There’s a moment on Dan’s Boogie, the spectacular fourteenth LP by beloved Canadian outfit Destroyer, where Dan Bejar–its chief lyricist and captivating frontman–introspectively says, “You don’t know what you’re doin’” on the beautifully intricate single “Cataract Time.” It’s a revealing moment, one followed by a rich man pointedly asking the protagonist, “What happened to you, boy?” The song, and others on Dan’s Boogie, shifts its focus on the lyricist’s interiority while examining the world around them, looking for answers. Bejar noted (and elaborated on in this interview) that during the writing of this record, he faced a fallow writing period. The page was blank and Bejar wasn’t sure how long this would last. So, he made a New Year’s Resolution to play the piano everyday for an hour. While that practice was short-lived, it kickstarted a fruitful period of writing new material which evolved into Dan’s Boogie.

These are amongst some of Bejar’s most intriguing, expansive and compelling songs in how he continues to hone his idiosyncratic approach to engaging with his immediate surroundings and the characters that inhabit them, as well as creating extremely vivid alternative realities and spaces. Self- referential, surreal and, quite simply, an extremely good time, Dan’s Boogie is another triumph from Bejar and his long standing collaborator John Collins. Over Zoom, Northern Transmissions spoke in-depth about Dan’s Boogie with its charismatic creator Dan Bejar. We talked about how Bejar felt he was entering a new period with Destroyer, the always exciting project he started almost 30 years ago, the elements that appeal to his approach to world building and scene dressing across his songwriting and his dream of making a piano trio record.

NT: Congrats on Dan’s Boogie! It’s such a great record and it’s been a lot of fun to listen to. As always, the opening song provides such an immediately incredible introduction to the record. I feel like that’s become a Destroyer signature. Do you have an all time favorite opening track for an album?

Dan Bejar: Hmm. I must! I’m trying to think. I feel like it’s important to me so I need to think about it. All my answers are going to come from my youth because that part, the opening song, would be my anticipation to hear that song. I’m not saying that I don’t have the same passion that I did when I was 15 compared to being 52, or whatever. I would say, and I don’t know if it’s the greatest opening or not, but to hear the first song on Loveless when it came out in 1991 was a very big first two seconds for me. The overall sound of that record really blew my mind. That’s also because I was marking X’s on the calendar until that record came out. I was like a person in jail just waiting to be released and the release was getting that record.

NT: Did you get to see MBV live?

Dan Bejar: Yeah, I saw them in the following few months after that record came out in 1992 and it was incredible.

NT: Nice. I’m going to see them live for the first time later this year, and will definitely have my ear plugs ready for that!

Dan Bejar: I would probably, yeah. I think my old ears would melt out of my brain, but at the time I was loving the punishment!

NT: I read that you had a period post-Labyrinthitis where you intentionally didn’t write in the hope that songs would build-up and then flow out of you when you eventually sat down at your desk. Had you done that before? And, what was the first song you wrote for Dan’s Boogie that helped the songs flow?

Dan Bejar: Well, I can’t remember what that sheet says, but I guess that’s kind of a benign way of phrasing it because it’s not that I was intentionally not writing, I was just not writing. I was not coming up with anything. I think what I was trying to focus on was not to panic at the idea of never writing a song again. Or, the idea that my old way of doing things was done; that this was some kind of new era of work or something. Something that I, at first, didn’t like at all.

After maybe a couple years, I finally forced myself to sit down at the piano and see if anything would come out. I basically had to do it like a New Year’s resolution. And then, like all New Year’s resolutions, it lasted for maybe a week-and-a-half. But, in that week-and-a-half, I probably wrote about two-thirds of what’s on Dan’s Boogie. They started as little piano exercises that I then sang over top of, which is an old school way of me doing it. I used to do that in the early days of Destroyer when I would play guitar all the time. I would just see what scraps of writing I had kicking around and sing over top. But for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been pretty skeptical of that way of writing so I was a little worried about how work-
man-like it was.

