Interview: Destroyer’s Dan Bejar talks new album ‘Dan’s Boogie’, “Bologna” Vs “Baloney,” touring with Father John Misty, and more

“The biggest tragedy of my life,” Dan Bejar says before deciding to rephrase mid-sentence. “Okay, no, hopefully this isn’t the biggest tragedy in my life, but I think I might not be that suited to singing torch songs, even though that’s my favorite kind of song.” Yet Dan’s Boogie, his new album as Destroyer, is full of them, along with swooning string sections and the unexpected sonic zigs and zags he’s given us since going widescreen with Kaputt back in 2011. Ever since Kaputt, he’s worked with bandmate and producer John Collins to reinvent the Destroyer backdrop for Bejar’s signature toothsome word salad style, and this one arrives in glorious Technicolor.

A title like Dan’s Boogie sounds like it could be a disco record, but after three albums of flirting with dance music, Dan pivoted and wrote a set of contemplative piano songs. (The “boogie” in question here is more like a hustle, the means to get by, whatever it takes, in the nighttime Destroyer Cinematic Universe.) He even, for the first time ever, had the tracklist worked out before recording the album. Those torch songs took new direction, of course, when Collins got a hold of them, and the “sound design” atmospheres he began with 2020’s Have We Met and continued on 2022’s LABRYNTHITIS have really expanded on this one. The record sounds enormous, at times seeming to move your walls and ceiling out and up. As usual there’s a lot to dig into and the album really rewards repeat listening.

I talked to Dan via Zoom in early March as he wandered around his Vancouver home on his phone, talking about the new album, those sound design elements, how Fiver’s Simone Schmidt came to sing lead on first single “Bologna,” his recent tour opening for Father John Misty and lots more. 

Pick up Dan’s Boogie on coke bottle clear and black swirl vinyl in the BV shop and read our interview below.

Dan’s Boogie by Destroyer

I saw you open for Father John Misty at Beacon Theater. That was a cool show. I’m not sure I’d ever seen that particular configuration of Destroyer before. Was that a first or have I just missed a bunch of tours?

That was a first. Probably a first and last.

How did you find it?

I liked it. I like the…I’m not sure what genre it fits in — “bluesy new wave power trio with keyboard playing drummer”?

Your drummer was doing a lot of the heavy lifting at that show.

Basically, yeah. The only reason why that worked was because he can do circus freak style stuff. It was cool. I’d been doing a lot of solo acoustic-kinda shows, off and on over the last couple of years, and so, I mean, my version of ecstasy maybe looks different than other people’s forms of ecstasy, but I am just elated to not play the guitar. To be able to just sing and break tambourines is really where I find myself, where I discover myself.

I do always notice, since like Kaputt, you always like to sort of crouch down, sip your drink, and just sort of dig the sound that your band is making.

Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely something I started doing 14 years ago when I was mostly just in shock at the volume and the disorienting, dizzy nature of the sounds coming from all parts of the stage. When we first started in as an eight-piece — now we’re a seven piece as a full band — but there was just so much going on, and especially with those Kaputt songs, so many long instrumental stretches where instead of ducking off to the side of the stage, I kind of just crouched down and grooved.

You didn’t play any new songs on your tour with Father John Misty. Was that because you haven’t worked them out yet or you wanted to give a Father John Misty crowd more of a greatest hits or somewhere in between or…

Other? Oh, no. We definitely have no idea how to play any of those songs without a doubt. I don’t know what I wanted to give the Father John Misty audience, we put that set together knowing what the limitations were going to be, seeing what songs would lend himself to that. A lot of it had to do with what Josh [Wells, drummer] felt comfortable with. The full Destroyer band hasn’t really been in the same room together since we got off stage in London in fall of 2022. The records happen in this new way that records, well some records, happen — just people mailing in their stuff. It helps if there’s a lot of really good recording engineers in the band. It occurred to me for one second just to try and figure it out, but then I didn’t want strange, pared-down versions of those songs before we’d even figured out how to play them at all.

You had two New York shows. You played Kings Theater, which is much bigger than Beacon, the day before. Did you do anything fun during the day or anything or to just sleep and go to the show?

It’s funny, the Misty schedule is kind of more forgiving than the kind of schedule we normally have, so there’s actually a day off. I was in New York for four nights. I can’t remember the last time I’d spent that much time there. I can’t really remember what I did. I kind of wandered around, saw a couple friends, nothing extravagant.

You said that you haven’t had the band together since the end of 2022, and the press release for the album said that you basically didn’t do any musical anything for a couple years.

