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.

New Order: “The Perfect Kiss” (1985)

Dan Bejar: If I’m being honest with myself, New Order’s Bernard Sumner is the most influential person alive when it comes to what I do. [laughs] He personified this sad, drugged, drunk guy off in the corner of a dance club in a way that, as a teenager, I’d never really heard before. And I still don’t know anything like that, really.

“The Perfect Kiss” is one of the first New Order songs I ever heard, when I was 13. It was like the beginning of me getting obsessive about music, and it’s one of the only examples of that where the singer, and not the overall sound, is what sucked me in—which is insane, because so much of New Order’s power is in the production. But it’s very much about Bernard Sumner and his strange, broken croon. It’s a “sad night out” song, like an adventure with someone who’s not around anymore, and that’s my favorite kind of downer.

When people try to copy New Order, it always sounds the worst to me, because they never have that voice. His lyrics were sometimes these terrible forced rhymes that made no sense, and other times they were really sappy or nonsensical, usually all within the same breath. There’s always really good lines, and lines where I cover my eyes, but I don’t think one can really exist without the other. It’s not a perfect form of songcraft, but it’s delivered so well, with such a natural flow, that it was always perfect for me. Also the fact that he had to be the most out-of-tune singer of the ’80s, and how he sounds very exposed but also super confident and smarter than what was around him. It spoke to me.

I was a massive music fan as a teenager, but I did not listen to lyrics—even though I started writing in a very self-serious way at the age of 15. I thought of myself as a young, brooding poet, but it just never occurred to me to care about lyrics. In fact, I found lyrics that were too in-your-face really intrusive, maybe because I was so into Creation Records and Manchester music, which wasn’t a lyrical thing really. I liked the Smiths a lot, but I found Morrissey way too over-the-top. It wasn’t till after I started making music that I realized how masterful Morrissey is—but I don’t want to give too much air to him.

Silver Jews: “Trains Across the Sea” (1994)

I couldn’t really talk about getting into lyrics without mentioning when I first heard Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted in 1992—for a bunch of 19-year-old dudes, that was a big “this guy is saying what I’m thinking” moment. 

I liked the Silver Jews singles that came out around the same time, but when I finally heard David Berman singing very clearly and more traditionally on Starlite Walker, that was the spark. This writing was as good as any I knew, and it was by some guy who was a bit older than me making indie-rock records. He had chosen to use this form to say these incredible things that you’d normally have to open a book to find. When I heard that, I was like, This is an art form that has room for me. There was no looking back. 

Besides Leonard Cohen and Berman, I can’t really think of anyone else that was operating at a very advanced poetic state. There’s so many cool lines in “Trains Across the Sea,” and they’re very subtle. His language would get more damaged and more arresting after that, but from the get-go, I was like, This is the guy.

In 2017, you worked with David Berman on music that was never released. Did that experience change the way you thought about your own songwriting?

I realized how different it was. I’m very cavalier and fast with the writing. It’s very much about whether it works as a musical phrase. When I worked with David, his writing was not show off-y at all. There were lines that I thought were incredible—amazing flash imagery—that he would just not consider using. I guess he covered a lot of that terrain already, and he wanted these very classy miniatures. And it had to be perfect on the page before he could ever consider singing it. And there was a lot of work, a lot of editing. It had to be just right. He wrote a lot to whittle it down to what you see, and that’s very different from how I work. There was serious craft that’s not part of my world.

Has part of you ever wanted to aspire to that kind of craft?

Deep down inside it didn’t interest me. I like it, but I can only be honest at this point. I don’t know if I’m just lazy or too distracted by the music I hear in my head the minute that these words get thrown together, which is something that wasn’t part of David’s process. I don’t totally know what it all means until the music is in place. The music is very much part of what grounds the words, in a world-building sense. I think a lot of times it’s the opposite for people, where the music is the wild stuff, and the words are supposed to be the description of what’s going on or the psychological state. But that’s just not how it works for me.

Syd Barrett: “It Is Obvious” (1970)

I put this on the list to remind myself of who I really am. I can still get very dogmatic about the lyrics of Syd Barrett. In 1995, in the first few months of me trying to write or sing songs, his music was the main thing that turned me around from being an American indie practitioner and got me into the idea of English mystics. On the very first Destroyer record, We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, there’s one half that sounds like pale imitations of lo-fi, Drag City artists, and then the other half, which I wrote after I started listening to The Madcap Laughs and Barrett by Syd Barrett. That’s the part that took over, and I never really looked back. When I heard those records, I was like, This confirms everything I already thought, I just never had an example of it.

Syd Barrett is the only person whose writing seems so part and parcel with the music, like he’s writing the words and the melody at the exact same time. Maybe he was. There’s a musical quality to the language, which leaves behind any traditional sense of meaning; I don’t know enough about literary studies to know if that’s what James Joyce was trying to do with fucking Finnegans Wake, but that’s the only time I’ve heard that in English-language singing. I think Barrett’s lyrics are considered infantile or nursery rhyme-y—I’m not sure if that’s because there was an entire psychic breakdown that accompanied them, but hearing them was really important on every level. His music is so emotionally resonant to me.

