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DON'T DESTROY THE THING YOU HATED: An Interview with Destroyer's Dan Bejar
 JACOB WEINSTEIN
April 2004
Modern pop began in the early 1950s when a rash of hopped-up rockabilly, country, and jump blues singles stormed the castle, discarding carefully crafted exposition in favor of drive and frenzied insinuations. Somewhere around this time, and certainly under this premise, rock & roll proper was birthed, reaching an early pinnacle with the Kingsmen's wobbly, unintelligible "Louie Louie."
That this mush-mouthed rant could find a place in the pantheon cemented pop music's deeply ambivalent relationship with language. Pop needs lyrics to sound human, since, after all, language is the point at which subjectivity opens itself to mass identification. But often the lyrics are sublimated into noise for the sake of the overall musical effect of a great, bracing single. Since the mid 1950s, pop has been content to derive meaning from rhythm, emotion, and texture, reducing lyrics to merely the phonetic component of that gut-level appeal.
It's a small miracle, then, that the defiantly wordy Bob Dylan meant more to the history of rock than "Louie Louie." Placing Dylan above "Louie Louie," though, doesn't mean he rejected the "Louie Louie" aesthetic—he just improved upon it, with "Like A Rolling Stone," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." Dylan's music was state-of-the-art electric rock, sometimes steeped in folk's plaintive assertiveness, often raging like the blues, but always vital. His lyrics could afford to explode pop songcraft because his strong melodies and instrumental racket more than measured up to the old standard on their own. These were supra-pop songs, staying grounded while the lyrics traced their own highbrow tangents.
Vancouver indie rock savant Dan Bejar, better known as the enigmatic Destroyer, is one-upping Dylan on a regular basis. Bejar's circuitous lyrics offer delirious wordplay, a devastating wit and a caustic sense of the absurd. Yet while many of them could hold their own on the printed page, Bejar is also fascinated by blunt, "Louie Louie"-like choruses and peaks, sandwiching poetic flights between fist-pumping slogans, catchy couplets, and almost trite plaints. While Dylan redefined what it meant to rock, Bejar, writing some of the most literate and, at the same time, joyously inane songs you've ever heard, can exalt and debase himself over the course of one three-minute track.
Musically, Bejar is a fractured traditionalist, scavenging bits of glam rock, kooky acid-folk, 1990s indie guitar chug, and John Cale-esque sophistication. Unlike Dylan, however, he exploits their visceral face value while playing their deeper connotations off of each other. It's not only the sounds that come together—it's the context we're used to hearing them in. By letting words-as-gesture pollute his lyrics, and using genre as a mode of meaning, Destroyer's musical interplay of high and low, abstraction and guts, and thought and immediacy is as downright revolutionary as any songwriter since Dylan himself.
His latest, the synth-laden epic Your Blues is the latest statement from this one-man vanguard. The endless waves of digital keyboard are at once moving and impossibly awkward, and a pliant lyric like, "You warn the ladies not to be corrupted by their looks, but your voice comes out soft and slanted / and you're living off what the government's granted you / amnesty from the true thing" tumbles out effortlessly and, more importantly, with very little sense of its own obscurity—but unlike "Louie Louie," you won't get the full story until after the rush subsides, and you start scratching your head.
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Nathaniel Friedman: There seems to be this need to figure you out, both among your fans and people who come into more casual contact with your music.
Daniel Bejar: A lot of people think that I'm just some person who can't step outside of his house, or shuns any kind of attention whatsover, which really isn't true. I think I'm responsible for about ten percent of that kind of thing. The rest is just other people.
Friedman: Maybe peoples' interest in you stems from their interest in figuring out your music.
Bejar: I like to create intrigue and mystery within music and within writing, even just on a rhetorical level, or using a certain style of language that will fan that. But people talk about lyrics being cryptic, or something along those lines; I don't really agree with that. It's a style of writing that comes from a background that doesn't always include standard rock songwriting or pop lyrics. I know the wordiness alienates a lot of people, especially with the voice that I've been given. It's like "I wish that guy would sing less, because his voice is driving me crazy." I've actually tried to pare the wordiness down a bit, because it's the kind of thing that can really kill a song. I'd like things to be as immediate as possible, ‘cause that's kind of the nature of the medium. At the same time, I'm not interested in writing the perfect pop song, so there's going to be a whole sector of people who are just not going to be down with it. But I think someone like Bob Dylan once was pretty wordy, and he sold lots of albums.
