The Daily Cardinal: In you explore what you refer to as \European Blues."" What do you mean by that?
Daniel Bejar: [sighs] That's the question that's been stumping me left and right. I guess I kind of just like the term, for one. It's a little bit nonsensical in some ways, just in the fact that the blues as it's understood is such an American art from. I guess I thought of the blues as a certain kind of melancholic peoples' music, but I was kind of going for a real Old World dilapidated version of that-Old World as in European sounding just in terms of musical choices within the songs and the instrumentation.
It seems that many critics characterize your songs as ""challenging"" or ""not immediately accessible."" How do you feel about those labels?
I don't know. I personally try to make them as memorable as possible. I hear lots of people say that it takes them a few listens to get into the records, which I guess is cool because it means that you are probably discovering different things or happening upon different things with different listens. But, personally, when a song or a piece of music resonates with me, it's pretty instantaneous. The stuff that I've kind of hated, which I've grown to think is OK or could understand it's merits. But I've never really gone from being held at arms length by something to really, really embracing it. So I don't know. It makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. At the same time, I know that the melodies are a bit skittish, and just vocally, the sound of my voice, I've been told takes a while to get used to. And the songs are a bit dense in places, maybe, and kind of are run by the lyrics, which is usually the opposite of how a song works for the most part.
Is that a conscious effort on your part, to run counter to how things normally work?
I just write words first, and then there will either be some semblance of a melodic phrase that is hanging off of the lyrical phrase, or I come up with something when, at the end of the day, before I have to teach the song to the band or go into the studio, I'll pick up a guitar and actually try and figure out a chord progression and more concrete melodic stuff. And I think that's kind of ass-backwards compared to what other people have told me the way they do things. It's usually a progression or a melodic refrain and, in the end, even in the studio people are scribbling down lyrics trying to come up with something that works with it. So I think that musically, that way probably ends up sounding maybe a bit more natural than the way I do it, because if you write the words first, words tend to jump around and the cadences kind of dart around and don't musically maybe make a lot of sense at first. I try and smooth all that stuff out, though, as best as I can.
Destroyer has gone through multiple line-up changes. What kind of an impact has that had on your sound?
I think probably a huge impact. As a musician, I can come up with little parts and I can play, adequately, chords on a guitar and a piano, maybe, but on all the records, people who have played on it or even recorded it have played a huge role in shaping what things sound like, from the point that when I come in with a song and play it on the guitar and at the end of the day it comes out completely almost unrecognizable, in the way it is morphed in the hands of these four other people, aside from the vocal melody and the words and the chords themselves, that is. So yeah, things change a lot.
What bands have you been listening to recently?
Maybe because I've been running around a lot getting ready to go on this tour, and also I'm in the middle of moving, that I haven't really been listening to a lot of music. But there are records that came out last year that I like. I usually really enjoy the Neil Haggerty records. Frog Eyes, the band I'm touring with, I think they've put out really great records, and they actually just put out a kind of acoustic mini-album that I think is really great. I got an advance copy of the A.C. Newman record that's really good. Stuff like that.
How would you describe your experience with the New Pornographers?
Speaking of A.C., I don't know, I mean, I don't know how I could give it a blanket characterization. It was something I did a fair bit back in the '90s, and the process of playing shows and recording that first album was fairly involved. I had four songs on the album that I wrote, and on the last one of the three songs that were mine, I pretty much had no involvement whatsoever in the way that they sound aside from coming in one afternoon to sing them. I pretty much found out were they were going to be like probably around the time when everyone else did when they opened up their copies of the record and played them. So there's a bunch of old songs I'm kicking around. Carl [Newman] kind of plucked a couple of those from the library from way back, '97. And then I coughed up a couple new ones, one of which they ended up doing, the other one, we didn't really nail. But I don't play live with them or anything. I'm not really too functional in the studio, either. I'm kind of like a satellite songwriting member, and we'll see if that keeps going.
I read somewhere that you responded to the unexpected success of the New Pornographers' Mass Romantic by ""not showing up."" What did you mean by that?
[laughs] I don't think I said that. I think somebody said that about me splitting-I don't think I said that. I left Vancouver for about a year, which is where the New Pornographers work and play, and it was at that point that I kind of bowed out of the band. Made sense, since I was living thousands of miles away. And at that point, things were kind of taking off but nowhere near to the extant that they would later, I mean the way things would happen in 2001 and 2002, and then when Electric Version came out. It's not like I was desperately trying to shy away from success, or being able to pay my bills. I also dissolved an incarnation of Destroyer that had been together for three years and recorded two albums, both of which came out before Mass Romantic. So I don't know, it's something for people to write about if they are inclined, but it's not really all that dramatic.
Have you ever played a show in Madison?
No, I haven't. This will be the first time I've been in Madison, so I'm excited. I have no idea what our show will be like, but I always hear of people having fun when they play Madison.
Many of the songs on sound pretty ambitious and have this big, theatrical sound. Do you try to replicate that live or is it a more stripped-down version?
I think live it's ambitious in a different way. Like I said, I'm touring with this band called Frog Eyes who have also learned the bulk of the songs off and a couple of older ones, so they're going to play them as the Destroyer band and also do a set as themselves. But I think they have a flair for drama, especially in their live attack, that I probably couldn't dream of touching-they've upped the ante, I think. But it's a full rock band sound. It's not really courting the pristine, crystalline digi sounds of the record.
I've read many critics who comparison your sound to Bowie's. How do those comparisons make you feel?
I don't really care. The classic early '70s Bowie sound was something like a certain line-up that Destroyer had a few years back took a crack at, not necessarily only Bowie, but that kind of English Glam rock music seemed to be a good backdrop for some of these songs I was writing, kind of a specific set of songs. I haven't really felt that comparison holds really much water in the last few years with the other records I've done. I kind of like the way he sings, but as far as a songwriter goes, he'd probably be way, way down the list as far as influences. You know, I think someone reads about something somewhere and it sticks so they write about that, and I think that things can be passed down through the ages just with one press sheet.
If could destroy one thing, what would it be?
[laughing] Oh my God, I can't answer that! I can't think of a single thing right now that I'm dying to destroy. But I know that they are out there. To those people out there that I can't think of right now, I know that you are out there, and your names will come to me next time this question is asked.