In the end, I think it’s fine, but the first real songs that came out weren’t songs that I wrote like that. They have more of a dam-bursting vibe and that’s “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” which I had these song fragments and I had to fill-up three minutes with something and so, I just started spewing lines. The real one, I would say, is “Cataract Time” which is a song that I just made-up on the spot, which I’ve never… I don’t really do that. I probably won’t do it again! When I listen to it, it seems kind of more emotional or more personal or something. You can tell, to me anyway, that it has a bit more of a now or never vibe.

NT: You’ve talked about having a fraught relationship with songwriting or the idea of writing and then singing the work and putting it with music. Something that I’ve really enjoyed with this record, and also Labyrinthitis and Have We Met, is that your delivery is so captivating in its stream of consciousness-like flow. This sounds very pretentious, but the words very much feel like colors coming from a paintbrush and each stroke brings out a vividness in the pictures you create within the songs. What exactly does songwriting–the process of it, the experience of looking back at your notebook– give to you on a personal level? Is it an escape from the day-to-day? Does it help you navigate through life or process things?

Dan Bejar: It’s gone through phases, in my early 20s, when I first started, so thirty years ago, it was something I was interested in. I had always written but I was a bit late to music. Once I found that I had a bit of a knack for it, it picked-up a lot of momentum and I got really into not just doing it, which I did all day long. I wrote a lot of songs back then, but I got really into the idea of the tradition of songcraft. That’s probably when I started really listening to older music as opposed to just indie music of the time. That’s pretty much the story up until the late 2000s, or until Kaputt, and then I threw the guitar down. I looked at all the chords I would make on a guitar with disgust. I looked at the challenge of trying to fit all these words into bars of music as something that was no longer interesting to me. I started writing just in my head, not in a conscious way, it just started happening; words and melody at the same time and that took over for a while. But it doesn’t seem to be happening as much anymore. I think that was one thing I was kind of side-swiped by, that this record is not a product of that.

Generally, I’m someone who thinks change is bad. And so, I guess part of Dan’s Boogie was me wondering how am I going to get out of this? Because this is the thing I do. For better or for worse, a lot of my identity seems to be wrapped-up in it and it’s just not happening the way it used to and I don’t know if this is just a product of age and me entering the third act of my life, or if it’s just things slowing way down. It used to be like a release and the writing part is still, I still just scribble things down and I don’t know why they mean something to me, even if they don’t mean anything to anyone else. It’s little moments of the actual world revealing itself to me. That makes me sound like I think I’m a wizard, I don’t think I’m a wizard, but when the words show-up, it’s just like the true world revealing itself, like a veil being lifted, right? I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone.

Then, the music is kind of like trying to attach it to the world somehow and that’s why it’s laborious. A, because I’m not that good at it and B, how do these words and how does this voice…What does the world look like that it’s going to walk around in? That’s the challenge and sometimes maybe the more disengaged you are with the world, the harder it is to pull off that part of it. That’s one theory. It’s still pretty fresh, so I don’t know.

NT: With that period of finding the process a bit more challenging, it’s good that you went for the more positively leaning title of Dan’s Boogie instead of Dan’s Funk!

Dan Bejar: Yeah! Yeah! I think so. I mean, Dan’s Boogie, I still can’t even believe it’s called that! I feel that was a failure on the part of many different friends, loved ones, colleagues. There’s all sorts of opportunities for it to not be called Dan’s Boogie and they all, they all failed! It really was just a placeholder name for a song that then became “Dan’s Boogie”, the song, and somehow that spirit just crept over the whole record by the time it was done.

NT: I think it captures the essence of the record really well. “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”, is a really interesting song, to my mind, in how it features some recurring imagery and world-building across your career such as including details of day and night, light and dark. With that song, I was taken by how prominent religion is in it. One of my favorite lines from the album is “God is famous for punishing” and there’s a moment in the song where a priest mistakes you for a priest. There’s also a line about you speaking to the breeze and it answers you and says that it doesn’t need religion and rules. That exchange between you and the wind made me think of one of the most iconic songs of the last sixty years: “Blowin’ In The Wind”; people looking for the answer in the wind. I wondered, because there are strong religious overtones in that song, was that something that had been on your mind a lot while you were writing the record and you were interested to explore more?

