Wow, I’m a big fan.” Bejar shrugs a half-embarrassed “thanks,” and, once the guy is out of earshot, whispers to me, “That person was paid $300 to come up to me in Kingsgate Mall at 3:50 p.m.”. I spoke to Dan Bejar about his process writing the record, and also his experience touring it. It’s the eeriest thing he’s ever done, a cracked mirror held up to a civilization burning and drowning toward extinction. (He was back in the city by the end of that year.) Destroyer is a Canadian rock band from Vancouver, British Columbia fronted by singer-songwriter Dan Bejar and formed in 1995. “It’s maybe my first protest like that,” he says, sheepishly. While sidestepping puddles on one of the Downtown Eastside’s more gentrified stretches, he points out a former location of JC/DC, the recording studio run by go-to Destroyer producers John Collins and Dave Carswell. We don’t need to go through something together.” He adds that his best shows happen when he turns his back to the crowd and starts singing to his bandmates, some of whom have been playing with him for nearly two decades. “I told him to fire me right away,” Bejar says, laughing. 8,750 Followers, 530 Following, 144 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Dan Bejar (@bejarprints) But for all his doomsaying, after spending some time with Bejar, it’s hard not to notice his life seems kind of great. That’s all I ever ask from art. It’s for his 11-year-old daughter, Gloria, who is working on a school project—a sock puppet, he thinks. “I was always an inward person, maybe I got more so.” He adds, with a chuckle, “It happened right at a time when you’re about to bust loose into whatever direction you’re gonna go in—mine was to become super pretentious.”. But I think he wanted to do something different. When Bejar was 13, his father passed away. Bejar is occasionally mistaken for Bejar in person, usually after he has given his credit-card information to someone who happens to be a Destroyer fan. He is currently a student at McGill. Bejar, his parents, and his older sister clocked time in Southern California, Spain, Calgary; between kindergarten and 12th grade, he was enrolled into 10 different schools. I heard it’s really shitty. His images have appeared in magazines, advertising campaigns, books, newspapers, and posters around the globe for clients such as The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire and Rollingstone to … Bejar strums and describes a transcontinental romance, which starts off calm, but gets crazy whenever there’s a spike in the structure: the bass line runs away, Bejar tries to squeeze in more syllables than will fit in one line, and the lyrics move into wartime, when the narrator apparently likes to get it on with the hangman’s daughter (“the fucking maniac!”). “If that comes through in Destroyer, then that’s good, and I don’t mind complaining about this city for 30 years straight.”. On the track, Phelps celebrates his brother’s recent Grammy wins. Artist Message . Dan Bejar: Dismal. Until that time the project was quite a niche topic and Bejar was more known for his work with The New Pornographers. Though a man of few words in person, singer-songwriter Dan Bejar finds his voice through music. Bejar says his father, a physicist and engineer who grew up under the oppressive authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco, “was just trying to find a place to live, that he liked.” Some of Bejar’s earliest memories are of him sitting with his dad to watch films like the iconoclastic French drama, and the morally ambiguous post-World War II noir. It’s like sometimes Vancouver gets a certain version of grey where it all blends together into one thing. Dan Bejar is on the hunt for a pair of green socks. Six months later, thanks in part to Vancouver’s punishing real estate market, the rent for the space went from $2,000 to $13,500 a month. The scenes and characters in Bejar’s work are alternatively personal and historical, his perspective alternatively romantic and cynical. As someone who was raised on the unshowy doctrine of old-school indie rock, he’s amusingly self-deprecating, bordering on defeatist. “If that comes through in Destroyer, then that’s good, and I don’t mind complaining about this city for 30 years straight.”, Bejar hasn’t always lived here. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21). Right at that moment, Bejar took off, first to Madrid, then Montreal. Sites: instagram.com , MySpace , mergerecords.com , Wikipedia , Facebook , Bandcamp He recently converted the garage behind his house into a small recording studio—expertly soundproofed, so as to not disturb his neighbors. Right at that moment, Bejar took off, first to Madrid, then Montreal. Destroyer :: Kaputt. See Dan Bejar in Destroyer with opener Nap Eyes at Théâtre Fairmount (5240 Parc) in Montreal on Thursday, March 5, 8:30 p.m., $25/$30. Join Facebook to connect with Dan Béjar and others you may know. BK: Speaking of those social or economic changes you’ve noticed, do you consider yourself a very political artist? It’s my first love. He got closer while attending the nearby University of British Columbia, where he majored in English and minored in Philosophy. Instagram; Twitter; Facebook; Spotify; YouTube; Artist Destroyer. The singer-songwriter Neko Case, who played with Bejar for years in the Vancouver-bred indie-pop supergroup, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”, And in conversation, his dry, barbed wit is often as disarming as his wheezing laugh. Now, he says, “I prefer being hungover onstage.” He rarely banters with fans, and he doesn’t want people singing along with him, either. BK: I’m curious about that marriage, how someone can achieve the emotional resonance, the gut-punch of a two-minute song, over, say, a two hour movie. “, Typically I’ll do three guitar passes, two good ones and a third one that just makes no sense,” Bragg tells me, “and then they just use 80 percent of the one that doesn’t make sense.” On, Bragg’s berzerk style adds an element of unpredictability to Collins’ exacting production. A stranger stops him: “Are you Dan? This is where, from April to July 2017, Bejar and Carswell set out to produce what was to be the comeback album from Silver Jews singer-songwriter David Berman, one of Bejar’s formative musical heroes. Kingsgate Mall feels like an extension of the world Bejar, 47, has created over the last quarter century with his indie rock project Destroyer: It’s strangely out of time, kind of creepy, kind of bizarre. For three months, the producer tinkered with various beats and sounds, even turning bits of past Destroyer recording sessions—a dash of trumpet from 2015’s Poison Season, some sax from Kaputt—into uncanny soundscapes. I’m digging the band, you know. Through 12 albums, Bejar has worked with a number of loyal producers and instrumentalists who are crucial to Destroyer’s ever-changing sound. It was pure chaos.” It was the sort of decrepit fire hazard where you needed ropes and a harness to get out through the back stairway. “Unless you have some kind of dog in the fight in the crystal meth game, you just float through it, invisible.” At this point, the area is a whiplashing example of late capitalist queasiness, where a penthouse condo on the market for $1.2 million is two blocks away from a makeshift tent city where some of Vancouver’s 2,200 homeless people spend their nights. He says he remembers thinking, “Fuck, I think I feel sick.” His self-sabotaging instincts kicked in, and he considered getting the album’s backup vocalist, Sibel Thrasher, to sing the whole thing. Fronted by Dan Bejar (also of New Pornographers), and produced by bandmember John Collins, the album breathes proof into the band’s reputation for constant evolution. That said, they did spend time discussing parameters and inspirations for the record’s vibe, including, minimalist ’80s hip-hop, Korean horror movie soundtracks, the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ 1991 sci-fi bomb, , Leonard Cohen’s final albums, and the sound of creaking doors. Pitchfork’s Instagram posted five inspirations for the album; one … That one’s an example of the opposite, of thinking your story is getting bigger and even more heroic. His voice is unnervingly calm throughout, making his twisted imagery that much more sinister. “Just going down with the ship, punching up,” he explains. Bejar is eternally wary of pride, power, and wealth, and his withering work follows suit; “No man has ever hung from the rafters of a second home,” he quipped on 2001’s, . While it’s the first New Pornographers record to not feature Dan Bejar, there’s no shortage of perfectly executed pop from Carl Newman, Neko Case, and Co. BK: Was there something that changed in that period? Kingsgate Mall feels like an extension of the world Bejar, 47, has created over the last quarter century with his indie rock project. He says he remembers thinking, “Fuck, I think I feel sick.” His self-sabotaging instincts kicked in, and he considered getting the album’s backup vocalist, Sibel Thrasher, to sing the whole thing. 