lot of ways, the new record reminds me of Your Blues, but a more integrated way of using that aesthetic, you know? Less extreme.

“Cataract Time” by Destroyer (2025)

DAN BEJAR: I think it’s going to go down as an important song for me. It just sounds like a mellow Destroyer song to people who listen to it but its genesis was intense. I didn’t do anything for a long time and then just blurted that song out and made it up, which is not normally what I’m used to doing, it’s not normally how I work. I’ve had this kind of collaboration with John Collins, this will be the third record we’ve done in a row in a pretty specific way, and I think this song is the peak. Kind of a way forward, maybe. I think it’s also probably the best singing I’ve ever done. I know everyone says that about their latest record, like “Oh, this is the best thing I’ve ever done”. I’m not saying it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but I can defend the fact that it’s the best singing I’ve ever done. Anyone that says I used to sing better just isn’t listening too hard, or has probably just moved on to other things.

BEST FIT: The arrangement is really beautiful. Was that something that came about between you and John or did one of you take the lead?

It was the song that John first glommed onto, which was really shocking to me. I’d done a version that just had a very dummied-down plinky synth version of one of those arpeggiating harps and he created these way more complex, duelling arpeggiating harps and flattened out the rhythm so that it’s walking tempo, groovy. Once the song became low-level groovy it really found its spot. So that was definitely him, because those plinky harps are actually the backbone of what is a fairly simple song. The rest is just me trying to deliver the words in an even keel, which was really easy because that’s how I wrote it and that’s how I sing it.

Is there anything that this song does that nothing else has in the Destroyer catalogue so far?

I mean, it’s not the kind of song I would have even called a song, fifteen years ago or twenty years ago or twenty-five years ago. It sounds oddly personal for Destroyer, the sound of me walking around and that’s what I’m saying in my head. There’s not a ton of that. Usually in Destroyer there’s the babble of several voices competing at once and things are slightly more excited. It’s like a state of the union address, really, but a state of the union address by someone who just turned fifty, you know?