Dan Bejar: I guess I may have two answers. I don’t know if either of them are really the true ones. I would say that, and maybe this is something that’s been running through the last few Destroyer records, but there’s just no way that Dan’s Boogie doesn’t harp on death. In my mind, I probably conflate the ideas of death and ideas of religion or how we deal with that or how we even perceive it.

The second thing is that I still think of myself as a very traditional songwriter, in some ways. Religious imagery is just catnip for a certain brand of songwriter, of which I think maybe I’m half part-of, because it just comes so loaded already with a set universe and everything is in these set boxes for you to use and play with. You color in the shapes the way you feel like, you know. I still find that religious imagery is really potent, even just talking about religion is really potent. It grounds a song the way the name of a street would ground a song, except the street is massive because the street is eternal and takes up many dimensions. It’s just tempting to me and it’s something I don’t really do consciously but when I’m grasping it, whatever’s happening in my brain, when I’m putting two or three things together, it kind of is becoming more and more tempting to grab things like, I don’t know, specific. Also the idea of wrestling with any kind of old philosophy, it feels very 20th century and quaint. Maybe not in all cultures, but in American culture, of which Canada is probably sucked into, I would say it feels like or seems different from what the current concerns are, you know? I’m generally pretty attracted to old stuff so that’s kind of part of it.

I’ll also say that “Hydroplaning” is definitely supposed to be a moment of reckoning, a moment of spiritual reckoning. Which seems like something that falls under the umbrella of a religious concern, not that I’m a religious person.

NT: Is there a reckoning also with your recent work, Labyrinthitis, especially. In “Hydroplaning”, there are nods to “Suffer” and “June”. Later in the album on “The Ignoramus of Love” you mention “The old grey mare”, you talked earlier about listening to older traditional songs and you’ve previously mentioned that song in “Your Blood” on Rubies. Had you been consciously looking back on your previous work as a way to aid the process of moving forward with Dan’s Boogie?

Dan Bejar: I was trying to remember where the other “old grey mare” was and yes, it’s in “Your Blood”! I don’t know, part of me likes to think that I have three or four hang-ups that I write about. That’s been the case for 25 years now. I feel like Dan’s Boogie, when I finished it and handed it in, I thought it was the most Destroyer-sounding record I’ve made in a long, long time. To the point where I think even five years ago, it would have been really different or I would have been really self-conscious about putting out a record that sounds like this.

I think something’s happened and this project, this Destroyer thing, it can’t just be anything but just a representation of shit we’re into. Unlike Labyrinthitis or Have We Met, we didn’t go in with anything, there was zero concept. Not that those records are concept records, but there’s always a launch pad. For Labyrinthitis, it was ‘Let’s make a house record!’ That’s not something we did, but it’s something that got us going and it provided a framework. Have We Met had a similar idea but I can’t even remember what it was.

This was just songs and us making them sound in a way that we like. It reminds me a lot of records like Poison Season or Your Blues. Those two records are really different from each other, but this record kind of synthesizes a lot of that stuff in a way that is not forced and feels really natural and it’s one of the reasons why I like the record a lot. As far as me referring to stuff that I’ve done before, I think there’s a bit of a history of that in Destroyer. It’s not totally new, I think I’m probably shameless about it now just because I’m fine building this cosmos. I’m fine referring to the cosmos, the Destroyer cosmos that these records exist in! Maybe that’s an annoying trait, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s pretentious, but it’s not mapped out. It just blurts out that way so it feels good. When it feels good in my mouth to sing it, I know that’s somehow legitimate, at least to me.

NT: You first collaborated with John Collins 27 years ago on City of Daughters. I’d love to hear about the demo stages for you and what they look like when you send them to him. For this record, were the demos mainly you playing piano and singing? Or were they voice note melodies?

