The world of Destroyer‘s Dan’s Boogie is one of sweeping beauty tumbling towards erasure. “‘There’s nothing in there/Everyone’s been burned,” Dan Bejar sings on ‘The Ignoramus of Love’. “I remix horses.” That third line, which nods to the Bill Callahan song ‘I Break Horses’ and reimagining Patti Smith’s Horses, is evidence of how other pieces of music – as well as film and literature, the boundaries being so blurred in Destroyer’s estimation – permeate Bejar’s subconscious lyrical process. “I think for Destroyer songs in general, outside art is crucial,” Bejar said. “It’s the tapestry of the world in the background of those songs – the world they live in. Not to say that it exclusively feeds off other people’s art, but it’s definitely not scared to.” You can’t always trace a direct connection between them as a listener, but you also can’t shake off the way a particular tangle of words, sounds, or images might have bled into Bejar’s madcap expression. It’s Destroyer at their most undiluted and fearless, and the results are both satisfyingly murky and illuminating.
We caught up with Dan Bejar to talk about Billie Holiday, Bi Gan, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and other inspirations behind Dan’s Boogie.
Billie Holiday
I was reading an interview about the making of Poison Season, which was 10 years ago, and you talked about listening to her later records, which were more orchestrated while her voice was more worn down. That fits into this idea that some of your inspirations remain kind of static. What era or quality of her work did you find yourself gravitating to this time around?
I feel like it started around then and just kept amping up. It’s not that I wasn’t into it before, but it was kind of a recent thing, probably around the making of Poison Season, while later on, especially in the last couple of years, it’s been something I listen to every single day. I immerse myself in her voice from all eras, hoping that it can be like a mist you walk through, and I’ll have a scent of it on me when I open my mouth in front of a microphone. I think there are a couple of songs where you can tell I’ve been under that spell, even though my voice has nothing similar and it’s not an intrinsically appealing voice. There’s an approach to phrasing she has that’s just unmatched, in the English language anyway.
There are a couple of quieter songs, maybe, where you can kind of tell I’m in thrall to that, which I am. Probably not the songs people think about much off Dan’s Boogie – I’m not sure which ones people think about, but there’s a 90-second song called ‘I Materialize’ that’s kind of me channeling my version of that. Even a song like ‘Cataract Time’ – for me, that’s probably the best example of where my singing is at these days. And when I think about singing, I think about her. That’s just the way it goes. I don’t listen to too much else. I mean, I listen to a lot of instrumental music these days, but I don’t listen to a lot of people singing.
Does it make you think about your voice differently now than maybe listening to her did 10 years ago?
I think I listened to it 10 years ago in a way that was very much like I was digging the aura of it, the overall sound. These days, when I listen to it, I listen for pleasure – and not in the sense of, like, leisure; it’s like a drug or something. When I listen to it these days, it’s more specific. I’m more focused on the contours of her voice. It’s not a scientific study, but I’m kind of zoomed in a lot more compared to 10 years ago.
Blue Valentine by Tom Waits
You cited ‘70s Tom Waits around the cycle for Labyrinthitis. How do you see that influence carrying over into Dan’s Boogie?
Well, to a lot of people I roll with, he’s poison, so it’s very gutsy for me to put him on this list. [laughs] But I guess I also don’t listen to him much as an adult. I kind of listened to him as a teenager, and mostly his ‘80s stuff that was more critically lauded and experimental, that weird mashup of Beefheart and Brecht. But I’ve been really into his schmaltzy ‘70s records these days, and Blue Valentine is maybe the best example of that. I just find them very romantic.
During the Poison Season era, I’d been more into songs that are orchestrated piano ballads. Dan’s Boogie, even though what I can do on the piano is very limited, was mostly written quickly over a couple of weeks while forcing myself to play the piano. I think the instrument you use to write informs the sound of the songs and even the lyrical quality. The piano brings out a certain lyric in me, which is more classic, maybe more fatalistic. There are a couple of songs where I just wanted there to be a certain jazzy, lounge despair, which is a pose Tom Waits was famous for in the seventies and probably got a lot of flack for. I feel like now that I’m in my 50s, I can do that kind of thing and not get in too much trouble.