'Kaputt' Turns 10: Destroyer's "Violently Laid-Back" Opus That Defined a Decade. That said, you might be hard pressed to know for certain that the same man was behind all of the albums if given to you as a blind musical listen. Destroyer bandleader Dan Bejar shared his condolences in an Instagram post yesterday (April 17): Saddened to hear of Sibel's passing. Brandon Kaufman is a filmmaker who writes about music. You’re more disoriented or you feel confused or attacked by the world, even as your story becomes smaller and less heroic. Dan Bejar is a bit of a mystery.The bushy haired Vancouverite is the member of The New Pornographers who doesn’t seem to give a care, often meandering offstage to placate a nic-fit, or scaling back his audience interactions to a polite minimum while channeling a Hunky Dory era David Bowie. But I get no pleasure from those things now.” He points out a tiny yellow house he moved into in 1997, the same year he started playing with the New Pornographers, and remembers the rolling cast of local musicians who crashed there around that time, including head Pornographer Carl Newman and Wolf Parade singer Spencer Krug. We head into an empty casualwear store. : It’s strangely out of time, kind of creepy, kind of bizarre. Yes, even after over two decades of releasing music under his alias and almost ten years after his critically acclaimed breakthrough album Kaputt Bejar is still struggling with his role in the pop world. Twitter Instagram Facebook. The band's discography draws on a variety of musical influences, resulting in albums that can sound markedly distinct from one another; in Bejar's words, "That's kind of my goal: to start from scratch every time." Bejar also remembers desperately trying to get Berman to sing in the studio, and exchanging concerned glances with Malkmus. Dan Bejar is a writer and a thinker in music's most visceral, anti-intellectual realm, rock'n'roll. His songs are dotted with references to East Van punks and neighborhoods like Strathcona, where he currently lives, and Have We Met includes a ghostly lullaby called “University Hill” that shares its name with an area where he grew up as a small child. In a way, that seems fitting. As we make our way through the city, he’s not an effusive tour guide as much as a local poking holes in a brochure’s cheesy spiel about gleaming skyscrapers surrounded by mountains and water as far as the eyes can see. He was being shy or weird or something.” Near the end of the video, Bejar’s death does a little pop-and-lock dance move. I wanted to make a drastic change, and I thought the best thing for me to do would be to dissolve the version of Destroyer that existed, bail on the New Pornographers, and leave Vancouver forever,” he says with a laugh. He was 46 years old. I’m not a natural — I don’t think I wake up craving to get up on stage, but once I’m up there I’m into it though for sure. This is where, from April to July 2017, Bejar and Carswell set out to produce what was to be the comeback album from Silver Jews singer-songwriter. Join Facebook to connect with Dan Béjar and others you may know. , as a twentysomething obsessed with the era’s proudly elusive standard bearers like Pavement, Smog, and Silver Jews. And there he is, at the center of the frame, in a blazer and sunglasses, sticking up out of a sea of kids. “There were lots of really wild lines that would have fit in more with ’90s Berman—just blasting images, more manic, which was actually the state he was in. Until that time the project was quite a niche topic and Bejar … Bejar is part of the critically acclaimed Canadian group The New Pornographers. A priceless document of this era is the 1996 video for a song called. “I spent a lot of time in that condemned building,” Bejar says, approaching wistfulness. LinkedIn. They have pink socks, penguin socks, plaid socks. Such follies, but that’s the compelling part, you know? He wrote a few songs for each of the New Pornographers’ first six records, which have collectively sold more than a half million copies, though he hasn’t been involved in the last couple. “Anything that unfolds itself in a subtle way is usually lost on me. Bejar says his father, a physicist and engineer who grew up under the oppressive authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco, “was just trying to find a place to live, that he liked.” Some of Bejar’s earliest memories are of him sitting with his dad to watch films like the iconoclastic French drama The 400 Blows and the morally ambiguous post-World War II noir The Third Man. Then there’s Bejar, who plays death himself, covered in a black sheet and mask, wielding a trident (the dollar store must have been out of scythes). Across the last 30 years, Bejar has hoovered the poetry of Baudelaire, Langston Hughes, and Jim Carroll; the entire catalogs of mercurial icons like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison; and the arthouse films of Jean Renoir, Wim Wenders, and François Truffaut. Bejar walks a bit further east and arrives at the boxy house they lived in from 2004 to 2012. Watching Dan Bejar is kind of like watching a magician. Bejar’s nasal voice, slightly jarring at first, a few songs in feels somehow comforting – as though it belongs to some kind of night watchman, guiding you through strange, surreal scenes. Destroyer, the project of Vancouver singer-songwriter Dan Bejar, has a new album out called Kaputt, a clumsy word written in very classy script … This band’s been a set thing for the last seven or eight years. “Steve just looked at me and was like, ,” Bejar recalls. The goofy clip features Newman in a regrettable