Photo by Michael Schmelling
Destroyer
On Dan Bejar’s newest, Trouble in Dreams, the prolific songwriter dabbles in the gray areas of subconscious reinterpretations, rather than grasping for black and white meaning
By Erik Adams
Published: March 24th, 2008 | 4:31pm
No matter how many masks you pull off the music of Dan Bejar, there’s always one that you’ll leave on. You can be satisfied with listening to 2000’s Thief — the third record Bejar recorded under the Destroyer moniker — as a critique of American underground music culture, but then you’d miss the fact that it’s really just a chance for Bejar to play with soapbox-posturing, pamphlet-distributing polemic.
In the same way, it’s very easy to get hung up on more self-referential moments of 2006’s Destroyer’s Rubies and not give consideration to the various milieus being tripped through by Bejar’s characters. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until Bejar told me it in an e-mail.
Something else I didn’t know: The slumber-time feeling that makes up the majority of Destroyer’s latest release, Trouble in Dreams, (released March, 18, 2008, on Merge Records) was manufactured by Bejar during his waking hours. “I can never remember them,” Bejar said of his dreams. “So I thought I would invent dream images, as if I could remember.” What results is a record that trades in the same skewed classic-rock stylings as Rubies, with inscrutable lyrics that wash in from a more steadily flowing stream of consciousness.
Judging by its performance at 2008’s SXSW, Destroyer is more of a band than ever before, and on Trouble In Dreams it constantly achieves massive swells, which Bejar likened to both the Romantic era of classical music and old AM radio country-western.
“I think it's based around the drummer [Fisher Rose], to be honest,” Bejar said. “He has a style that just when you think the wave is about to crash and break, it just gets bigger. [Ted] Bois’ gotta pretty sweeping style with his keyboard/m-tron/synth arrangements. [Guitarist Nicholas] Bragg’s parts are also usually writ large, no matter how squiggly they first appear. I really do like more modest styles as well, but in a rock band setting I always tend to fall into this pattern, probably ’cause it’s what makes me go the most apeshit as a singer.”
Bejar wrote Trouble In Dreams during a visit to Spain that stretched from the fall of 2006 to the winter of 2007. Upon returning to his native Vancouver, British Columbia, he began working through the songs with Rose, Bois, Bragg, and bassist Tim Loewen, though little was cemented before they began recording.
“We’ve never really done very much practicing, and that didn’t change this time around,” Bejar said. “Aside from a couple songs like ‘Dark Leaves Form a Thread,’ ‘The State,’ and maybe ‘Plaza Trinidad,’ it was unclear how any of this stuff was gonna sound upon entering the studio. We figured it out as we recorded and mixed it — a little stressful, maybe.”
Recording studios and Bejar have become well-acquainted over the past two years. In addition to his contributions to the New Pornographers' 2007 effort Challengers, he put out Beast Moans as one-third of Swan Lake (the other members being Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer and Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown dude Spencer Krug) and Hello Blue Roses’ The Portrait is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty … , a collaboration with girlfriend Sydney Vermont. “If you do minimal-to-no touring, it frees up a lot of time to do creative — as opposed to promotional — projects,” Bejar said, alluding to his notorious road wariness.
Few contemporary songwriters have the word “poet” thrown in their direction as often as Bejar. He said he doesn’t think his lyrics would hold up without his music, though he usually turns to poetry to find “the most kick-ass writing.”
“Stick something on a page and it is automatically taken more seriously, but I’m not exactly sure why it has to be that way,” Bejar said. “This is partly rock music’s fault, in that 99 percent of all rock lyrics are complete shit, or at least beside the point, which to me kind of amounts to the same thing. Lyrics will always be secondary to music, and for good reason.”
But for many listeners, lyrical content will always be the primary concern of a Destroyer song. To those listeners, Dan Bejar would like to remind you that it’s less about meaning, and more about feeling.
“I don’t need people to figure out what lyrics mean, ’cause that’s not what to look to words for,” he said. “I’m more into what words do, what effect they have. The drive to look for meaning or to crack the code seems to just be some by-product of the American educational system. Or maybe vestiges of the idea that a song is supposed to tell a story, which I don’t do, or have a character (the average Destroyer song has around 10), or is supposed to contain a moral, which all Destroyer songs do.”
The moral of this story: The last mask to be peeled from a Destroyer song is the one that’s obscuring the emotional core.
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Issue #24
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