Dan Bejar: There were proper demos. The first song I wrote was on the piano but I demoed it in a chintzy parlor organ kind of way and it was going to be very subdued, almost like a 21st century Leonard Cohen-style song which doesn’t interest John Collins whatsoever! What he likes is Led Zeppelin and so he made a mock-up demo that got really heavy. Then we sent that demo to Josh Wells, our drummer who can play drums really heavy in a very convincing manner. He played with a band called Black Mountain for decades and he’s really good at it and things just got bigger and bigger sounding. All I brought was the main melodic riff and the chords and the vocals, which didn’t change at all.

The whole record was a challenge because I wrote the songs in a very piano ballad style, in an intimate way, and I didn’t want to change that style of singing. I wanted the vocals to be really loud so I was kind of like ‘John, fuck it you can do whatever you want but this is what at least my corner of the record is going to sound like and so knock yourself out if you want to make it sound heavy’. The song “Sun Meet Snow” was supposed to be a vaguely boogie-woogie kind of poetry riff and piano song but it ended-up being maybe the heaviest Destroyer song ever put to record. I don’t know how that happened, especially because we weren’t ever in the same room together. These records are all done super piecemeal. It’s just me and John in the same room but everyone else is scattered around.

Then there’s other songs which just sound like really good versions of the demo, “Hydroplaning” is an example of that, in that it even uses the bulk of the demo vocals. With that one, I kind of had the sound and John liked it and he was like, ‘Okay, well let’s keep this really like you did it but make it big sounding and with real drums’. It was the same for “Ignoramus of Love”, in some ways the parts of that got really abstract. The record is a mix of fleshed-out but true to the demos, and then just couldn’t be more different from how they started out.

NT: Was there anything in particular that when John sent it to you or played for you when you were together that you were completely taken aback by? I think of the song “I Materialize” which has this steadiness to it and then you just suddenly go away and we’re abruptly dropped into the next song. I remember the first time listening to that thinking that my stream had crashed!

Dan Bejar: Yeah, that we pulled off really well, that was a very conscious move. “I Materialize” is kind of like the demo, but I tried to sing it well and Ted [Bois] played really good schmaltzy piano and John played good schmaltzy bass and there’s a loungy drum pattern on it. That song is probably the first song I actually did write but I didn’t consider it a song because I didn’t really feel as though I was hitting the ground running with it. Even though it’s the closest to the music that I listen to and picture myself singing, as someone who just listens to Billie Holiday and Helen Merrill and those kinds of jazz vocalists. Because I’m deluded, that’s the tradition that I see myself in! “I Materialize”, that’s the kind of thing I like but I didn’t want to overwrite it. I didn’t want to turn it into a traditional song for a couple different reasons; I liked what I had and I didn’t really know what to do with it.

One thing that we did this time was that we sequenced the record from beginning to end. So, I knew it was going to go into “Sun Meet Snow”. We had the sequence before we had anything else, which is the first time I’ve tried that trick. As “Sun Meet Snow” got spaceier and weirder and extra heavy, it seemed to be a cool fucked-up middle of Side Two style medley.

NT: Absolutely, yeah. I certainly enjoyed it! I’d love to hear more about “Bologna.” I remember the first time I listened to it, and one of my friends had the same experience, where we thought that Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver’s vocals in the opening verse was actually you but pitched-up. Your vocals correspond and relate to one another so nicely on the song and work really well together. Did you write that specifically with Simone Schmidt in mind to join you?

Dan Bejar: No, no. Their involvement was born from my panic at the fact that I couldn’t fucking sing that song to save the life of me. I just wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t getting it over or across. I could kind of sing the middle verse because that’s more of a typical… or it has an unreliable, outside narrator-feel about it. I’m in a weird role with that character with that kind of hissy, wheezing, voice for the “Children quiet, the storm’s been listening,” like those kinds of lyrics, I could sing that. There’s something vaguely villainous about it, but the important stuff is the first and the third verse and it needed to sound like something was at stake. It needed to sound heavy. It needed to sound like there was an actual outside chance that you were gonna never see that person again, instead of someone just singing a song. Also, when I sang it, it almost sounded sleazy or made it sound like the song was about a one night stand or something like that, which is absolutely not what I was trying to go for! I wanted it to have a noir-ish feeling but I didn’t want it to sound goofy.