I wouldn’t want to dig into the press release too hard. I can’t remember what I said to them. I think though that — I could be totally wrong about this — I feel like maybe my process or whatever, I don’t know what people call it when they write songs or make stuff, but how I do it, it seems to be changing in my 50s, which was a little freaky at first. I’ve always written pretty fast, stuff’s come pretty easily, and that was not the case with this record. For the first time, I had to take a few deep breaths and maybe that shows in the music and the writing. Hard to say. I never know what I hear or what I think is in there compared to what other people hear and what they see.

Did you have anything in mind as far as the sound of this record as compared to LABRYNTHITIS?

No, zero. In fact, it’s the first record where we didn’t go in with a sound. Even though usually those ideas of “let’s chase this sound,” that stuff gets thrown out the window really fast. At least with us. I feel like maybe it was intentional. I’m not sure really about the last record, so I knew that I was kind of done with any kind of intentional flirting with techno music or dance music, which just kind of popped its head up on the previous three Destroyer records. I mean, I love that stuff, but the songs that I brought in were pretty sedate and slow — to me, they seemed contemplative. They seem morose. They’re kind of piano ballads essentially. That’s how I wrote them for the most part. I’d say about two thirds of them or three quarters of them, so I didn’t feel like just giving them some kind of facelift. Instead, we just started making things in a more natural way, just like, “oh, it sounds good,” and I think it benefited the record.

There’s a grandeur to this record, or a faded glamor type of thing going on. The album opens with “The Same Thing as Nothing At All” and the way those strings come in it’s almost like an old Paul Anka variety special from 1971, or the intro to an award show. I keep expecting an announcer to be “Welcome to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the 67th Annual Academy Awards. Here’s your host, Dan Bejar!”

It’s not the first time that Destroyer has flirted with that sound. I guess in a lot of ways, it was more about just owning it or not being freaked out by the fact that we were touching on a lot of stuff that’s just what we’ve done before in the last 20 years or 25 years, so there’s unabashed Hollywood strings. It’s kind of a jazzier record than the last few, which is basically where I live artistically. That’s what I listen to. It’s not John’s total thing, but there’s ways of fooling him into it, so yeah, there’s more of that. I was like, when I finished the record and listened back to it, it just seems like kind of a mix of Poison Season and Your Blues in a lot of ways. It’s not really coming out of nowhere, but in some ways it’s a lot more refined and, because of where I’m at, the songwriting and the singing sounds aged in a way that I’ve kind of always thought about and alluded to, but never truly inhabited. Probably because you can’t fake that shit.

The stereo field on this record, I was listening to the album on my actual stereo system — I have a tiny Brooklyn living room, but it made it sound three times bigger. I was really struck by “Bologna” and the title track. They’ve all got swirling arpeggiated synths and some choral things going on. Big.

No matter what I throw at him and what kind of record we end up making, John’s sound design sensibilities seem to be getting more and more acute and in your face, just the older and more insane he gets. It’s undeniable.

There’s also the way the guitar kicks in on “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” it’s just so much louder than everything else that it kind of wakes you up.

Yeah, very much so. That song, it was a tough one because it’s just this one progression and this kind of one choral thing that happens from beginning to end and then just a shitton of me talking. You have to really sign up for the words to get you through the last three minutes of the song, so there’s these kind of crazy tom fills that are sprinkled around, but I think when John was mixing a song, it was stuff like that that would create momentum. We have a long history of doing that with Nic Bragg’s guitars. His guitar is just so crazy. Musically, it’s actually kind of a sweet song, and his guitar was just gnarly as hell, but at this point we are really adept at using his guitar for extreme punctuations, and sometimes even just pulling the rug out from underneath the song. It’s like there needed to be something to accentuate the fact that it’s like, okay, this is a new section of this song. Aside from me going, “we are now entering a new phase,” which I thought is kind of straightforward enough, but having these guitar shards also helps.

Otherwise, it’s definitely the poppiest song on the record with the “bah bah bas” and all that.

Yeah, it barely fits in. It’s kind of an outlier, I would say, on the record, aside from the fact that it’s vocally an important song to me and one of the first songs to end The Strange Dry Spell, or not really a dry spell, just a song where I just forced myself to sit down and spew something out. That’s why I feel like the tirade at the end of that is emotional.

Was that the first song that basically you completed for the record?

