Dan Bejar is on the hunt for a pair of green socks. Actually, just one sock will do, but it must be solid green. It’s for his 11-year-old daughter, Gloria, who is working on a school project—a sock puppet, he thinks. So we hop in his hand-me-down Toyota hatchback and steer through Vancouver, toward a relic known as Kingsgate Mall. He says the shopping center used to be nicknamed “Murder Mall,” before adding, in his typical deadpan tone, “I don’t think anyone gets murdered there anymore.”
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. Everything here seems to be a knock-off, all the way down to the picture of a bulldog with a monocle in its eye and a cigar in its mouth hanging on one store’s wall. The main passageway is lined with beige tiles and, since this is the week before Christmas, filled with elderly women hocking holiday tchotchkes. They’ve got plenty of red stockings, but no green socks.
We head into an empty casualwear store. They have pink socks, penguin socks, plaid socks. Bejar spots a festive pair, bright green with a white toe and reindeer heads lining the ankle, and sends a picture of them to his wife with the caption, “Completely unacceptable?” (She confirms they are.) He heads into a dollar store and contemplates taking a green marker to some plain therapeutic socks. A stranger stops him: “Are you Dan? 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.”
After striking out at the mall, Bejar wants to try one more place, a nearby army surplus store. It’s where he bought a pair of cheap boots in the mid ’90s, when he first started writing songs as a 22-year-old college dropout enamored with the local underground rock scene. “I’m kinda scared to go in,” he says, walking past a life-sized military mannequin, armed with a rifle, standing guard outside the door. Inside, BB guns made to look like actual Uzis line the back wall, along with stickers and patches that read things like “FUCK OFF & DIE” and “I’M NOT TOO OLD YOUR MUSIC JUST SUCKS.” After some fast, fruitless browsing, Bejar is sufficiently disturbed by the store’s testosterone overload: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The search is over. He heads back into the city’s never-ending winter drizzle, sockless.
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. Shuffling along wet sidewalks, the tall, slightly hunched singer is layered in two weathered button ups and a black coat, his mess of curls tamed underneath a knit hat with braided tassels. As someone who was raised on the unshowy doctrine of old-school indie rock, he’s amusingly self-deprecating, bordering on defeatist. The singer-songwriter Neko Case, who played with Bejar for years in the Vancouver-bred indie-pop supergroup the New Pornographers and counts him as a huge influence on her own work, calls him “one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.” And in conversation, his dry, barbed wit is often as disarming as his wheezing laugh. He’s no longer the indie hardliner he was in his 20s, when he wrote songs that unabashedly equated bad taste with actual evil. But after a few beers, he can still be refreshingly blunt on topics ranging from the Hamilton 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”).
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. But there’s an off-the-cuff nature to his pretentiousness that makes it more endearing than pompous. “I’m not really a complicated thinker,” he says while tooling around one of his old neighborhoods. “Anything that unfolds itself in a subtle way is usually lost on me. I was always super inspired by this quote from Godard about how he’s read the first and last page of every book, and just sucks the life force out of it to his own ends.”
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. Given such heady source material, it’s unsurprising that his impressionistic lyricism has left some people a bit perplexed. 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. “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. Bejar refers to those ideas as “typical Destroyer bullshit.” His songs often center around people at the end of their rope, quixotic idealists fighting hopelessly against suffering, torment, oblivion. “Just going down with the ship, punching up,” he explains. 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, Have We Met, “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 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 Streethawk: A Seduction. One of his favorite songwriting rules is: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of, and try to make it sound beautiful.”
Bejar, a nervous performer, used to have to get loaded in order to step in front of a crowd at the start of his career. Now, he says, “I prefer being hungover onstage.” He rarely banters with fans, and he doesn’t want people singing along with him, either. It’s all part of an overarching artistic philosophy that cuts hard against the personal connections many artists aim to forge with their followers: “As a member of the audience for all the shows I’ve ever seen, I just wanted to be flummoxed. That’s all I ever ask from art. Just stagger me, stop me in my tracks. 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.
Through 12 albums, Bejar has worked with a number of loyal producers and instrumentalists who are crucial to Destroyer’s ever-changing sound. They have assisted him in tackling everything from offbeat indie folk to freewheeling rock’n’roll to wandering disco to string-laden balladry, bolstering Bejar’s singing as it’s evolved from manic to morose. With their ear for hooks and volume, the extended Destroyer crew acts as a welcome bridge between Bejar’s fevered musings and his audience. 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.