There was vague talk of getting someone else’s voice on the album, in general. John and I bandied that around all the time, maybe more seriously this time. I definitely didn’t have any plans for someone to be the lead singer of a Destroyer song. Once it happened, it all really came together and the song became much cooler. We were also just struggling with that song. Honestly, I feel like we were coming up with excuses not to open that file and work on it because we just didn’t quite know because it’s supposed to be like a torch ballad, which is my favorite kind of song, but I haven’t written that many of them. I don’t know exactly what to do with them and I really don’t know how to sing them. I won’t stop trying if I write another one, but it seemed once Simone got on there, everything could become way trippier and just cooler sounding. All those crazy congas got reverbed-out and things became very spacey and the effects got really in your face, so did the guitar. And the mix actually, there’s a version where it’s me singing the lead and the mix actually doesn’t work. It’s just not good. There’s something about Simone’s vocals that just lend themselves to that kind of like, I don’t know, they just kind of pierced the fog, you know? My vocals always tend to have to sit on top of a mix, also. They can’t seem to fight their way out of like a busy fucked-up mix. While Simone’s vocals are very strong, they could just pierce that.

NT: As you were talking about the world you were trying to create, I was imagining it being set in an Orson Welles noir. It also, weirdly in its own way, has a Massive Attack or Portishead feel to it.

Dan Bejar: Yeah, I mean I wanted it to be this dark, sensual sounding song. I don’t want to put myself down, maybe I’ll evolve into a dark, sensual singer. There’s still time! But I just wasn’t interested in what I was bringing to it, in the tone of my voice or just even the phrasing of even. That song went from a point where I didn’t know if it was gonna make it onto the record, to us asking the mastering engineer if there was a way that they could make every single song on the record sound like that song! And it was very like the mix that John did, it was just really unconscious, and not just in his standard multiple box of wine kind of way. We don’t know how we got that mix! When we got it, we’re just like, ‘Okay, let’s move on to the rest of the album because we can’t fuck with this because we’re gonna mess it up because we don’t know how we got here!’, which is always fun. That’s really different from almost every other song on the album. It makes you feel like lightning struck, which is always a good feeling.

NT: That’s so funny that it went from almost not being on the album to then being the song that announced the album and introduced audiences to the world of Dan’s Boogie.

Dan Bejar: Yeah, I went from being really uncertain about it. I think John, if he ever spoke his mind on it would have said something, so he doesn’t. But it was funny to go from that to being like, ‘We just need to use the momentum of whatever happened here to power the rest of the album’.

NT: “Bologna” has such an enveloping nocturnal feel to it. Across your lyrics, night and darkness are kind of intrinsic to the worlds and backdrops you create for the songs. It’s very considered. I remember reading around the time Have We Met was released that you recorded a lot of the vocals in your kitchen at night time and that image always appears in my head when I listen to that record. On Dan’s Boogie, there are lines like “It’s all the same thing under a certain light” or “Death by illumination”, and there’s just so much nighttime and darkness in it, as well. Is that a very conscious element to your writing, playing with the lighting of the song’s settings?

Dan Bejar: I think so. I think it’s something that I gravitate towards in other art that I like, as well and I just hopped on that train. I always liked artistic universes where it’s explicitly said that there’s two worlds. There’s a night world and there’s a day world, and they’re very different. For me, the nocturnal world, it’s always been the one for me. It’s where all the mystery is, I guess. It’s kind of immature, I don’t know, because there’s a lot of mystery in the daytime, as well, but I like established tropes. I really like night language, I like reflections, which is a night thing. I come from a rainy place where the city looks a certain way at night in the rain. I set most of my songs in cities at night in the rain. I think they’re all set, I’ve never said that out loud, but I think they’re all set in the city at night in the rain. It hits me physically and it’s just what I like. Well, no, it’s not what I like because it doesn’t give me a warm, cozy feeling, it’s more that that’s where the puzzle is that needs to be solved. It just happens to be in a rainy city at night. I also like the idea of being really consistent to a point of like, ‘Oh no, here we go again!’ and Destroyer songs being such a specific, distinct thing that you just shake your head. It’s just like, ‘I can’t believe I’m listening to the 800th song about someone walking around in the rain at night!’. But, I feel there’s still some untapped stuff. There’s still business to be done.

