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Dan Bejar, known for his work with The New Pornographers, Swan Lake, and most notably, Destroyer—is a walking indie rock enigma. You’d go insane trying to derive true universal meaning from his songs, filled with cryptic language, poetic phrasing about mythical beasts, death, and wonder, and a musical backdrop that dramatically shifts from post-punk, indie rock, free jazz, synth punk. He’s the kind of musician who goes through periods of intensity, almost fugue states as he’s writing his albums, and sometimes forgets the intent almost purposefully. His songs stem from a pure love of language.
For his latest, Labyrinthitis, Bejar once again worked with his longtime collaborator, John Collins to create a wonderfully weird and abstract piece of cryptic indie rock. At one point, he thought he was experiencing some sort of sickness, brought on by periods of vertigo and ringing in his ears. He looked up his symptoms and found the word “Labyrinthitis,” which he still admits sounds like a made-up word.
We spoke with Dan about some of the mysterious sounds and phrases on his latest album, his love of Jim Morrison, his weird relationship with Nick Cave’s music, and references to dark magic.
PAN M 360: Hey Dan. How’s your day so far?
Dan Bejar: It’s been pretty easy. Went for a stroll in the sun, and bought some bread. How about yours?
PAN M 360: I just came back from a Nick Cave exhibition opening here in Montreal.
Dan Bejar: What is that even? What do you go and look at as you stare at the walls?
PAN M 360: It’s basically laid out so every room is a different chapter of his life. His Berlin years or how we started the Bad Seeds and all that and then at the very end, he appeared and did a little media Q&A.
Dan Bejar: I’d like to be in the kind of the house that he was squatting in with a friend or whatever, where he has a bunk bed and his typewriter setup. There’s some famous picture of him in Berlin, working away on that book and looking pretty gnarly. I think that would be a pretty cool room to recreate.
PAN M 360: Would you ever consider having an exhibition on your trajectory as an artist. A Destroyer exhibit in Canada or something?
Dan Bejar: I don’t think so. I mean, it’d be funny to be approached about such a thing. I think you probably have to buy into your living legend status. Which is understandable if you’re Nick Cave because that’s where he’s at right now. Like there’s a Bob Dylan museum opening in Tulsa or somewhere like that. I think it’s probably a similar vibe. But no one’s knocking on my door asking for copies of my correspondences or anything like that.
PAN M 360: We can get off of Nick Cave, but one thing he talked about was ego being an absolute killer when you’re so revered. How is that as an accomplished artist yourself?
Dan Bejar: It’s interesting, especially in North America, he’s had this kind of a slow and steady rise to the kind of Godhead figure of English language songwriting. So maybe when it’s a slow and steady rise like that, as opposed to just like a pop version, where you explode onto the scene and are just massive and then you disappear, it makes it seamless and less weird to recreate the different rooms of your life in an institution.
I have like a deeply conflicted relationship with the guy in that he’s written songs that are among my very favourite songs and put out records that I’m really attached to. I don’t really know the stuff between The Good Son and The Boatman’s Call, which are two of my favourite records. I did spend a lot of time listening to Skeleton Tree, which I thought was weird because that’s not a record you really just throw on while you’re doing the dishes.
PAN M 360: Have you seen parallels between his music and yours throughout the years?
Dan Bejar: Maybe but I also have a contentious relationship with him, because I know that he has a really strong work ethic. He has kind of an office space where he goes, and he just punches the clock and shoots, like a nine to five job. And I’ve just never been able to do it. It’s so different from how I operate.
PAN M 360: Yeah I feel you’re more of the guy who has a bunch of phone recordings or voice memos, singing things or phrases you find interesting?
Dan Bejar: Yeah I sing ideas. And usually, my ideas show up with melodies attached and that’s why I think they’re singable. It’s like it’s God’s clue that they’re ideas with melodies. And, I’ll string them together because certain ones will talk to others really well. Sometimes it will be chronological, I’ll do a bunch in a row and that will be the song. It wasn’t always like that, though. I used to like have a book that I’d write in and then I’d sit around all day long and strumming the guitar. The chords and melodies would kind of get smushed together at some point. And that was like Destroyer for definitely for the first 10 or 12 years.