Still, the album finds Bejar sounding impossibly isolated. It’s the eeriest thing he’s ever done, a cracked mirror held up to a civilization burning and drowning toward extinction. It’s also pretty catchy. “I anchor shit around melody,” he says, apologetically. “It’s just the way it goes.” There’s a near-tropical jam about opening death’s door, a cyber-funk odyssey narrated by a devilish ringmaster, a nightmarish vision punctuated by a cataclysmic guitar solo. Bejar recorded the album’s vocals at night, at his kitchen table, into a microphone connected to his laptop, singing of serial killers and drowning pit ponies as his young daughter slept. His voice is unnervingly calm throughout, making his twisted imagery that much more sinister. “Even if I sound like someone who couldn’t be less in the world, I also somehow sound really hung up on the fucking hellfire reigning down on my hermit’s cave,” Bejar says. “The scary thing is I don’t think I’ve ever sounded more comfortable—or groovier.”
Bejar’s relationship with Vancouver involves a tangled web of frustration and weary acceptance. 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. 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. “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. “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. 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. 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. 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.
When Bejar was 13, his father passed away. He was 46 years old. “It’s like the last thing that made me,” Bejar says. “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. By 15, he was back in the Vancouver area, in a suburb called Richmond, itching to move into the city proper. He got closer while attending the nearby University of British Columbia, where he majored in English and minored in Philosophy. Around this time, he also wrote a short album review—byline: “Danny Bejar”—for the college radio station’s newspaper, in which he praised how indie rock trio Galaxie 500’s 1990 LP This Is Our Music had the “feeling of floating over a shitty part of town.” But during the entire three years he spent at school before dropping out, he only got two good grades, for courses in creative writing, and existentialism and phenomenology.
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. It’s where he recorded his first Destroyer album, 1996’s four-track experiment We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, as a twentysomething obsessed with the era’s proudly elusive standard bearers like Pavement, Smog, and Silver Jews. 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 loved lines in the sand and calling people out. 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. “It was just crumbling beneath the weight of young, shitty bohemia,” Bejar says.
A priceless document of this era is the 1996 video for a song called “Behind the Beehive,” by Newman’s early band, Zumpano. 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. 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). “He never took the mask off,” recalls Collins, who has since had a hand in the production of nearly every Destroyer album. “Nobody ever got to figure out who he was during the shoot. 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.
In 2001, it looked like Bejar’s years of toiling in Vancouver’s indie scene were about to pay off in a big way. The New Pornographers’ debut album, Mass Romantic, was blowing up beyond the city’s borders, and Bejar was putting together Destroyer’s ambitious, meta-glam opus Streethawk. Right at that moment, Bejar took off, first to Madrid, then Montreal. “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 back in the city by the end of that year.) But the unlikely moves boosted his burgeoning reputation as a shadowy indie rock renegade.
Throughout his life, Bejar has never really had a 9-to-5 job, and for the decade after he dropped out of school, he says he was likely living below the poverty line. 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. 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. And while he’s still good friends with Newman, Case, and Collins, Bejar isn’t sure if he’ll ever contribute to another New Pornographers record. “I’d have to write something that screamed their name,” he says, adding, “But if they passed through town, there’s no way I wouldn’t get on stage and do a song.”
Bejar has spent much of the last 20 years of his life living and working in a notorious stretch of Vancouver, just a few blocks from its touristy central hub, called the Downtown Eastside. 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. “I feel pretty comfortable here,” Bejar says. “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.
About 30 feet from where a man hammers in a white tarp to protect himself from the elements is the jam space where Bejar first met his wife, Sydney Hermant, a musician, visual artist, and curator, in the late ’90s. Bejar walks a bit further east and arrives at the boxy house they lived in from 2004 to 2012. It’s where the version of the band that recorded 2006’s rollicking Destroyer’s Rubies used to practice, loudly, in the living room, without having to worry about any noise complaints thanks to the harrowing conditions outside. 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 Music for Airports 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. It’s where they amassed the uneasy, quiet storm sounds of Kaputt, which gave Destroyer its first—and, to date, only—real taste of semi-success. “I spent a lot of time in that condemned building,” Bejar says, approaching wistfulness. “It most closely resembled a squat, except they paid money to be there. 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. Toward the end of 2011, JC/DC were evicted from the building after the city deemed the structure unsafe. 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.