NT: As someone living in Ireland, I can appreciate the rainy, dark city as a setting. And, you know, things go bump in the night and that’s when all the scary stuff happens.

Dan Bejar: Yeah, I think that I just know how to use those symbols the best. They’re the ones that interest me and excite me and so it’s cool to just place your dramas there. There’s other cool dramas that could probably exist at noon on the side of a mountain, but I’m just not gonna write them, you know?

NT: Yeah, absolutely. I loved the closing song for Dan’s Boogie, “Travel Light,” it brings us back to the idea of recording in an intimate way just you and a piano. Listening closely to that song, hearing your fingertips or fingernails tapping on the keys, made me have an image of a little Fred Astaire dancing along while you played. It’s a really nice intimate moment, was that recorded at home?

Dan Bejar: No! When I actually play piano, I mean, that was an attempt to have a palette cleanser, just cause I think even though this is a breezier, or you could say organic sound, I don’t even know what that word means, but compared to Labyrinthitis, this is a more human sounding record. It’s still a John Collins production, which means it’s really cooked and still very sound design heavy, and I liked the idea of having a palette cleanser or a sigh at the end of some kind of experience. But no, I went into a studio with a proper baby grand piano, mic’d up very fancily, but also mic’d so that I could sing and play at the same time, which was an extreme hurdle. I’m just such a bad piano player, I make any recording situation sound like it’s done in my basement. It was supposed to be an intimate sounding recording, almost where you could hear me get up from the bench when I was done and walk away.

NT: Yeah, it also has a Bacharach feel to the melody.

Dan Bejar: Yeah, I kind of wanted to keep it simple because it was an unabashed Carole King-style number, or one of those Brill Building style songs that I liked and I didn’t want to toss out just because it was so much in that vein and because it was really short. It seemed like a good album ender, so it was always going to be at the end of the record. Yeah, I like that one.

NT: Dan’s Boogie is your 14th Destroyer album and each album has its own distinct personality. Do you think about the albums and how they correspond to one another? How certain albums or certain songs got you to progress to certain places? Do you have ones that are particularly special to you in terms of either having fun with the songwriting or that it was made during a special time in your life?

Dan Bejar: I don’t think about the records too much, I’ll be honest, once they’re out in the world. I kind of lump them together, or lump certain ones together. I think about the recording process or the process leading-up to that. I’ll always think of this one, even in the hope that I don’t go through that again. Just because for some reason, the period of writing or leading-up to the writing, I was definitely ill at ease and not myself, or maybe it’s just my new self.

I often look fondly on the easiest, because I like easy, I’ll look at the easiest thing or at least what felt like the easiest thing I’ve ever done, and that was making Destroyer’s Rubies. That just came together in such a, I don’t know, I felt like there was no trying. That’s not a gauge of something being good or bad, but just right away when we started to play those songs to practice them, and we didn’t practice very much because we didn’t need to, it just came together and it was very pleasurable. There’s no trying to figure it out because it just landed. This could be a really rosy, 20-year-old memory now, there could be some real heartbreak in there and I’m not remembering, but I remember those songs coming together and I could tell that I was at the apex of a certain style of writing, which I don’t really do anymore. And so, it felt fun. If I was being honest, at that point I didn’t know if I had an audience for this music. It really felt to me like it was way too laid back and kind of dad-rockish or something, which in 2005 wasn’t really the vibe but I felt like I couldn’t miss, honestly. The singing and the words melded into one thing and the band just felt super, super easy, just super in the pocket and really great to sing over. The recording was just like, ‘Let’s just try and capture what we’ve been doing’. And then, the fact that I think the record turned out good also helps this kind of view of it being a relaxed affair.