I saw a comment under a YouTube video of the title track from Blue Valentine that struck me as quite bizarre – it was someone recalling a childhood memory of their parents dancing to the record. Is there a memory that comes to mind when you think about listening to Tom Waits for the first time?
I have a very distinct memory, probably as a child, of seeing the video for a song called ‘In the Neighborhood’. It’s a very surreal black-and-white video with circus freaks everywhere, just kind of marching through the main street of a small town. I must have been 11 or 12, I don’t know where they would even show this video, but I remember thinking it was really creepy – it kind of freaked me out. I don’t think I’d actually heard Tom Waits properly, or in a way where I knew who he was, until a couple of years after that, when that song ‘Downtown Train’ became slightly popular. But this was much darker and creepier. That first time always stuck with me. I always think about that song. Even when making a song like ‘The Ignoramus of Love’, I was thinking of the way he would do a circus waltz kind of song, or his version of Americana, which is different from the typical rootsy, folksy version. There’s something more cartoonish about his version, but also something more theatrical and musical, literally. Τhose things appealed to me.
Patrick Modiano
I think I started reading him not that long ago – maybe three or four years ago. He’s not famous in North America at all. He’s like the least famous Nobel Prize laureate in the history of that prize, I think, as far as Americans go. I read one and thought, “There’s nothing to this book. It’s just a series of street names and people’s names, and you wander through it. You’re not totally sure what’s real – it’s all just fuzzy memories.” But for some reason, the last couple of pages always reeled me in, in some kind of very melancholic, powerful way. Then I read another one, and another one, and another one. And they’re all the fucking same, they’re all like that. They’re all just a series of street names, people’s names coming in and out of the mist, some vague mystery which never gets solved. Someone trying to account for a dark past, which is barely remembered. There’s something sinister in the air, but you don’t know what. They’re all really short, also, and my attention span as I’ve gotten older is really bad. so I love that these books are all under 200 pages. [laughs] But they are these poetic accounts of the world being erased, which is an important theme in my songs. It’s something I can’t get enough of, and something I can’t get to the bottom of. I can’t figure it out. I like it when mysteries don’t get figured out in books. So yeah, it’s something I’ve been into for the last few years. I was just reading the latest one that came out in English – I read them in translation – just a couple of weeks ago.
It sounds like that feeling like there’s nothing in it, exactly, but there’s something to it. Or it moves toward nothing, things being erased.
On the surface, they’re kind of these vaguely noirish mysteries without a lot of the tropes – definitely without the desire to solve anything. There’s nothing too sordid in them. Maybe, at their heart, they’re really about a European condition. A lot of it wrestles with Europe after the war, which – I’m not from there, I can’t really speak to it. The books are kind of romantic, but they exist in the shadow of something horrible, which usually goes unspoken. That’s very specific to that time – maybe that time in Paris, anyway.
Hustle (dir. Robert Aldrich)
I read Roger Ebert’s original review of the film, in which he wrote that “it cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.” That seems in line with what you’re talking about in terms of mysteries remaining unresolved.
I’ve been asked a lot about the title Dan’s Boogie, and in my mind, I kept saying, “Well, it’s one of these titles I remember from my childhood – these hard-boiled ‘70s crime novels or espionage novels, or maybe a film.” I saw Hustle after Dan’s Boogie was made, but it shocked me how much it inhabited what I was thinking of when I was defending the title. Not that it has someone’s name in it, but if it had been something like So-and-So’s Hustle, it would’ve been exactly what I was thinking of. It’s kind of a sordid movie, part dumb ‘70s cop movie, but it also has this hardened, self-consciously ‘40s noir aesthetic – probably because of the director, Robert Aldrich, who directed Kiss Me Deadly, one of the noir films.
In those kinds of movies and books, people get to talk in a heightened level of poeticism. The dialogue is borderline ridiculous sometimes, because that’s just understood in noir – you can speak in this exaggerated mode. I like that, because I like that for songs, and I like that for when I have to stuff lyrics into songs. It’s a world I like to put people in, because you can try to be as over-the-top Shakespearean as you want, and it still lands if the aura is right. In this case, the aura is some Burt Reynolds crime thriller.