Kaputt not only marked a commercial breakthrough for Destroyer—it landed at No. 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. Whereas his previous albums had him stuffing as many references, in-jokes, and wild images into his verses, which were sometimes delivered through a yelpy bray, on Kaputt, he cut back his songs’ word count and sang them in a terminally chill new manner. Bejar describes the initial concept behind Kaputt thusly: “Let’s make a record that sounds like you put it on at the salon or a dinner party, something that people wouldn’t instantly request to be taken off.” When the music started to meet those parameters, though, he panicked. 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. That didn’t happen, and by now Bejar has come up with a very Destroyer-style rationalization for the album’s unlikely popularity. “My vocals sound really dead inside, and what people reacted to the most was my absence,” he says with a knowing laugh.
About 10 blocks east of JC/DC’s old building is the studio’s current home, a one-time paint store Carswell and Collins share with several visual artists. Carswell shows us a gear room filled with teetering equipment, a mixing console once used by the Jacksons, and a pebble sculpture in a bathtub that looks like a baby elephant with no head. 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. After what Bejar describes as a rewarding but frustrating few months, though, he pulled the plug on the sessions. Berman went onto record the album elsewhere, with members of the rootsy indie band Woods, and it was released in July 2019 under the moniker Purple Mountains. Four weeks later, Berman, who suffered from what he called “treatment-resistant depression,” killed himself.
“We never really talked about what happened here,” Bejar says, gingerly, thinking back to the unfinished sessions with Berman. “I never got a chance to.”
Berman first emailed Bejar out of the blue in the fall of 2016, and the two soon made loose plans to work together. “I told him to fire me right away,” Bejar says, laughing. “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. 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.
“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. But I think he wanted to do something different. So a lot of those amazing pieces of writing didn’t get used,” Bejar says. “It was interesting to see. Like, wow, this is how the great ones do it. Chipping away at this page. It made me realize how different it is than what I do, which is way more thoughtless. Literally without thinking.”
Bejar also remembers desperately trying to get Berman to sing in the studio, and exchanging concerned glances with Malkmus. “Steve just looked at me and was like, Good luck, my friend,” Bejar recalls. “My heart was in the right place, but I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I was the last person to know how fucked I was.”
He says the improvisatory music they recorded is notably different from the more straightforward, country-style songs that ended up on the Purple Mountains album. “It was incredibly loud and brittle and dry and compressed, with this Serge Gainsbourg-style voice-of-God over whatever is happening beneath,” Bejar says, nodding to the legendary French singer. “But I don’t think that’s something that really spoke to him in the least.”
Bejar says there’s “halfway to final mixes of an album’s worth of music” from the sessions, adding that whether it ever comes out is up to Berman’s label, Drag City. Considering the possibility of its release, he adds, thinking of Berman, “I don’t know if he would have wanted the world to hear it.”
Bejar largely wrote Have We Met in the year following the Berman sessions. 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. 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.
The final member of Have We Met’s creative triumvirate is faithful Destroyer guitarist Nicolas Bragg, who’s been in the band since 2002. “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 Have We Met, Bragg’s berzerk style adds an element of unpredictability to Collins’ exacting production. Bejar, Bragg, and Collins completed most of their individual work for the album separately, in their own homes, in part because Bejar wanted to lean into the digital, vacuum-sealed sound of so many modern recordings. 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. “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. But for all his doomsaying, after spending some time with Bejar, it’s hard not to notice his life seems kind of great. 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. 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. After being told that his voice was too weird to be featured in TV shows, he’s scored syncs on the high school comedy A.P. Bio and the teen suicide drama 13 Reasons Why. He recently converted the garage behind his house into a small recording studio—expertly soundproofed, so as to not disturb his neighbors. He tours a couple of months a year and spends the rest of the time with his family. 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 Mad Max: Fury Road. “As much as I love Fury Road, I don’t want to live on Fury Road,” he says. I ask what he’s doing in his life so that he, or his daughter, will not have to live on Fury Road. 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 maybe my first protest like that,” he says, sheepishly. He remembers feeling tense amid the bottleneck crush of bodies on the Cambie Street Bridge and thinking, What the fuck’s going on?
The day after our interview, Bejar sends me an email with the subject line: “creepy middle-aged guy at giant teenage protest.” I open it to find a picture taken at the march that appeared in a local paper. And there he is, at the center of the frame, in a blazer and sunglasses, sticking up out of a sea of kids. He looks a little lost. A little bewildered. A little flummoxed.
