Thoughts on Destroyer's Dan's Boogie
I find it hard to recall exactly when I got into Dan Bejar’s music as Destroyer. It must have been sometime in the late-2000s when CBC Radio 3 and the Polaris Music Prize were still significant institutions in millennial Canadian cultural life. Bejar was renowned for his work on classic records by The New Pornographers, and people wrote rapturously online about Destroyer’s 2006 album Rubies on the then-robust mp3 music blog infrastructure. Rubies was an LP that hit me hard as a teenager newly obsessed with the cryptic and loquacious lyricism of classic Dylan. Other artists that I held in high regard like Owen Pallett and Rollie Pemberton themselves loved Bejar’s work, as evinced by amazing cultural artifacts like this video of Pallett performing live with Pemberton and Bejar—doing Bejar’s “An Actor’s Revenge” off of his orchestral MIDI epic, 2004’s Your Blues—at Fun Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, TX, in 2007 that has sub-100 views(!) since being posted in 2009.
What is significant about Bejar’s work as Destroyer, however, is that—unlike so many other artists of that period of 2000s CanIndie—it has remained vital across the ensuing 20-odd years, rescuing him from both the nostalgia festival circuit that even acts younger than him have succumbed to recently, and from being consigned to the dustbin of indie history like … say … the Shout Out Out Out Outs and Woodpigeons of the world. As erstwhile indie luminaries Arcade Fire queasily and depressingly kick into gear with yet another Super Secret Album Rollout full of facepaint, costumes, and cryptic teasers—hoping that we’ll overlook the fact that frontman Win Butler was credibly accused in 2022 of sexual misconduct by at least five people and somehow be able to sing the whooah-oh-ohs once again—I’ve been reflecting fondly on Bejar’s understated moral compass, workmanlike pace, and consistently stellar output over the past 15 years that I have been a card-carrying Destroyer fan. By all accounts, he lives a comfortable life in Vancouver with his wife, Sydney Hermant, and his now teenage daughter. He pops up every couple of years to release another statement that both confounds and delights, maybe does some live dates—solo acoustic in an homage to his earlier, folkier material, or with his killer band—and then retreats for a few years again, but not too long. Bejar is a classic Gen X hipster archetype. He’s arch, knowing, over it as soon as you’re into it, keenly aware of his place in the broader culture, and, increasingly, his estrangement from that culture.
Destroyer’s longevity across the past 15 years can basically be chalked up to the artistic rebirth that was his 2011 album, Kaputt. Rock critic Steven Hyden recently ranked the album #2 in a clickbaity list of “The Best Indie Rock Albums Of The 21st Century,” and, honestly, it’s hard to disagree. The album, which was already fresh as hell in 2011, has aged like fine wine across the ensuing years. It’s hard to understate how daring it was in 2011. Sonically, Kaputt almost single-handedly restored the cultural cachet of maligned genres like sophisti-pop in the indie cultural zeitgeist, making signifiers like garish horns and extended nylon-string guitar intros palatable to an audience that, a few years before, would’ve recoiled at them in horror, clutching their Jay Reatard albums. Lyrically, Bejar drastically stripped back his verbiage to vexing, little koans1 that he would sing over the album’s lush soundscapes, ostensibly while sprawled out on a couch in the studio.
Hilariously, Kaputt anticipated the indie cultural vibe shift so well that it proved to be his biggest “hit,” bearing at least a family resemblance to the trendy subgenre Chillwave, and getting Destroyer a much-coveted late-night TV performance on Fallon:
Bejar was eight albums in and close to 40 when Kaputt came out—at least a decade older than many of his buzzband contemporaries like Washed Out’s Ernest Greene and Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick—and, as with many things Bejar-related, you get a sense of his slight bemusement at the album’s success. As he wryly said, reflecting on the relationship between the LP’s lyrical style and its commercial performance four years after its release in a career-spanning interview with SPIN, “My absence from the record helped.”
Destroyer releases his new album, Dan’s Boogie, 14 years and 4 full-length albums after Kaputt. All of those ensuing albums have ranged from good to great, with my personal favourite probably being 2020’s laptop-pop gesture Have We Met, though that can change day to day for me.2 The zeitgeist has now fully passed him by, and he really has nothing to prove. He has forged a career with easily one of the strongest bodies of work in contemporary Canadian music, though he remains a tour opener for the likes of Father John Misty. This is maybe how he likes it? It’s a bit hard to get a sense of his read on that.