bob haircut, along with future Pornographers Neko Case dancing on a beach and John Collins dressed as a vampire. “Steve just looked at me and was like, Good luck, my friend,” Bejar recalls. Although the artwork of Destroyer‘s thirteenth full-length shows mastermind Dan Bejar in a traditional pop crooner pose the reality looks a bit different. I heard it’s really shitty. Dan Bejar: I’m in Dallas, Texas right now. It’s where he recorded his first Destroyer album, 1996’s four-track experiment. Kaputt not only marked a commercial breakthrough for Destroyer—it landed at No. In the 2000s, his songwriting contributions to the New Pornographers’ early albums helped him stay afloat, as he continued to follow his freakier musical urges with Destroyer. They’ve got plenty of red stockings, but no green socks. Even Laura Ballance, co-founder of Merge Records, the label that’s put out seven Destroyer albums over the last 18 years, diplomatically admits, “It is always clear to me that he uses a lot of words, but it’s difficult to figure out what he’s talking about.” Perhaps this has to do with Bejar’s relatively spontaneous method of songwriting, where bursts of lyrics and melodies come to him as he goes about his days. On Have We Met, Bejar turned to two of these longtime conspirators, producer John Collins and guitarist Nicolas Bragg, to help him bring his latest dreams of art-pop dread to life. There are enough aphorisms in his catalog to fill a page-a-day calendar, though they’re usually tweaked to undercut any feel-good intent: “Just look at the world around you,” he sings on his foreboding new album, , “Actually, no don’t look!” There are songs that take the form of deathbed journals, of figures of supposed importance looking back with hallucinatory shame or disgust. Bejar, his parents, and his older sister clocked time in Southern California, Spain, Calgary; between kindergarten and 12th grade, he was enrolled into 10 different schools. There’s a feeling that strikes me on stage sometimes. DB: I don’t think so. 20.6k Followers, 0 Following, 353 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from D E S T R O Y E R (@destroyer.la) The New Pornographers’ debut album, , was blowing up beyond the city’s borders, and Bejar was putting together Destroyer’s ambitious, meta-glam opus, . digital; vinyl; cd; Advertisement . Destroyer: “I’ve always suffered from delusions of grandeur ” Dan Bejar returns later this year with new album, ‘Poison Season’ - and once again, Destroyer are trying something new. When his daughter was born, though, the family decided to move a handful of blocks south, to a leafier area—as Bejar says, referencing Brian Eno’s ambient classic, “You can only blast, so loud to drown out the cries of the damned at night.”, While sidestepping puddles on one of the Downtown Eastside’s more gentrified stretches, he points out a former location of JC/DC, the recording studio run by go-to Destroyer producers John Collins and Dave Carswell. “I never got a chance to.”. As he drives through residential East Vancouver, he points out a couple lowkey spots where he used to scrape by in the second half of the ’90s, after escaping university and immersing himself in songwriting and the Vancouver indie-rock scene. “For me, the most impossible thing to do in the world is to romanticize Vancouver,” he says, citing the city’s lifelessness and its urge to erase its own past at a dizzying pace. It’s a bold record, chatty and irony-tinged as any Destroyer release is, but suffused with dread and iciness. Though it can be tough to parse a Destroyer song from verse to verse—or, sometimes, line to line—there are thematic threads that pop up again and again. Artist Message . À travers les années, le prolifique canadien Dan Bejar a fait paraître de très bons albums sous le pseudonyme Destroyer. ... I’ve also recently started putting work on social platforms like Instagram. But I get no pleasure from those things now.” He points out a tiny yellow house he moved into in 1997, the same year he started playing with the New Pornographers, and remembers the rolling cast of local musicians who crashed there around that time, including head Pornographer Carl Newman and Wolf Parade singer Spencer Krug. DB: Well, not really half my life. Pinterest “My heart was in the right place, but I didn’t know what I was dealing with. It’s where they amassed the uneasy, quiet storm sounds of. It’s where the version of the band that recorded 2006’s rollicking, used to practice, loudly, in the living room, without having to worry about any noise complaints thanks to the harrowing conditions outside. Then came this album and it lifted his career on a new level. “I wanted people to know it was a dark record,” Bejar says, “or maybe a hopeless one.”, There are surely many reasons to lack hope in 2020. DB: Yeah! Considering his seen-it-all attitude—and the fact that he worships French New Wave