It was the last song we mixed, but it was probably the first song that I came up with. I can’t really remember if it was that one or if it was “Cataract Time,” another song which I just made up on the spot, which I’ve never really done before and probably won’t do again. That one is also kind of personal or feels closer to the bone for me in that it has this feeling of, well, I got to say something. I can’t just exit.

I was trying to figure out what the phrase “cataract time” means.

I think I invented it, but it means something. I was probably watching some French movie, like a Jacques Rivette movie or something, and someone used that expression in a way that has nothing to do with how we use it, like eye surgery. It was more just a rupture where something comes gushing out. I think in French or Spanish, it kind of means a waterfall. And I could be inventing this, but I remember a scene in King Lear when he rushes out onto the Moors and he’s been betrayed by all his daughters and he’s out there going insane in the storm with the Fool and he’s like, “come open up you cataract!”. [You weren’t inventing it, Dan.] It’s like the sky is supposed to open up and just rain down upon you in a moment of reckoning, and I was thinking of more of that…

…than optometry.

Than optometry, as poetic as optometry can be.

I’d like to ask about the song “Bologna,” which is mostly sung by Simone Schmidt of Fiver. At what point did you decide that you needed somebody else to sing this song?

I don’t know. After just working on it and it sucked, John and I talked about getting another singer on the album just to have another vocal presence. Definitely. We weren’t talking about getting someone to sing lead on one of the songs. In the case of “Bologna,” it didn’t have what I heard when I sang it. It sounded glib. It sounded sleazy, like a one night stand or something, which it absolutely isn’t. It just wasn’t tough and it wasn’t dark. The biggest tragedy of my life, okay, no, hopefully this isn’t the biggest tragedy in my life, but I think I might not be that suited to singing torch songs, even though that’s my favorite kind of song, and I wrote a torch song and that’s “Bologna.” I just wasn’t delivering it, and at some point I just asked Simone because I was a massive fan of Fiver’s last record. I knew that they could find their way around, find emotion inside of a weird lyric, because they’ve got tons of those.

I think I just wanted something that wasn’t light sounding, because even when I come in for the second verse, it’s like I’m a strange foil to the rest of the song. Really, what really helped was Josh laying down this forest of congas that John then really dubbed out, and then once things started getting real Sandinista! sounding or maybe Combat Rock sounding, the song really started to sound good. But that style, that sonic template, really only worked with Simone’s vocals. It didn’t work with mine as the lead, but we really stumbled on that mix. I don’t know how we got there. It was a real fast one that John just threw up and then we we’re like, this is very, very good, and because we don’t know how we got here, let’s just walk away, and that’s what we did.

I’d like to reiterate how big “Bologna” sounds. When that song starts, I can’t even pinpoint what it is that I’m hearing. I don’t know whether it’s just gallons of reverb or what, but just instantly like I said, the room sounds so much bigger.

I know. I agree with you. That’s why when the record got mastered, we’re like, can you just take whatever sonic harmonic reading your special mastering machine is getting off “Bologna” and just try and apply that to the album as a whole? I don’t know if that really works. I don’t think that’s what mastering actually is, but we’re like, if you’re a wizard — which is still how I see mastering a little bit — Can you just cast Bologna’s spell on the rest of the songs,

“Bologna”: are we talking the Italian city or the American luncheon meat?

That’s funny. In the back of my head, I thought ” Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if people weren’t sure if the song is Bologna or ‘baloney’?”

You only sing it as the city in the song, but I’ve seen other people who seemed to think it’s “baloney.”

Only in America has the question come up. I was really thinking of the city when I wrote the song but, as per uzh, after having written the song I was enjoying the thought of what a word that might have two or more meanings might do to a song.

I like the video for “Bologna.” When it starts, it seems sort of just random footage, like How To With John Wilson or something, but then you realize there’s a plot going on, and then when we get to the footage of the car submerged in a river, it’s almost David Lynch. It took me by surprise.

Yeah, I like it too. That whole thing is director Dave Galloway’s baby. We were just like, okay, we’ve got to make videos guerilla-style, and so it just ended up being a mix of his ancient handicam and found footage. But yeah, as it goes it gets increasingly dark so that at that point you see submerged cars getting dredged out of a river, youve already seen buildings on fire at night, and then at the very end where you see a getaway plane. And then the narrative starts to kind of actually really work. I was a non-believer at first. I was like, is anyone going to be able to attach a story to this? But actually I think it does work. Which is good because “Bologna,” way more than almost all other Destroyer songs, seems to take place in a specific time, in a specific place with specific people. I’m not going to get into it, but it feels more like a tale, or a song from the movie Bologna, as opposed to some Destroyer songs, which are just a swirl of images that I find emotional and I smash together in a way that pleases me.