Regardless, Dan’s Boogie arrives as yet another wonderful Destroyer record. It’s a leaner work, clocking in at 37 minutes total, however, over that short runtime, it manages a thoroughly satisfying tour of the Bejar discography. A live drum kit is back and played heavily by Joshua Wells on cuts like the massive, glammy opener, “The Same Thing as Nothing at All,” the whimsical title track, and the frenetic “Sun Meet Snow.” This is a change after the past couple LPs filled with more synthetic beats. That said, studio experimentation isn’t completely absent from this project, as evinced by the absolutely gorgeous trip-hop(?) first single, “Bologna,” which features vocals from Fiver’s Simone Schmidt.
My favourite moment on Dan’s Boogie is easily its eight-minute penultimate cut, “Cataract Time,” though.3 This track provides the LP with its lush, sighing Kaputt-style moment. John Collins’ production overflows with filigree harps and a steady rhythm section before it devolves into an exquisite ambient jazz outro. Lyrically, it contains Bejar’s most wistful verses on the record:
You're sick of winning games
Been out on the road too long
Carve yourself out of illusion
You take the long way round
A setting sun
You don't know what you're doing
On the wrong side of town
Wastrels look at you sideways
As if to say, "What happened?"
The rich man looks at you sideways
To say, "What happened to you, boy?
You on Cataract Time?"
You're tired of pretending
You're tired—
Of playing pretend
This time, it's real
It's real, you're on Cataract Time
Every day we give up time
We pour the drink into a vast glass
We act fast, we think we know
Enough to go on, on Cataract Time
I wear see-through too much
And take strolls downtown
Thinking it's a garden of shame
You take the night train and live
To see another day, another day
Another day, another day
Another day
Who knows exactly what “cataract time” is? Likely only Bejar, but it’s a gorgeous, evocative phrase. Bejar expounded on the song a bit in a recent interview with Our Culture, speaking with rare candour:
“I find that song, ‘Cataract Time’, kind of important to me. If I had to pick out a song and the lyrics in a song, I’d probably pick that.
[…]
There are lines that feel very personal or very much describe where I was at while walking around the day I wrote that song. ‘Carve yourself out of illusion’ – what is it? – ‘You choose the wrong way around a setting sun.’ That song speaks to a lot of the stuff I picked as examples of influences [earlier in the interview]: wandering through the streets and not recognizing the streets, not recognizing the world around you, having what used to be familiar slowly erased. Things that are normal as you get older, as you get into feelings of entering the last act of your life, I suppose, if a life is three acts. Just how disorienting that can be at first. And also, ideas decay. But also, the speed at which the world wants to erase itself these days, whether through some violent act or just a slow fade.”
These lines from “Cataract Time” and Bejar’s reflection on them suggest, to me, what could be a potential aesthetic direction for Destroyer’s Late Style if he continues releasing music into older age. The song reflects Bejar poetically registering the erasure of the world around him, its decay, and his own disorientation amidst a changed landscape. It’s also a beautifully sung composition, evincing Bejar’s own obsession with the control of jazz vocalists like Billie Holiday. If Destroyer’s early work can be said to be Dylanesque in its poetic excessiveness, and then Kaputt corrected this by, ironically, nearly excising Bejar himself from the proceedings, “Cataract Time” feels out a happy medium between the two. He isn’t lyrically excessive on the track, nor is he absent or merely singing playful little earworms. His verses are rich with depth and a lived sense of loss that comes through in the delivery. It’s a markedly melancholy boogie, but one that I’ve returned to often over the past month.
My favourite of these on the album has always been, “Sounds, Smash Hits / Melody Maker, NME / All sound like a dream to me” off the title track. These three lines are—at least as I interpret them—a kind of commentary on the status of music journalism in its high ‘70/’80s cultural form, and how those publications would’ve held a kind of intoxicating appeal to the bookish and musical types of their era. Kind of like how Morrissey wrote music journalism before fronting The Smiths.
Apple Music says that I’ve played it 13 times in my library since adding it on 3 March 2025 when it was released, which is 104 minutes of “Cataract Time” this month for me!