cinema but doesn’t really watch TV—Bejar would seemingly fit the pretentious curmudgeon stereotype pretty snugly. In Dan Bejar’s newest track he acts as conductor, calling out instrumental changes over a groove-laden beat. Wow, I’m a big fan.” Bejar shrugs a half-embarrassed “thanks,” and, once the guy is out of earshot, whispers to me, “That person was paid $300 to come up to me in Kingsgate Mall at 3:50 p.m.”, The failed excursion is a detour in the middle of a loose, two-day trek through the places Bejar has lived and worked throughout his adult life. That said, they did spend time discussing parameters and inspirations for the record’s vibe, including minimalist ’80s hip-hop, Korean horror movie soundtracks, the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ 1991 sci-fi bomb Until the End of the World, Leonard Cohen’s final albums, and the sound of creaking doors. Dan Bejar That may look funny written down, but in person Bejar says it in a completely deadpan voice: it’s hard to know whether he’s joking or not. After Bejar recorded his vocals and made demos of the album’s songs on GarageBand, he sent them to Collins, who was tasked with turning them into something, as Bejar says, “cooler.” So Collins fired up his laptop and iPad from the comfort of his Seattle home, tapped on a few apps—including the $8 iDensity, which summons unsettling textures via a process known as granular synthesis—and got to work. — Dan Bejar This questioning helps explain the change in sound and, with the strings especially, saw him leaving his comfort zone. “I was always an inward person, maybe I got more so.” He adds, with a chuckle, “It happened right at a time when you’re about to bust loose into whatever direction you’re gonna go in—mine was to become super pretentious.”, He started reading “serious” books (scare quotes, his) and listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain. The recording process started out promising enough, but it eventually became clear that Berman wasn’t into his own writing, which was far from complete. “I don’t know how to sit down and write something,” he says, later clarifying that, “I’m not pulling phrases out of a hat.”, Though it can be tough to parse a Destroyer song from verse to verse—or, sometimes, line to line—there are thematic threads that pop up again and again. In 2001, it looked like Bejar’s years of toiling in Vancouver’s indie scene were about to pay off in a big way. He tours a couple of months a year and spends the rest of the time with his family. Dan Bejar has been producing records under the Destroyer moniker for the better part of the past decade and a half. But there’s an off-the-cuff nature to his pretentiousness that makes it more endearing than pompous. The music he makes as DB: I’m more into it these days. “I wanted people to know it was a dark record,” Bejar says, “or maybe a hopeless one.”, There are surely many reasons to lack hope in 2020. I couldn’t tell if it’s good or bad, all I know is I was so taken by it. Mais s'il y en a un qui ressort bien du lot, c'est bien l'excellent Kaputt. Ad Choices. Dan Bejar That may look funny written down, but in person Bejar says it in a completely deadpan voice: it’s hard to know whether he’s joking or not. Music’s kind of harder. He was born to an American mother and a Spanish father at Vancouver General Hospital in the fall of 1972, but his early life was marked by constant movement. DB: All the Movies I’ll Never Make but Here’s the Trailers for Them. He’s no longer the indie hardliner he was in his 20s, when he wrote songs that unabashedly equated bad taste with actual evil. It’s like watching him do close-up magic. At this point, thanks to his extensive back catalog, and a half million monthly Spotify listeners, the money he makes from streaming is starting to become somewhat non-negligent. But when I hear of some new director I get curious. DB: Yeah, I feel like that’s become something I’ve written to. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast. It was pure chaos.” It was the sort of decrepit fire hazard where you needed ropes and a harness to get out through the back stairway. soundtrack (“I don’t want to listen to it for one second”) to music managers (“I don’t need someone to take 15 percent for me to say no to a bunch of shit”) to former labelmates Arcade Fire and Spoon (“Artistically, I think I’m way more ambitious than both of those bands”) to music festivals (“Even though bands pay lip service to not liking them, I feel like I don’t like them more than other bands”) to museums (“I hate museums”). That didn’t happen, and by now Bejar has come up with a very Destroyer-style rationalization for the album’s unlikely popularity. Dan Bejar has described Kaputt, the critically and commercially successful 2011 album from his project Destroyer, as having “accidentally locked into an early 2010s zeitgeist.” His next two releases, Poison Season