NT: I just have one or two questions left. Which member of the Houston Rockets did you get confused with?

Dan Bejar: Ha! Honestly, I refuse to be held accountable for a lot of the words in that last three minutes of “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” because there’s just a shit tonne of riffing going on! I was really just like, in real time, just had scraps in front of me and I was just making it up as I went along. There’s all sorts of things in that song, which I think even five years ago, I would have been like, ‘This seems very uncensored. It just feels like there’s no filter,’ which I think is an age thing. At least it is for me, I just don’t care. I just wanted it to come out the way it comes out. That song is an extreme example! There’s weird lines like the Houston rocket line and the priest mistakes me for a priest and all sorts of stuff, which was fun to sing and it wasn’t written. It’s not like I was saying, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun’, but listening back to it, it sounds like I was releasing something that needed to be released.

It’s different because I felt kind of empowered by “June”, which was done in a similar way. That was extra fractured because I’d never done anything like that before. It seemed like really digging into surrealism, while I think in its own fucked-up way, “Hydroplaning” is actually kind of a more composed and emotional and personal piece of writing. I knew what the end was gonna be. I knew what the last little verse was gonna be and I knew it was gonna start with, “We’re now entering a new phase,” it’s just that the middle of the song is a strange journey.

NT: Yeah, I find with that song, what’s really interesting is that a line like “The last time I saw Georgie”, I’ve been saying that over and over and over to myself. The fact that something so inconspicuous can become a hook from such a big song, that’s kind of wild!

Dan Bejar: Yeah. There’s a lot of going in and out between speaking and singing. I guess I was conscious that there’d been a lot of people speaking in music, that post-punk style, which I do like, but I feel like you’ve got to earn it. You know what I mean? I paid my dues. I paid my dues singing, singing shit day and night with writing that really lends itself more to just like blurting it out and speaking it. But I was like, ‘No, this must be rendered melodious’. This is the work, you know?

And so “Hydroplaning”, I feel like one thing it does that I like is it goes in-and-out of melody and spoken word in a way that’s kind of hard to detect. So, strange things that shouldn’t be hooks at all become hooks like the one you just mentioned.

NT: And finally, because another thing I really love about the first listen of a new Destroyer album is hearing all the different cultural references you slip into the songs. One of my favorites on Dan’s Boogie was the mention of “ Da Do Ron Ron”. I’m a big fan of the Crystals. What are some albums, films or books you’ve been enjoying recently that, who knows, could make their way into Destroyer LP15?

Dan Bejar: Oh man. I am reading a 1300-page experimental novel, which goes against every rule I have because I’ve become such a slow reader in my old age. I generally refuse to read a book that’s more than 200 pages long! But this one is so good, it’s just got me. And yet, because of the nature of the prose, which is like this dense swirling, dreamlike writing from beginning to end, there’s no breaks, not that I would know because I’m stuck on page 180, but at the rate I’m going, I’m gonna be reading it for the next five years of my life. Maybe that will seep into Destroyer 15.

NT: What is that book called?

Dan Bejar: It’s called Miss Macintosh, My Darling, by a writer named Marguerite Young and it’s from the early 1960s. It’s one of these lost books that just got republished and is maybe destined to become incredibly classic amongst a handful of people. I can’t think of what else I’ve been listening to or enjoying, my things that I am into haven’t changed too much. I’m always still just listening to jazz music, piano trios, piano music. I always threaten to just make a record with a piano trio and then I chicken-out. Also, I don’t know any. These are the things I think about, I think about Miss Macintosh, My Darling, and I think about piano trios.

NT: They’re not bad things to have in your mind.

Dan Bejar: Yeah, absolutely. They’re two great things, you’re right, I agree!

Pre-order Dan’s Boogie HERE