Friedman: You said in an interview a few years ago: that you write the lyrics and the melody, independent of the chords and band parts.
Bejar: It's getting really bad. Back then I would come up with the chords to go over the lyrics and vocal melody when I had to show it to the band, and then with this last record, there was no band. I was coming up with the chords the day of, in the studio, still trying to figure stuff out. I know it's ass-backwards. For most songwriters I know, the last minute thing is scribbling down lyrics in the studio.
Friedman: But I think that's where a lot of the force of the language comes from—it has its own momentum.
Bejar: Definitely with this last record. There ended up being a lot more on the record than I'd initially imagined. I'd kind of thought in my head that it would be this stark soundscape bubbling in the background, and have the vocals way up top, almost on the verge of an a cappella record. But we just got too spastic once we got into the studio—too much fun to be had with MIDI—so that kind of fell by the wayside.
Friedman: It sounds like the opposite happened.
Bejar: We kind of went wrong somewhere, didn't we? Some of them kind of retain a bit of that. I mean, that was one idea, and the other was to take a stab at the style of heavily orchestrated, European-style crooning. That's a style of music I've always been into.
Friedman: Like?
Bejar: Scott Walker. John Cale, he's done things that have brushed upon that. He's a specter that looms large over every record I make, it seems.
Friedman: How so?
Bejar: The placement of sound, the way he arranges things, whether it's a string section or a rock band. Who else? Crazy people like Richard Harris. He did a couple records back in the late Sixties, early Seventies, with this guy Jimmy Webb, that were very dramatic and heavy on the strings. And maybe certain Eighties records, that I can't remember, which I was listening to then. This Night was so rag-tag … in a good way, but such a rag-tag affair that even back then I had the feeling that the next record would be something very constructed and precise. Friedman: It's odd to hear you rattle off influences, since so much writing about Destroyer works the Bowie angle to death.
Bejar: Obviously I like David Bowie. I like his singing and I like the people he was drawn to rip off. It was all open season with him. And his melodic phrasing—what he would do was glom onto an idea that was out there and make it catchier. But as a writer, there's not much really to attract me there. If you think of the record that had the most of that kind of early Seventies glam affectation, it would probably be Thief. Thief was dabbling in this kind of anti-underground music, or some kind of vaguely political rhetoric. Especially coming from a band that no one had heard of, it seemed that the more bombastic the music, the better. And Bowie, he's no slouch at that kind of thing. I guess I could have gone more for Queen, but at the time that seemed out of my reach.
Friedman: Is that an influence or a reference? You make a lot of references in your lyrics.
Bejar: I can't imagine referencing something just for the sake of having a reference. It's more that if someone's flailing about, they're going to grab onto things, and part of those things are going to be information that exists in the world, and part of that is going to be names and places. I don't think there's some puzzle that if you tie it all together, it's going to be solved, because I don't really think in conceptual terms. I almost don't really believe in them.
Friedman: How can you not believe in conceptual terms?
Bejar: It's not that I don't believe in them. But what I'm really going for is something that strikes me as poetic. That's the bottom line: to make something that can be moving and that can seem unfamiliar and beautiful at the same time. That's the nature of writing that I like: putting two things together that seem incongruous. So whether I'm dropping some name or some quote, it seems beside the point unless it fits and works with what's around it. It's way more instinctual and much less brainy than people give me credit for.
Friedman: That makes your songwriting sound almost naïve.
Bejar: Sure. It's not like I sit down and come up with a game plan. I just spill my guts like everyone else, but my guts just happen to look like this.
Friedman: In an email interview this past summer, you called each Destroyer song "a love/relationship with its own medium." That's not conceptual?