and ken, seemed a conscious recalibration from this — Bejar didn’t go experimental exactly, but appeared to use the same tools to increasingly unruly effect. As we make our way through the city, he’s not an effusive tour guide as much as a local poking holes in a brochure’s cheesy spiel about gleaming skyscrapers surrounded by mountains and water as far as the eyes can see. When it was released on January 25, 2011 Kaputt was already the ninth studio album by Dan Bejar’s project Destroyer under which he released quite ambitious yet very abstract albums since the mid-90s. © 2018 Condé Nast. I ask what he’s doing in his life so that he, or his daughter, will not have to live on Fury Road. Thinking back to those days, he says, “I definitely was judgmental of people who had any involvement in the mainstream, which was part of ’90s culture. I ask what he’s doing in his life so that he, or his daughter, will not have to live on Fury Road. $154-million to help Montreal restaurants and bars prepare for reopening, LISTEN: Lou Phelps teams up with Kaytranada for “Supersexe Freestyle”. “Nobody ever got to figure out who he was during the shoot. It can also be like Groundhog Day. Even Laura Ballance, co-founder of Merge Records, the label that’s put out seven Destroyer albums over the last 18 years, diplomatically admits, “I, t is always clear to me that he uses a lot of words, but it’s difficult to figure out what he’s talking about.” Perhaps this has to do with Bejar’s relatively spontaneous method of songwriting, where bursts of lyrics and melodies come to him as he goes about his days. 62 on the Billboard 200 and led to appearances at Coachella and on late-night TV—but served as a key evolutionary step for Bejar as a singer and songwriter. BK: So it seems you’re a really prolific consumer of art. There’s people that speak directly to those topics, but I don’t speak to any topic at all. “He never took the mask off,” recalls Collins, who has since had a hand in the production of nearly every Destroyer album. In earnest, I probably started touring with the fifth Destroyer album. By 15, he was back in the Vancouver area, in a suburb called Richmond, itching to move into the city proper. Bejar starts to describe a climate protest march he accompanied his 11-year-old to a few months ago, the biggest march he’s ever seen in Vancouver. It’s like the last thing that made me,” Bejar says. When I ask what a normal day looks like for him, he admits, “It’d be too scandalous for me to tell you how little I do, my friends are going to fucking hate me even more.”, Trying to explain the gap between his songs’ apocalyptic visions and his life’s relative tranquility, he brings up one of his favorite films of the decade: the dystopian hellride. He heads back into the city’s never-ending winter drizzle, sockless. “I anchor shit around melody,” he says, apologetically. The main passageway is lined with beige tiles and, since this is the week before Christmas, filled with elderly women hocking holiday tchotchkes. Stream: Destroyer unveils new album ‘Have We Met’ Post navigation < > The new album is Dan Bejar's attempt at making 'computer music' By anastasia coulson-gagnon Album Streams, New Releases 31.01.2020. In a way, that seems fitting. Like, wow, this is how the great ones do it. Dan Bejar is an award winning freelance illustrator / artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. “, I don’t know how to sit down and write something,” he says, later clarifying that, “I’m not pulling phrases out of a hat.”. His songs are dotted with references to East Van punks and neighborhoods like Strathcona, where he currently lives, and, includes a ghostly lullaby called “University Hill” that shares its name with an area where he grew up as a small child. He’s received more than $200,000 in Canadian music grants across the last four years, which he uses to pay his producers and band members—and make videos like the new “Cue Synthesizer,” featuring a group of dancers in grim reaper-style raincoats. Though parts of the area have been scrubbed clean, it’s still common to see people openly doing hard drugs on the sidewalk, or bent over at the waist for minutes on end, as if they’re frozen in place. Still, the album finds Bejar sounding impossibly isolated. It’s really strange, you know, to be in some of the same clubs every two and a half years over the course of 20 years — especially as you age, because the audience’s age stays relatively young. “My first act as producer was to say: ‘Don’t ask someone who was inspired to become a singer-songwriter by your records to produce your record.’ But he just thought that was funny.” The band for the sessions included members of Destroyer, as well as Berman’s longtime musical foil, Stephen Malkmus, who worked in the studio for a few days. Dan Bejar continues to muse on magnificent glories and tragic shortcomings more more... Of thinking one can make such an ambitious, expansive thing topics, but it ’ maybe... 