PAN M 360: And I’ve noticed that you have been adding more musical space in your music. I think Kaputt was when I took note of it. But this album really has lots of room for each instrument to breathe and the vocals are sometimes very minimal. Was that a conscious choice?
Dan Bejar: Yeah I think so. Compared to the way I used to write, which was kind of almost like a dare or a trick, like trying and fit all this language into a song. That’s not really the case anymore. That’s why the song “June” was really fun was because I could just lay into that shit and narrate these strange images and strange situations and just treat it as an acting job.
PAN M 360: You’re talking about the spoken word part in June where you just kind of go crazy?
Dan Bejar: Yeah just being free of song structure once and for all. That was kind of like one of the illuminating and terrifying liberation moments on the record.
PAN M 360: Yeah it’s almost like slam poetry. Definitely the wildest moment on the record.
Dan Bejar: You know there would have been a time in my life where someone said, ‘This feels like slam poetry to me.’ I would have thrown myself off a cliff. But I don’t know. Where I’m at right now. I’m kind of just fine with that. I went into it the way Jim Morrison would approach it.
PAN M 360: He’s someone you’re usually trying to channel?
Dan Bejar: I mean as a singer, and as a poet, he speaks to me more than someone like Nick Cave. It seems to be like just a shadow that I can’t help a walk in these days. I think about it all the time. That being said, I think I try and channel a bloated middle-aged version of him … not the young Dionysian version.
PAN M 360: That’s a little self-deprecating no?
Dan Bejar: I just understand what I currently am. I’m turning 50 this year so it might be hard for me to get into the leather pants right now.
PAN M 360: We spoke once before, maybe five years ago, and you told me that you want Destroyer songs to feel like a random page in a spy novel. Do you still agree with that statement?
Dan Bejar: That’s funny. I totally 100% agree with that, but I didn’t think I was feeling that five years ago. But I’m pretty consistent these days. I have really just two or three hang-ups and I guess that’s one of them espionage but in a really disoriented way—just like cut up, cut up espionage.
PAN M 360: I Googled “Labyrinthitis” and found that its to do with an inner ear infection and periods of vertigo? Did you experience that?
Dan Bejar: I’m still not really sure what it is. I did have a phase where I guess I had really bad what you call tinnitus symptoms. Like the ringing of the ears, and hearing loss. I wasn’t listening to music because it was painful. I definitely couldn’t be around the loud sound. And it seemed to be accompanied as well with yeah, fucking vertigo man. I mean, the tinnitus … just comes with the territory of exposing yourself to really loud rock music for 30 years. And the vertigo was just a weird new thing. It flared up and it went away within a week or so. But you know, it was one of those moments last year where I was like ‘What the hell’s going on?’ And I came across that word. I kind of lost interest in any kind of self-diagnosis and the more I got into it, I looked at that word as a jumble of letters and it sounded completely made up.
PAN M 360: I honestly thought it was a made-up word as well.
Dan Bejar: Right? It looks 100% made-up and if it’s not made up someone made up that definition in the last 10 years. It seems like too much out of some like Italian modernist, short story, or something. I just kept thinking about it. I like the connotations of it, not so much the clinical stuff, but the connotations of like disorientation, vertigo, and nausea. And I like the connotations of just what definitions you can invent for yourself. Like, is it about being addicted to mazes? Maybe the idea of getting lost is a clinical condition.
PAN M 360: Getting lost in a labyrinth.
Dan Bejar: Yeah or trapped. It also kind of implies a spell or some kind of magic, potentially, like evil, dark magic (laughs). Perhaps even some kind of beast that lurks inside the labyrinth that is your undoing.
PAN M 360: There’s that line in “Tintoretto, It’s for You” ‘Do you remember the mythic beast.’ Is that where that idea came from?
Dan Bejar: I gotta say that the song was finished before I found the word. That’s just kind of how my mind works and I gravitate to certain words. So I’m not surprised it all connects. It’s a weird song, but when I just kind of scan it peripherally, it seems to be like a pretty steady meditation on the Grim Reaper coming to knock on your door, telling you it’s time.
