Destroyer’s Dan Bejar on the Lyrics That Changed His Life

I need to know about the horse’s ass.

On the title track from Destroyer’s new album, Dan’s Boogie, bandleader Dan Bejar waxes quizzical over a cascading backdrop that sounds like Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham crashing into a cocktail jazz trio. It’s as strange as it is rollicking, a prime example of why this Canadian outfit has become an irregular indie-rock institution across nearly three decades. As always, Bejar is at the song’s center, tossing out blissful musings, cryptic apologies, and an incredible observational joke about how “the opera house is a jam space for the desperate and insane.” But there’s another bit that makes me laugh—and scratch my head—even harder:

You fill your glass
You check out
A horse’s ass
It’s not bad
It could be worse
You’ve been looking for a way out

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but this is the kind of deranged comedy I need in my life right now: The idea of someone ogling a horse’s butt and thinking, It’s not bad, it could be worse. Like, what?! Where does this shit come from? As it happens, part of my job is to ask people like Dan Bejar questions such as these. He graciously obliges.

“That’s just a dirty old man who’s so out of it, who’s leering at an ass, and it’s a horse’s ass—so there’s a bestiality angle, which is extra gross,” he explains, breaking down the lyrics in a way that’s both hilariously plain and seriously playful. “And then the line that ends that verse is important: ‘You’ve been looking for a way out.’ I don’t know if that’s a Trojan horse thing, like you’re gonna escape inside a horse’s ass. Or are you gonna do something so horrible that it’s gonna disrupt your life forever, and that’s a way out of where you are? I don’t really know.”

When Bejar claims to not know everything about the verse’s “actual” meaning, or its implications, he’s not just another songwriter feigning ignorance in hopes of maintaining an air of mystery; at 52, he’s too old for those kinds of games. It’s because his process is genuinely off-the-cuff, and the results can seemingly confound him just as much as anyone else. “I’m not a conscious writer,” he says. “I’m still just scribbling lines that amuse me. I’m putting things I want to see in the world that aren’t in the world. It’s kind of a selfish gesture.”

Bejar walks laps inside his Vancouver home as he talks about his instinctual songwriting methods, holding his phone close to his face. He’s in good spirits, letting off plenty of hot takes about musical heroes who are also villains of a sort. At one point, Bryan Ferry catches a loving stray: “He’s probably the most important artist to me, even though he’s a scumbag.”

For years, Bejar challenged himself to, as he puts it, “try and sing unsingable things.” This often meant cramming as many words, ideas, and obscure references into a song as possible. Since his most-loved album, 2011’s Kaputt, he’s dialed all that back, floating above his music rather than splashing through it. At this point, Bejar takes pride in writing lyrics that are “more brittle and not poetic-sounding.” Of course, this is all relative—there’s still no danger of anyone mistaking a Destroyer song for a run-of-the-mill pop or indie-rock song.

Through his stylistic evolutions as a songwriter, there have been thematic constants too. He’s always gotten a kick out of subverting aphoristic comforts: “To have loved and lost is the same thing as nothing at all,” he croons near the start of Dan’s Boogie. And he’s always stuck up for the underdog while acknowledging their powerlessness. One couplet from the new album, on a beautiful country ballad called “The Ignoramus of Love,” sounds like a statement of purpose that could fit on Destroyer’s tombstone: “I wasn’t born to love at all costs/In fact, I could only love a cause that’s already been lost.” It’s a hopeless sentiment made hopeful by the music surrounding it.

I’ve interviewed Bejar a few times before, and he’s honest with me about the prospect of discussing the lyrics that have shaped his life. “I’m very disturbed by having to do this,” he says, joking but also not. He adds that the problem has to do with how he hasn’t really been influenced by song lyrics for more than 20 years. So in order to pull off this assignment, he was forced to dig pretty deep into his own past. Another complicating truth: His love for the music he listens to nowadays—mostly jazz singers like Billie Holiday—has nothing to do with lyrics. “I don’t care one bit about the American Songbook and I don’t know who wrote ‘I Cover the Waterfront,’” he says, citing the standard famously sung by Holiday, “but it’s maybe my favorite song of all time.” (For the record, it was written by Edward Heyman.)

But for all of his talk about not overworking his own lyrics and not really paying attention to anyone else’s for decades, Bejar makes clear that his scribbled words—and how they fit into his band’s maximalist arrangements—are still the main thing for him. “I think about the lyrics all the time,” he admits. “Lyrics are how I know a song is a song.” 

Here are some of the artists, lyrics, and songs that have inspired Dan Bejar’s one-of-a-kind way with words.