Dan’s Boogie, the fourteenth album by Canadian indie rock rogues Destroyer, is an album of decaying glamour shot through with moments of dusky beauty. A week into their tour, and ahead of their gig at Mr. Smalls Theatre on Tue., Oct. 7, Pittsburgh City Paper spoke over Zoom with Dan Bejar, Destroyer’s founder and songwriter.
How’s it feel playing the songs from the new album live?
Those are feeling really good. We make records in a very piecemeal way, people flying in tracks from thousands of miles away. We’re all scattered. So it’s cool to finally get in a room and make mincemeat of the songs. We’re a much louder, brasher version of what happens on the record.
And some of the new record lends itself really well to our natural dynamic on stage. “The Same Thing As Nothing at All” became a kind of love letter to the band. [John Collins, Destroyer’s bassist and producer of many of their albums] just started pushing it in that direction. It started to sound more and more what the seven of us sound like when we get into a room.
What are earlier shows like versus later ones in a run like this?
At first it’s just kind of tense. We hadn’t toured in three years. So it’s just finding your feet on stage. And then somewhere in the middle, you become more like a … gladiator zombie. Which maybe has more to do with the lifestyle, or the travel, and the living on the bus, and all these things, which are kind of not natural.
And maybe as you get older, they become even more surreal, and maybe slightly punishing. But the shows themselves are always good. They’re always the highlight.
Your recent setlists are primarily drawn from Kaputt (2011) onwards, with some songs from Destroyer’s Rubies (2006) thrown in.
The band’s been pretty steady since 2012, when [Josh Wells] joined on drums. So maybe we lean more into songs that everyone played on. Maybe we shy away from all the copious chord changes I was obsessed with in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Some older songs might sneak out as the tour progresses.
You’ve said this album feels like a mashup of Poison Season (2015) and Your Blues (2002). Is that something you thought about early on in your writing?
It’s something I never thought about until the record was completely done. Those two albums are quite different from each other. To say your record is a cross between Poison Season and Your Blues puts you in a kind of giant, nebulous zone. There are a lot of canned MIDI strings that haven’t been on a record in a while, as opposed to Poison Season, where we actually had string players. But then there are also a few songs which really showcase the band, which I don’t think the previous couple records really did. They were more kind of a chopped and screwed production aesthetic. So maybe that’s what I meant. I don’t think I write in a florid manner, the way that I did in the Your Blues era of my songwriting.
You’ve talked about “Bologna” as a torch song. To me, the entire record gestures at love and longing and loss. Is this the closest thing that there is to a Destroyer love album?
I don’t know if thematically, that’s … I tend to write in flashes, so I’m not sure. And it’s generally pretty imagistic. I will say, I listen to a lot of traditional jazz vocalists from the 20th century. Crooners and their songbook are pretty pointed at heartbreak. Not even heartbreak, but just love’s impossibility, or something like that. Some of that language is bound to seep into what I do, because I like that tradition of downtrodden singing.
There’s no Destroyer without you. But when you refer to Destroyer, you refer to it as a project or band. You don’t refer to yourself. But now your name is in the title of the album.
The title came about in a very joking manner. It was like a placeholder for that song (“Dan’s Boogie,” the title track). That’s kind of a swinging number. I was probably poking fun at myself when I sent it to John, because it has a fairly dumbed-down, kind of pseudo-swing, jazzy piano chord progression. Played really terribly by me, on the demo.
And then it was just like the specter of the title started to just creep over the proceedings, so that by the time we finished the record, I just knew it was gonna be called Dan’s Boogie. I thought that maybe this was a very personal record, or more personal than other Destroyer albums. And so, I could afford to insinuate myself into the title. And I thought it was kind of a funny title. But not funny in a way that would ruin proceedings.
There’s a lot of old man humor in the songs. (An instant classic, from “Dan’s Boogie”: “You fill your glass / You check out a horse’s ass / It’s not bad / It could be worse.”) Which kind of surprises me still. I guess I’m creeping towards the stage of my life where the darker the art gets, the more comic elements start to seep in.
In what ways do you feel like this is a more personal record?
I don’t really know. I was very, very conscious of the songwriting process for the first time in my life. I wasn’t just a bird on the sill visited by his muse. That’s not the way it went down, and usually that is. It was kind of, like, spill my guts to get the song written.
I don’t even know what that word “personal” means. I don’t like to use it. So much songwriting is rewarded for its personal quality or its honesty. These words that don’t mean anything, really, when you’re constructing something. But for some reason, when someone sings a song, you really get rewarded for at least creating the illusion that you’re confessing. So not personal that way. But I think my voice really sounds like me in these songs. I finally arrived at it. It’s kind of hard won.
You took some time off from writing for about a year, but you had been doing a prolonged solo tour. Does solo touring have anything to do with the transition from one album to the next?
I would say for the last 15 to 20 years, it has been part of the process of purging the album before, and just going out by myself. Forcing myself to play guitar, which is an instrument I don’t touch with a 10-foot pole, unless I have to. Singing a bunch of old songs that the band never touches. But also, in the last few years, it’s just, to be blunt, an economic necessity. I just have to go out and sing for my supper. Which will be more and more the case, I assume, in this crazy, crazy world we call the music business.
You’ve mentioned King Lear in reference to “Cataract Time,” with the idea of a cataract being some sort of opening or rupture. And you said in another interview that you think about King Lear more as you get older.
I was being asked questions about eye surgery. I was like, no, I’m thinking cataract more in the old usage of the word, or even the French or Spanish word for it.
But I like Shakespeare a lot. I think about Shakespeare all the time. I’ve always been into the theme of the gnarliness of the world being revealed to someone in a violent kind of way.
Destroyer: Dan’s Boogie Tour with Jennifer Castle. 8 p.m. Doors at 7 p.m. Tue., Oct. 7. Mr. Smalls Theatre. 400 Lincoln Ave., Millvale. $33.45. mrsmalls.com
This article appears in Fall Guide 2025.