Bejar: Maybe I'm wrong, but I still feel that I'm going about things all wrong, and that timeless music and timeless songs don't operate like this, that this style of writing doesn't belong in the medium that I happen to really dig doing, and in the end it will suffer for it. I guess when I wrote that, I was thinking that within the songs, there's moments where you can maybe hear a voice trying to convince another voice that it's not the case, or that it is. And that in itself, to discuss that issue within a song seems like a really secondary, or tertiary, theme. Songs should be about love, or death, not whether they're the correct vessel for experimental writing, or some bullshit like that.
Friedman: Do you do the same things with genre? You jump around quite a bit.
Bejar: I'd actually like things to be a bit more cohesive. I always like albums that feel like a definitive statement. Though maybe they're boring to make. I think if I had a more specific, overarching musical vision, that would be different. But I don't even have the chops to pull off one specific style.
Friedman: Does that go back to issue of you primarily being concerned with writing things?
Bejar: It sounds bad, but I don't really care about music that much. I guess if the voice and the singing counts as music, that does seem to be evolving a little bit. Part of my whole thing is sometimes trying to get my voice to do things which there's just no way it can do, and it sounds bad when it does it. So in that sense, I'm kind of invested in music.
Friedman: I think you're selling yourself a little short.
Bejar: I mean, I can write a song. I don't want to belittle myself too much, because I still feel like the songs are way more musical than tons of the shit that's out there. Maybe I'm comparing myself to people that just have a wide breadth of what they can actually do on their instrument, which is definitely not me.
Friedman: But all the stuff around what you're doing. Clearly that's not just other people browbeating you into letting them do things.
Bejar: No, I mean, I come up with some of that stuff. But for instance, I can't really hold my own in a rock jam, and that's something I've always wanted to be able to do and it was kind of frustrating. Or on this record, I really thought that, given the means and the time, and could pull off some really over-the-top, ornate, orchestrations. And I couldn't really do it [without producer Dave Carswell's] help. I couldn't get my brain to think in those terms.
Friedman: How do you think people are going to react to you using so many synths on the new record?
Bejar: Do they sound like synths?
Friedman: I mean …
Bejar: Do they sound like strings or do they sound like synths?
Friedman: They sound like. . .
Bejar: Do they sound like synth-strings?
Friedman: I didn't realize it right away. I think it had more to do with the nature of the record; I figured out that it was your synthesizer masterpiece after a couple of songs.
Bejar: I don't have the budget to hire the London Philharmonic, especially if you go in with not a single musical idea whatsoever. I don't have the budget to have them sit around and then hire someone to arrange the charts for them. So the MIDI Rhodes seemed to be the best option, the only option. And I wasn't too concerned with the hokeyness of the sounds. I did want to get the least hokey sounds possibly, for the most part, knowing always that we'd probably fall short of something that sounded real. I guess I thought that if the parts themselves had enough integrity, it wouldn't matter if they sounded more like a synthesizer than like 101 violins. And listening back to some of the old records that inspired that approach, obviously the orchestra sounds great, but if you take your inspiration from what was getting played and not so much the overall sound of it, you could walk out with something decent. I don't know—it's not something I'm going to do again, probably ever.
Friedman: But this isn't a self-consciously electronic record.
Bejar: Oh no, god no. I didn't want to make an electronic pop record, if that's what you mean; had I wanted to do that, I would have gone about it way different.
Friedman: You've spent a lot of this interview wondering if you're doing things right.
Bejar: I feel pretty good about what it is that I've done so far. That would be bad if I came off as doubting my every move, because that's not what I do at all. I think in a lot of ways, I'm pretty fearless, but I'm just not sure if that comes from ignorance or what. I just write in a very natural way, and it's only in the actual recording process that maybe I start to have my doubts, but in the end, I think I have a pretty good reign on it. And then live, that's a whole other can of worms. That's something I'm still coming to grips with.
Friedman: You've said that you were self-consciously dramatic on Thief, and then for this new one you've said you wanted to go for something very dramatic and orchestral, but is your music ever that understated?
Bejar: I thought Streethawk and This Night, actually, were quite different in those respects. Though I think I'm the only one who thinks that. I thought in a lot of ways, those two records were way more personal.
