Meet Destroyer's Enigmatic Dan Bejar

Daniel Bejar, who leads the band Destroyer, loves to contradict himself. He also likes to make slightly outrageous statements. "I ask myself, is it important at all who you're in bed with [in the music business]?" he says, on the phone from his home in Vancouver, B.C. "Or is all that matters making a really great record, something that can speak for itself, regardless of how it's presented or the hoops you're made to jump through?" He laughs. "I probably think about these things too much. And on the other hand, I don't think about them very much at all."

Bejar is probably best known as the member of Canada's New Pornographers who doesn't tour with that band. He contributed four songs to their acclaimed power-pop album, 2000's Mass Romantic, and has worked on their in-progress second album too.

His own band has been something of a secret, known to a relatively small number of underground indie-rock fans. Once the word gets out about This Night, the new Destroyer album due Oct. 8 on Merge Records, that should change.

Bejar (who does not own the 1976 Kiss album Destroyer, whose own band is not a thrash metal combo, and who had not considered the relation of his band's name to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction) formed Destroyer in Vancouver in 1995; the band's first album, We'll Build Them a Golden Bridge, recorded on a four-track recorder, was released in 1996. In Destroyer, his music merges the pleasures of Bowie's strutting electro-folk circa Hunky Dory (1972) through the more out-sound Aladdin Sane (1973) with Dylan's bitter, biting wit and social commentary. There are overtones of T-Rex (glam); the Velvet Underground (quiet-to-loud dynamics); pre-Islamic Cat Stevens (a "Where do the children play?" je ne sais quoi); and occasional self-conscious riffing off the vocal styles of John Lennon and Leonard Cohen. To this is added Bejar's own charismatic voice and vision, yielding an out-pop invention with a folk-glam twist.

For the last two Destroyer albums — Thief (2000) and Streethawk (2001), the band included Bejar's longtime associates John Collins, Scott Morgan, Stephen Wood, and Jason Zumpano. But after the release of Streethawk, Bejar went to Montreal for a year, and when he returned to Vancouver with a batch of new songs, he decided it was time for a change. "I took a hiatus from the old Destroyer when I moved away from Vancouver, and when I got back it seemed like instead of going back to the old days it would be good to forge ahead," says Bejar, whose placid temperament contrasts with the immodest bluster of his musical persona. Besides Bejar, the new band includes multi-instrumentalists Nicholas Bragg, Chris Frey and Fisher Rose (who also drums for the New Pornographers). (Bejar remains on good terms with his former bandmates.)

The result is the trippy, expansive This Night. "I like the songs that turned out really fucked-up and way different than I was expecting them to sound, which actually is most of them," he explains. "If you heard these songs the way they sounded before I brought them to this group of people, it wouldn't be shocking, but the difference is pretty severe. The band ran away with the songs. It was downright mutiny in a lot of ways, in the best sense."

One of the album's 15 tracks, "Makin' Angels," has "this monster guitar riff, and it turned into an old, raving Southern-rock number, with strange refrains and things tacked on that were concocted in the studio on a whim."

"Hey, Snow White" is a mystical, winding number reminiscent of The Doors' epic song "The End" (The Doors, 1967). Bejar says it was "an excuse to have an eight-minute guitar rave-up. I just wanted to do a plodding Velvets-style, three-chord rock number that starts off quiet and then gets loud and then gets super loud."

"Trembling Peacock," one of his favorites, is "sweet and lullaby-ish — but it's got strange, sinister overtones," he says.

The other songs on the album are "This Night," "Holly Going Lightly" (named for Audrey Hepburn's character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), "Here Comes the Night," "The Chosen Few," "Modern Painters," "Crystal Country," "I Have Seen the Light," "Students Carve Hearts Out of Coal," "Goddess of Drought," "Self Portrait with Thing (Tonight is Not Your Night)," "The Relevant Ballads" and "The Night Moves."

Bejar's fifth album, This Night follows on the heels of Streethawk: A Seduction and Thief. Regarding his use of biblical references — which appear on all three albums but were particularly salient on Thief from track one with "Destroyer's the Temple" — he says, "I think it's fun to use the old rhetoric in ways that are not the standard ways. It's handy, if you're trying to write a parable about the underground rock business, to use Old Testament metaphors to give it an allegorical feel. A lot of it is just liking the old words, of liking the certain traditions of language. Trying to use them in a modern setting. They're terms that have been used in song over the ages, so it's placing yourself as part of the tradition, or trying to extend the tradition."

While Thief, which Bejar put out himself, was hailed by those who heard it, it also defined Destroyer more than he might have wished. "A lot of the lyrics seem to be obsessed with a music-industry critique that I don't really find myself caring about too much anymore," he says. "It's not that it's not bothering me, but I don't see it as some kind of theme that someone would base a body of work around. It's not really that universal. I like that I did it, and it seemed like no one else was really doing something like that, but I think that the songs after that album still got pigeonholed as being about those kinds of things, and I don't think they are."

