Destroyer's Dan Bejar, sporting a serious case of bedhead
To promote the release of the new album “Trouble in Dreams,” Destroyer is trekking across the U.S. and Canada during April and May. Before setting off on the road, Bejar talked to Metromix about his own past troubles in dreams, his unique use of language, and the untapped potential of the potato.
Do people still ask you to provide “answers” or decode your songs, or have they given up that quest?
There still seems to be a strain of people who want to crack some kind of code or have some real meaning or message behind this veil of words—and they can’t quite accept the notion that the words mean what they say, and that this is just the style in which I write. I generally stick to the party line that I’m more into the function of words--what they do and what they evoke—than any specific meaning. If you hear some kind of a soaring melody, you don’t usually ask the person who wrote it to tell you what the melody means. I kind of approach writing in the same way.
In reaction to that, the response from critics and fans sometimes seems to be a little sterile or overly intellectualized. But do you have cheeseball sensibilities? Do you laugh when a guy steps on a rake?
I think people are usually pretty surprised by my tastes. I don’t really see Destroyer in an intellectual light at all. I think Destroyer songs are pretty funny—maybe for all the wrong reasons. But, yeah, people think I’m way brainier than I am, and they write a certain style of writing in reaction to the music that’s pretty over the top.
You said recently that the sprawling new song “Shooting Rockets” won’t get near a set list on this tour with a ten foot pole. How come?
“Shooting Rockets” was like a studio construction; kind of unlike any song I’ve written, probably, in that I find it uniformly—from the very first second to the very last of its eight minutes—kind of unpleasant. [Laughs] It’s just kind of a negative song, even though it’s cloaked in what I think are some really beautiful parts. I sang it a couple of times to record it—and that was plenty.
Rodney Graham is credited with playing a potato on that track. Where does that come in?
[Laughs] You can’t hear it? Shit. He’s credited with playing gong and potato, and it was him throwing a barrel of potatoes over and over in an empty hall against a giant gong. It’s from an art piece that he did. I actually really liked the sound of the potatoes when they missed the gong and fell flat and rolled along the floor with a thud—it was menacing, like someone getting punched. I thought it fit the mood of the song, but with all the other crap going in, it’s hard to hear the potatoes and the gong in all their glory.
What a bummer that the song isn’t on the set list so you could do the potato throwing every show.
[Laughs] I don’t know if Rodney would be game. You’d need an extra bus to travel with that gong—and a gong crew.
Have you ever had a recurring nightmare?
I’ve had two. One was right after I dropped out of college, and it was basically a “being back at school” dream. But the other one was around the same time and it was one of those dreams that probably gets portrayed in movies a lot: being with a bunch of people in a car that goes off on a winding mountainous road and you wind up suspended on the precipice for a split second that lasts an eternity—and finally the car just topples over and you plunge into the abyss. But they’re really few and far between—it’s been ages. I don’t remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re the most mundane things you could possibly imagine, like me looking for a bottle of milk in the fridge.
That must get confusing: hey, I brushed my teeth already. Oh, no, I just dreamed about brushing my teeth.
Yeah, yeah. The day-to-day stuff of life. Maybe that’s the nightmare, who knows.
