Destroyer’s Dan Bejar says the band’s new album, Poison Season, ‘just reflects the kind of music I’ve been listening to.’Fabiola Carranza/The Canadian Press
The music of Dan Bejar's Destroyer project has taken many forms in the past 20 years, from synth-laden soundscapes to skronky acoustic folk-rock. In 2011, he unexpectedly earned the most attention of his career with the release of Kaputt, a nine-song pop album that blends smooth jazz and yacht rock and may or may not have spawned a whole generation of imitators.
After four years, Bejar and his band finally released its follow-up, Poison Season, in August. It's at once more subtle and more bombastic than its predecessor. There's chamber pop (Girl in a Sling), swinging Springsteenian jams (Dream Lover), and songs that incorporate both approaches (Hell). They have even turned the ambient 2010 track Archer on the Beach into a "smoky, late-night jam." The Globe and Mail spoke to Bejar by phone in Vancouver just before he and his band crossed the border to begin touring Poison Season.
You created this piece of art that had a huge reaction, mused about following it up with a disco salsa record, threw that out, and made Poison Season. Your photographer-pianist Ted Bois said that when shooting the album art for Kaputt, he tried to create the image of a "disillusioned, alienated, existentially bored" character. In recent interviews, it almost feels like that has been your reaction to Kaputt. Do you think that's true?
It seems like that's become part of the narrative somehow. I know that as a lowly musician, that's not really how I operate. I can't really work conceptually like that. I just write the songs, and then I imagine a world for them and I just follow what I'm into. It's more just the story of the shit that I'm into. I think, also, there's probably a lot of people who didn't know what Destroyer was before Kaputt. Maybe even a lot of music writers. It wasn't part of people's worlds. But if they listened to Destroyer before that, I think that the distance between Kaputt and Poison Season would seem nominal at best.
It's so many of the same players playing in their distinct style. If anyone saw our show in 2012, they'd be like, "Oh, I totally know what this record is." The way that band sounded onstage is pretty much what we did – with the added element of these 20th-century chamber treatments that happened with the string quintet. But none of it is supposed to be a reaction for or against the record that came before it. It's just me attending to my needs.
How did the string aesthetic come to be?
It really just reflects the kind of music I've been listening to. Just like a baby in the store – I grab at it and I want it for myself. I haven't really been listening to much rock music in the last few years. When I started making Kaputt, I was listening to a lot of jazz. And from there, I started listening to jazz vocalists for maybe the first time in my life. So I was listening to Johnny Hartman sing his version of Lush Life and blown away. Or I would listen to I Loves You, Porgy. And, probably more than anything, I listened to the original versions of Mack the Knife. That was probably the biggest inspiration for Poison Season.
All the songs have a history of orchestration. Through Scott Walker, I got really into Frank Sinatra. I also got really into the last few records that Billie Holiday did, when she was so ravaged – her voice, she sounded very damaged, but it's still really swinging, with its amazing phrasing, and cloaked in strings. I also listened to lots of film soundtracks. That was probably the other main thing that I wanted Poison Season to have – a widescreen, cinematic quality.
How do you plan on translating that sound live?
I think the band is really good at taking whatever song we want to take and making it our own. Some of those are going to sound like the versions that appear on albums and some of them are going to not sound like that. If it feels good to us, then we play it. But I'm not going on tour with a 13-piece. There's eight of us; I'm not going to add a string quintet. We're not going to get a second bus for members of the VSO.
When you toured Kaputt in 2011, the War on Drugs opened for some dates. After the band put out Lost in the Dream last year, your saxophonist, Joseph Shabason, played with them in Toronto. Have you found Kaputt's sound or instrumentation has rubbed off on people?
I think [War on Drugs front man Adam Granofsky] is pretty into seventies rock, and saxophone is a pretty standard instrument for that decade. No one would blink an eye at it. I don't see Kaputt as a torchbearer for the saxophone as an instrument. It's definitely something that people wanted to talk about when Kaputt came out – like, "I can't believe there's saxophone on the record" – even though there's more trumpet on the record. I'm not sure people know the difference between the sound of a saxophone and a trumpet, which I find mind-blowing. Some day I'm gonna write an essay about it.
I've heard things where people say, "That that kind of sounds Kaputt-ish," but not in any way that I want to be connected to. Even when the record came out, there seemed to be a desire to line it up with the aesthetic of a bunch of younger bands that were around at the same time that I felt nothing for. Or part of some grander zeitgeist, I guess. I don't know what kind of influence Destroyer's had on anyone. It's possible that maybe we're responsible for a lot of terrible music you hear right now. But I don't think War on Drugs is one of those examples, because a) I think they're good, and b) I think they have a love for a certain era where the sax is definitely in play.
Destroyer plays Toronto's Danforth Music Hall on Sept. 30, Montreal's Théâtre Fairmount on Oct. 1, and Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom on Oct. 17.
This interview has been edited and condensed.