That movie is interesting also because it has this Catherine Deneuve angle, and it’s lit in a way that’s kind of over-exaggerated, doomed, romantic. It’s a strange clash of styles – a really weird, awkward movie, which is the kind of art I like. I like imperfect art, and this one is very imperfect, but it has elements I really like, and other things which are repulsive.
It’s interesting how you’re creating or referring back to a cinematic world that validates that kind of poetic speech, or at least makes it sound natural.
Yeah, it’s kind of a trick, because Destroyer songs are pretty in-your-face. It’s hard to tune them out, especially on a record like Dan’s Boogie, where I purposefully wanted the vocals cranked – they have to be at a crooner level, no matter what’s happening in the music. That’s the challenge. When the style of writing is kind of arch – not florid, that’s not the right word, but aggressive lyricism – you need to find a world that style can attach itself to, because otherwise, it’s just grotesque.
Bi Gan
I love his movies, and much later, I was reading an interview with him – he’s only made two feature-length films, I think. One’s called Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is kind of noirish. He also talked about being really into Patrick Modiano, which made a lot of sense to me. This kid – I don’t know how old he is, but he’s younger than me – I think likes a lot of the things I like. But that’s not always enough to make me want to watch or listen to something, the fact that there’s shared inspirations. But In his case, he mashes it all up into something very distinct.
With him, I find he’s visually so arresting – so good. There are so many potent images and shots in his movies. But he’s also an incredible writer. When I think about the movie Kaili Blues, there’s some monologuing over the top, almost like spoken word style, and I think it’s his own poetry. I think it’s some of my favorite poetry I’ve been exposed to in the last 10 years. It’s rare for there to be a double whammy like that. When I think of the amazing poetry in a Tarkovsky movie, that was at least his dad, it wasn’t Tarkovsky writing it. I’m trying to think of other examples where the visual and literary components line up in an incredible way. I think Bi Gan might stand alone as the greatest example. Anyway, I love his two films.
Do you think about how the visual world and the poetic world of the record line up more over time?
With visual things, I know that I like them when I see them, but I’m really bad at it. When it comes to Destroyer, I think about what music is, and music can have a filmic quality to it, but that’s a sonic thing. I think Dan’s Boogie is, in my mind, the apex of that – as far as my idea of songs having a cinematic feel to them, this is the closest we’ve ever gotten. Working with John is really important because he’s a sound design freak and an incredible mixer of sounds. He creates these tapestries where it’s literally a joy to sing into them, even though the vocals are usually the first thing done – they’re all done before any of that stuff gets worked on. But the way he juggles the band and the canvas he makes for me to spew onto is, I don’t know, confidence-building. It gives me the freedom to work large.
For me as a listener, there’s a line between something sounding cinematic and something making what I’m experiencing feel more cinematic. A song like ‘Hydroplaning’ definitely does that.
Yeah, I think that’s an important distinction to make. There’s a song that’s trying to sound like music from a movie, and then there’s a song that’s trying to sound like a movie. For me, even though I’m really into film scores and things like that more and more every year, when I think of something having a cinematic quality, it’s maybe more what you said: something that gives me the feeling I get when I’m watching a film I really love.
Manoel de Oliveira
Was it a case of revisiting his films more, or certain themes or images being stuck in your head?
I go in and out of his world. I go through phases. I think I’m back in now. There’s a theater angle to what he does, which is interesting to me, but it doesn’t come off like filmed theater, for some reason. Because he made movies when he was, like, 110 years old, he started really getting going when he was old enough to be pre-cinema consciousness – kind of an old-school European approach to theater and artifice, which he then filmed in this very interesting, dry, but still very filmic way. Again, an example of people speaking in over-the-top poetic ways, but somehow creating a universe where that kind of language and speaking feels normal, or just right – it’s the right way to speak, even if everyone sounds like they’re reading from pamphlets or essays.
There’s an approach to artifice in his films that I find really liberating when I watch them. It makes me interested in how people speak on a stage, and I’m always on a stage – what you can do to mess with those notions of how you’re supposed to sound when you open your mouth. He’s a director who’s kind of stuck with me for a long time.
Do you think about messing with that notion even when you don’t have performance in mind? When it’s just words on a page?