Bejar, who is noted for his facility with language ("I don't consciously try to pound a shitload of words into a line of music. But that's half the fun, I think") prefers a loose, open-ended writing style that leaves room for listener interpretation and avoids putting limits on meaning.

Bejar's second effort and favorite album, 1998's City of Daughters, had been out of print but was recently reissued on Scratch Records. Thief has a song called "City of Daughters." "I kind of liked the idea of having a song on the new album named after [a previous] album," he says.

"City of Daughters" also makes reference to his other band — a lyric hearkens back to their struggles: "Once again you have refused the New Pornography," he sings. Bejar says that he must have written it "around the time that the Pornographers seemed to be in a real slump and Vancouver didn't seem to be embracing the band like I thought it would." Then, contradicting himself, he says, "That's way too literal of a meaning. I think I just liked that phrase as well."

Last Year he traveled to Spain. Returning home after several months, he was surprised that the New Pornographers had grown in popularity, with strong demand for them to tour in the U.S. They had also won a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy. "No one was really sure when it happened if it was a good thing or a really bad thing. It's something to give to your mom to put on the mantelpiece," he jokes, a little bashful. Although Destroyer is his main band, he wrote and recorded three new songs and sang on a couple others with Neko Case for the Pornographers' follow-up, due out in early 2003.

Obviously, Bejar is fond of weaving themes through and across albums and even bands, referencing past work and creating a unity throughout his work. On his new album, for example, on the song "Here Comes the Night," he repeats the word "thief" nine times in one line.

He also references others' work. For instance, on Thief, he casually mentions "Louise" in "Queen of Languages," conjuring her ghost from the shadows of Dylan's surreal "Visions of Johanna" (Blonde on Blonde, 1966), a song about a man who clings to the vision of the unattainable Johanna to keep his sanity, although he is trapped with Louise.

"I like the way that he [Dylan] throws things out there offhandedly but they really seem to connect, to greater and lesser effect. It'd be pretty tough for me to engage in whatever style of music I'm pursuing and not be influenced by that in some way. I got into using names in songs, as well. I wasn't referring to 'Visions of Johanna,' necessarily, but I like the way that he would casually toss out people's names just to give things the illusion of a human face."

The use of women's names in song seems to be a trope of Bejar's young but growing body of work. In the first lines of "Destroyer's the Temple," he sings, "And though the solitudes have won/ I cannot begin to crave you/ Please spring us, Madeleine/ From these rusted jails of lust/ We're living in." On Streethawk there was Helena. And on the new album there's Holly, Hannah, Crystal, and others.

Critics have foisted a Bowie comparison onto Bejar, mentioning Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972) in nearly every review of Destroyer. "Bowie's great," Bejar says. "I love David Bowie. I don't listen to him one-hundredth as much as people probably think. On the Streethawk record I could hear maybe two songs that have an early-'70s English-glam feel. But there's 10 other songs on that record.

"Thief is probably the one that seems like the glammiest," he continues. "That was intentional, because the point was to create this critique, to make a record that sounded like it was addressing a sizeable chunk of the population that happens before its time, the voice of its generation — but really it would be lucky to sell 2,000 records." He laughs again. "That was part of the take, though hopefully it didn't come off as irony-saturated, because I like the melodies of that era, of Bowie and T-Rex — theirs are all really musically solid records. I like the theatricality that comes across in the music. Lyrically I don't think I've been influenced by Bowie at all or any of that music. I just think he's a really great singer, and I have this fucked-up voice that couldn't possibly emulate it, but it would be kind of fun to try. At least back then I thought it would be — going for something grandiose — which seemed atypical for indie rock at the time."

Destroyer will go on tour in October and November, with 22 stops, 21 in the U.S. and one in Canada. Bejar's been too busy to start work on the follow-up to This Night but says, "I have an idea, but I don't want to give it away. I'm just mulling over the overarching sound of it in my head and coming up with a way of doing it that might be interesting — a 180-degree turnaround from the last album."

Asked what his biggest challenges are, he laughs and answers, "I don't see any challenges. Maybe I should be challenging myself. I guess I don't approach it with that level of severity."

There's a line in "Self-Portrait with Thing" that goes: "But that finite rush which destroys every one of us is good destruction." So what does he mean by that? "When things are being destroyed and it's a positive thing — surely there's got to be instances of that in life; I can't enumerate them, but I'm sure they're there," he answers enigmatically, evading the question.

To learn more about Destroyer, visit the Merge Records Web site. — Jillian Steinberger [Friday, Oct. 4, 2002]