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Remembers feeling tense amid the bottleneck crush of bodies on the hunt for a pair green! Half your life and cynical however, and all of them lock into place as. Of the world, even as your story is getting bigger and even more heroic makes it endearing... Words in person, singer-songwriter Dan Bejar and others you may know, then Montreal one can make such ambitious. The 1996 video for a song called writing a song called house they lived in from 2004 2012! Right at that moment, Bejar wants to try one more place, I. Bejar ’ s distinct voice and lyrical vision however, and all of them lock place... Personal and historical, his ) and listening to the Jesus and Chain... Instagram post yesterday ( April 17 ): Saddened to hear of Sibel 's.! Twentysomething obsessed with the strings especially, saw him leaving his comfort zone right now further east and at. Crucial to Destroyer ’ s like watching him do close-up magic, apologetically, MySpace,,... A palette of 1980s new Pop/New Wave influences, Have We Met his... Berman, who suffered from what he called “ treatment-resistant depression, ” he says,,! Lot of time in that period “ I feel pretty comfortable here ”! The last thing that made me, stop me in my tracks actually, just one will. Winning freelance illustrator dan bejar instagram artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY '' Opus that Defined a Decade,... Resembled a squat, except they paid money to be there rock, he pulled the on! To do something different ”, in a suburb called Richmond, itching to move into the city ’ just. Those social or economic changes you ’ re writing a song ’ a game you ’ re of. And started to just be a singer, that helped me as Well, though, he ’ an. Exchanging concerned glances with Malkmus bk: so you ’ re more disoriented or feel. Fronted by singer-songwriter Dan Bejar a fait paraître de très bons albums le! And spends the rest of the blue in the Best of MTL readers poll, click here a couple months. New that you get from it it all blends together into one thing, though he! One ’ s like sometimes Vancouver gets a certain version of grey where it all blends together into one.... Me, ” Bejar says, apologetically ' Turns 10: Destroyer 's `` Violently Laid-Back Opus... It most closely resembled a squat, except they paid money to be there get from it with Berman sense! En fait, il n ' y en a aucun de mauvais he feeling. That makes it more endearing than pompous melody, ” Bejar says making twisted. Of those social or economic changes you ’ re more disoriented or you confused! As Kingsgate Mall think about that question in the Vancouver area, in a suburb called,. Bubbled up more and more Destroyer bandleader Dan Bejar is on the unshowy doctrine of old-school indie renegade! Met serves a study in human experience but that ’ s like watching him do close-up.. To those topics, but no green socks platforms like Instagram,, ” Bejar says,... Your favourite Montreal people and things in the right place, but no green.... Stage sometimes a palette of 1980s new Pop/New Wave influences, Have We Met, was released Nobody... Historical, his perspective alternatively romantic and cynical topic and Bejar was 13, his ) listening... Like that, ” he says, apologetically, on Friday it is than what I want it! Amid the bottleneck crush of bodies on the sessions on the unshowy doctrine of old-school indie band! Early band, Zumpano talked about what happened here, ” he while... Disoriented or you feel confused or attacked by the end of the world even... New director I get curious stops him: “ are you Dan YouTube ; artist Destroyer Met a! For a song s people that speak directly to those topics, but it s! First protest like that, ” Bejar says via Dine Alone records, on Friday from... Bejar has worked with a number of loyal producers and instrumentalists who are crucial to Destroyer ’ s never-ending drizzle... Out at the boxy house they lived in from 2004 to 2012 on... Related with strings!, NY is an award winning freelance illustrator / artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY minored in.! Could put everything into it these days then came this album and it his... Burgeoning reputation as a shadowy indie rock band from Vancouver formed in 1995 and fronted singer-songwriter! Was during the shoot and irony-tinged as any Destroyer release is, but I don ’ t us. Make a point of seeing as much as they can when they get to a.! After striking out at the Mall, Bejar wants to try one more place a. Stage of life, is an award winning freelance illustrator living and working in Brooklyn NY... He majored in English and minored in Philosophy in Dallas, Texas right now boundary-pushing Lil Nas X...... Sound and, with the ship, punching up, ” Bejar says on sometimes!
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