Even more so, yeah. Because when I’m on stage, I’m usually just frozen, like an animal. I’m not natural enough or academic enough to get on stage and be conscious of what I’m doing. I usually just get on, start singing, close my eyes, and then an hour goes by. I get off stage, and I either feel really good about it or really bad about it. But when I’m making songs, I think about it a lot – not when I’m writing them, because the writing happens pretty fast. I just like banging words off each other, and I have a hard time really delving into the actual writing process. But once the song is written, how it’s supposed to come across as a recording, and how my voice is supposed to come across as something that carries it, is something I think about. Maybe not always in the most conscious way, but I know it’s always there. And how you can mess with it – not for any philosophical intention, but more just to create sparks, to try and start a fire.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young
I read that this is one of the longest novels ever written.
It’s so long, and I’m so slow. I’m barely on page 200, and I started it a few months back. It’s really strange, very stream-of-consciousness. Incredible sentences, one after the other, just so densely packed with a mind saying incredible things all the time. But I’m constantly losing my place. I go back 20 pages over and over again, kinda like a maze. If I take a break for too long, I have to start from way back. There’s no real narrative to latch onto – just a few vague, ghostly characters who say incredible things, almost like in an opium state. Maybe one of them is in an opium state. But it’s not just stream-of-consciousness; it’s like a crazy wind you have to follow.
When I read it, I find it really inspiring. It’s a book I’d never heard of from, like, 60 years ago. It’s like, “Oh, we can still discover these amazing works that were just kind of lost to us. Or maybe only a few people knew about them, but over the decades, they get buried. It’s an incredible thing to discover, and then it’s really inspiring to read. I feel like I should just read one page from it for the rest of my life. I wonder if I’ll ever finish it.
Is it also inspiring in a way that makes something click about the way you’ve been writing or aspiring to write in recent years?
Even though I may never finish this book, it kind of validates everything I think about in art. [laughs] It’s like, “Oh, you just did it. You just went and did it.” Everything I thought art was supposed to do – this onslaught of language where, no matter where I open the book, I start reading and I literally get swept away by the words. That’s just what I want to feel when I’m reading, listening to a record, or watching a movie. I just want to feel like that all the time.
As a work in itself, it’s almost impossible. It’s an onslaught. It’s bloated – it just goes and goes and goes. But the force of vision to make this 1,300-page blast is definitely very inspiring. It doesn’t make me think that I could do that, but it makes you think that art matters, which is something that’s really easy to forget, especially in this particular day and age. It also seems like an incredible book from a time when there was more at stake. It’s impossible to imagine a novel like that being written and published in America right now. So it makes you wonder about what we’ve lost.
If I could single out one phrase from Dan’s Boogie to encapsulate it, it would be “carve yourself out of illusion.” Does that line hold a similar weight for you in the context of the album, or outside it?
I find that song, ‘Cataract Time’, kind of important to me. If I had to pick out a song and the lyrics in a song, I’d probably pick that. It’s the most automatic writing that happened. I just sat down and started singing it over a little chord progression and melody. A lot of the writing is very uncensored – it wasn’t written beforehand, which is pretty rare. I don’t normally do that. I don’t have it in me to just improvise a song, but for that one, I kind of did.
There are lines that feel very personal or very much describe where I was at while walking around the day I wrote that song. “Carve yourself out of illusion” – what is it? – “You choose the wrong way around a setting sun.” That song speaks to a lot of the stuff I picked as examples of influences: wandering through the streets and not recognizing the streets, not recognizing the world around you, having what used to be familiar slowly erased. Things that are normal as you get older, as you get into feelings of entering the last act of your life, I suppose, if a life is three acts. Just how disorienting that can be at first. And also, ideas decay. But also, the speed at which the world wants to erase itself these days, whether through some violent act or just a slow fade.
It seems to be a feeling that sticks with me, and when I write, I seem to write to that point a lot. I seem to point myself at it. A lot of the things on this list, whether it’s Modiano, Kaili Blues by Bi Gan, or even the later Billie Holiday records – there’s always a looking back on something that’s almost gone, which gives them their power and their tragedy, I guess.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Destroyer’s Dan’s Boogie is out now via Merge.