There’s a total noir vibe to it.

Definitely. That’s what I was going for.

Okay. Another song that sort of takes me by surprise every time I hear it, but in a different way, is “Materialize.” It ends so abruptly. Even though I’ve heard it like 14 times, the ending makes me think of stress dreams that involve me being a college radio DJ and a song’s ending and I don’t have anything anything else queued up.

That song is actually really important to me, or just the most me. This is the most where I’m at right now. Even if it sounds like a pseudo jazz lounge singer kind of song. The words and definitely the vocals are kind of my favorite thing, but for some reason I just had that and I didn’t want to force it into the place of being a “songy” song. It’s so traditional sounding in a lot of ways that I was fine just doing this weird move, which is to just to hatchet it. Not that there was anything that was supposed to come after it, but I felt good just letting it be this piece of shrapnel that in some other universe might’ve been just full-on schmaltz. Also, the record’s songs were sequenced very, very early on. Basically before we started working on the records, I showed up with the songs and an order for them, and we stuck with it.

Had you ever done that before?

Never, and I don’t know if it’ll happen again but for some reason on this one it’s something I did. We started pretty early on having thoughts about how that song could just stumble into “Sun Meet Snow” in a cool sounding way.

Let’s talk about “The Ignoramus of Love.” Am I right that there’s a little Steve Miller nod going there?

I hadn’t thought of that!

Really.

Not at all. Oh, wait, he’s got a “something of love song.” Right?

It’s in “The Joker.” First it’s “Some people call me the gangster of love” and then “I speak the pompatus of love.”

“The pompatus of love.” I’m sure that line was floating in my body somewhere over the last 52 years, and it just came out in this strange way, but it’s not really what I was thinking of.

Fair enough. Speaking of faded glamor earlier, there’s a lot of that going on the album art. That’s Louise Brooks on the back cover of the album, right?

Correct.

And on the front cover there’s a head shot, somewhat hidden a bit behind a box of tissues, and I was trying to figure out who it was. Barbara Stanwyck? Veronica Lake? Or are you not allowed to tell.

I can’t remember if I’m allowed to tell, but I might get in trouble.

We’ll leave it at that, then. Was that taken in a green room?

It is a green room from a tiny old theater here in Vancouver. I think at some point I was going to be in that green room, and then I split for tour and things just got hectic and Dave Galloway and I were kind of like, maybe it’s better if you’re just not there. He was like, “If I can just dress this green room to look like this dry, kind of sad, but maybe somehow still compelling Green Room, that might remind you of the thousand green rooms that you’ve been in in your life.”

And what about the back cover with Louise Brooks?

I think he loves Louise Brooks. He’s obsessed.

You said that you guys haven’t figured out how to play the record yet. When will that start? You’ve got a few months till your first shows, right?

Let’s see. Primavera Sound is our first show. June 7th, so that’s where we will try and play these songs for the first time, in Barcelona. So somewhere at the end of May we’d better get together and learn how to play them, and maybe even remind ourselves of how we played some other ones before we get on a plane to go to Spain.

Do you like playing festivals?

No. Do you? Wait, does anyone like them? I don’t know.

That’s a good question.

Actually. I think bands really like them and they say they don’t like them. I think they’re liars, but I’m being honest when I say I don’t like them. Wait, am I going to get in trouble for saying I don’t like playing festivals and then I have to go play these festivals? Redact!

Have you been thinking about openers for the tour? I know you probably can’t say anything at this point. I’m just getting you into trouble here.

We have and know who’s opening the East Coast shows, but can’t say right now, but for a big chunk of it, I’ve got to figure it out really fast. I need help.

Is there anything else we need to know in the world of Destroyer coming up or otherwise?

I think that’s all of it. Going to go to Europe for that little trip in June. Going to live on a bus for a month in the early fall, we always do. Then going to live on a bus for maybe two or three weeks in Europe after that. Kind of standard shit.

Do you have any tour essentials that you have to have with you that make life on the road easier?

Tour essentials. No, I don’t have a security blankie or anything like that. I probably could handle a few healthy rituals to create structure in my day, but I haven’t discovered those yet. I don’t have them at home, so it’s hard to conjure them up when you’re living on a bus with eight other people.

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Pick up ‘Dan’s Boogie’ on coke bottle clear and black swirl vinyl, and other Destroyer albums, in the BV shop.