The very first line on “Is It Obvious?” just goes, “Is it obvious? May I say, oh baby, that it is found on another plane.” I was like, What does he fucking mean that it’s obvious? How can a song start like that? I found his songs so melodious, but also really deadpan. And he wasn’t using forced or florid language—it wasn’t ridiculous, psychedelic hippie shit. Even though I grew to love Bob Dylan later on, Syd Barrett seemed like a real antidote to the ridiculous beatnik imagery that Dylan was using in the mid ’60s about the “chrome horse” and the “diplomat” and the “Siamese cat” and all that stuff. It didn’t seem like a written thing that got planted onto a song. With Syd Barrett, you did not get the sense of a lyric sheet—the music and the lyrics became this one thing. Unfortunately, my only other example of someone who really nailed that as well is an American example by this guy Jim Morrison. Pure poetry, no lyric sheet.

The Doors: “Roadhouse Blues” (1970)

This isn’t the first time you’ve mentioned your love of the Doors to me in an interview.

Do I always just do it around you? It’s like I finally have someone who literally can’t get up and walk away. Because when I try this on someone who’s actually not forced to listen for a few minutes, they might pick up a knitting project or turn on Netflix.

When you talk about your admiration for Jim Morrison, are you trolling at all?

I’m really not. It comes from such a sincere place. I’m basically just a crusader, I guess—in olden times, I’d just be locked up or called a heretic for defiling the common view of things. A lot of boomers thought he was a total joke. And he was something Gen X despised. But I really thought Gen Z would have caught up to this love of Jim Morrison. Every year, I’m slowly more disappointed in the world—for a bunch of reasons, but this is one of them.

I’m not sure if the Doors are thought of as a joke anymore. I don’t think they’re really thought of at all.

I agree with you. I mean, those are painful words for me to hear, but I can’t deny that you speak the truth.

Listening to “Roadhouse Blues” again, maybe it’s the bluesiness of it that makes it seem dated.

But you know what else is blues and still considered very important music? Highway 61 Revisited. That’s pretty damn bluesy in my book. “Roadhouse Blues” has way less of a “folk singer decides to write surrealist lyrics” vibe than some of the things that are taken more seriously from that era. I just love, like, “Ashen lady, give up your vows… right now,” and the line about the beer: “Well, I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” It just swings.

My Doors thing goes back to the early 2000s, when I was 30 or so. In fact, I think [Destroyer’s 2004 album] Your Blues is probably named after something Jim Morrison says over and over again in “L.A. Woman.” His poetry just really works on me. I know it’s considered terrible, so it makes me worry that I don’t know what’s bad and what’s good. I mean, the albums are so uneven, there’s really bad songs and then incredible songs. But as far as the incredible songs go, I don’t know why they’re not considered more incredible than Bob Dylan lyrics or Patti Smith lyrics. I’m not trying to troll those artists, because I actively listen to their music and love them. I just don’t think they’re quite as good.

Bob Dylan: “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” (1983)

I have a very contentious relationship with Bob Dylan—not that I’ve ever met him, I just find him so flawed, but also so incredible. Sometimes I’m not sure that I’m a hundred percent on board with him being the master poet of the songwriting form in the English language, but I felt like it was disingenuous to not include him. I think he’s one of the greatest singers of all time, and that can go a long way. He’s an underrated singer and maybe an overrated lyricist, in my book. If there was going to be a Nobel Prize for someone writing songs, surely Leonard Cohen had to make the short list more times than Dylan. I would put Joni Mitchell above either of them, but hers is a level of mastery that is too far away. I can grab things from Dylan.

The stuff that gets called “Dylanesque” is super fucking boring to me, and when I see a comparison to him, I’ll usually cross the road to not listen to that music. There is stuff to use from the guy, but you have to do it in a manner that’s playful in the same way he is. I don’t find any wisdom in his music, per se. None. I don’t think he has much life experience because of the life he’s led, but there is just the way he slings around words that—especially in my 30s, around the time that I wrote the songs on Destroyer’s Rubies—had a hold on me. I like him at his most casual, and that’s why I included this song from Infidels—especially the line, “Come over here from over there, girl.” What a great, pointless way to start off a verse.

Did you see A Complete Unknown?

I tagged along on family movie night to that one. I don’t want to always bring it back to the Doors, but there’s only one biopic that I have any time for. The Dylan movie was functional, I guess. If you didn’t know anything about him, which I guess lots of people don’t, then it’s cool. But it’s not what I go to see a movie for. It could have been made for TV. But I thought the acting was all right, the impersonations. At least Todd Haynes’ Dylan movie [I’m Not There] was doing something different. But just telling the story doesn’t really embody the spirit of what Dylan actually does at all.

Lou Reed: “Ecstasy” (2000)

As an old person, I wanted to include a pick of an old person singing. I remember hearing this CD when I was living at my cousin’s house in Madrid in the winter of 2001, and I was just so moved by this song. It had all the qualities of what I love in a Lou Reed song—tough imagery; “alabaster” this and “tattoos” that—squeezed hard, which is what life does to you.

On the Have We Met tour, which is the one that got canceled two-thirds of the way through because of the coronavirus, we played this song a few times, and it was shockingly emotional. I would be holding the lyric sheet in my hand, kind of trembling. I was at a point in my life where I could sing it and feel elated and devastated at the same time. I was shocked that I could sink into the song, because so much of it felt like a death’s head. 

That’s something special with Lou Reed. I love David Bowie, and I’ve tried singing some Bowie songs, but I don’t get much by being face to face with the words. Actually, it’s the same with Bob Dylan: I’ve tried to sing a couple of his songs, but I don’t get much out of it. Singing this Lou Reed song was gutting, though.

Below you’ll find convenient playlists with Dan Bejar’s picks for the lyrics that changed his life—including a bunch of choices that we didn’t get to in the interview—for paying subscribers only. Your support makes it possible for us to keep going!