Friedman: I was going to say that. The depth of emotion is the same, but it seems much more genuine in some ways.
Bejar: Yeah, I think there's less artifice, in some respects. I find that they're more relaxed records. So I would say that's it's in me. And I think the one after this, I'd like to sit down and maybe not have a fist in the air and a soliloquy going on all the time.
Friedman: What about the artifice in your style?
Bejar: I mean, it's there. I don't really like that. I mean, I don't really like music that is like that. But at least for this last record, and sometimes just in general, I can't help but assume a voice that's definitely not my own. It opens up opportunities for writing that wouldn't be there otherwise. And I am a sucker for anthems, and really, really large gestures or brush strokes. But I think there's a misconception that that's all I really like, when in fact it's something I dabble in and will occasionally want to try on. I have a soft spot for it, though I often don't like having a soft spot for it. But I don't really think it's as present as some people think..
Friedman: Is artifice necessary in music?
Bejar: That's where the art is found a lot of the time. I don't really have much belief in this idea of the authentic voice, but I have a little shred of belief in it. And I don't want to come off as a put-on, because I think that's just a couple steps away from becoming something that's pretty disposable. In songwriting, in pop songs, I don't really know how you sidestep that and still keep someone interested.
Friedman: I think people find your music very convincing, even if there is this element of artifice in it. You create very convincing persona.
Bejar: That's something I definitely don't have any interest in, creating personae. That's partly why the Bowie thing is so unpleasant, because the thing I can do without from the glam era … is how front and present the artifice and the dramatic personae were.
Friedman: Maybe it's more a truly eccentric personality than a persona.
Bejar: I have so little contact with what people's perception, I'm in most ways at a loss to really figure out how the music is received, except for the last record, where I know a lot of people didn't like it. When you're toying with creative voices and writing within them, it's a fun mode of writing but it's also a bit too close to packaging something. It's like the concept comes first and not the writing itself.
Friedman: But the alternative is that people believe that everything in it is personal and real.
Bejar: That's the bane of the songwriter's existence—that umbrella of the singer-songwriter, stepping into the recording booth like it's the confessional. You really have to be touched with genius to pull that off, at least as far as I'm concerned. It's a style which send me running.
Friedman: Why is that what people expect from music? With fiction, no one assumes that it's first-person confessional.
Bejar: Well, because you've got a voice, and you've got a photo on the back of the record. And when you've got someone on stage, with a spotlight on him or her, it's pretty unavoidable. And it's by far the easiest thing to sell that there is.
Friedman: Do you ever resent that?
Bejar: It's so obvious that it doesn't have to be that way. If you can step away from the givens, there's tons of stuff you can do with it. I don't know if it's going to be embraced, or if it's going to sound awkward or weird--it probably will. But I think if that's where you're playing around, in the words, then the music will suffer, and the music is what's got to be there. Without that, you're screwed. So it's tough, because that's really at the end of the day what people are going to latch onto: the catchiness of your song, or hook, or bridge. On all levels—I'm not just talking about radio. In fact, even more so in whatever the word that people are using today for underground music. Lyrics seem important to me in country music, and in hip-hop. But aside from that, I don't really see how they get you anywhere. In a lot of ways, I'm in agreement. If I can't remember the melody of a song after the first couple listens, it's a bad song.
Friedman: Is that why there's no way you'd ever stop being a rock songwriter?
Bejar: I really like rock music, all sorts. And I like these problems; they give me something to think about, even if they're not themes that should really move a listener, like I've occasionally tried to do. It's not really something that I'm wringing my hands over a daily basis; it's just the nature of it. Also, the idea of writing for a blank page, that scares the shit out of me.
Friedman: So singing is the best way to get your words across?
Bejar: There's some sort of emotional thrust that comes across in one direction or another when you sing a line. There's also stuff that can appear completely banal, that when you phrase it a certain way can come off as more than that. That's the recipe to the classic song. And then there's things that sound really strange, and you can sing them in a certain way so that they have incredible emotional resonance. Ideally, when you sing something, people understand.
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