Dan Bejar of Destroyer; Photo: Facebook
In a recent interview with SPIN, Dan Bejar revealed some hindsight lyric thought on Destroyer‘s latest album, ken, saying he would’ve “shirked away from” some of the songwriting on the album.
He said the opening lyrics to the opening track, “Sometimes in the World,” are not what he would’ve written five years ago: [LISTEN]
I can’t pay for this
All I’ve got is money
“Me five years ago would have shirked away from singing that song, or singing that line, anyway,” Bejar said. “I don’t know why.”
He said the lyrics in that song reminded him more of Destroyer’s 1998 City of Daughters. And he said he’s not sure why that’s the case, but it may have something to do with his instrument of choice recently.
“[My creative process is] always a pretty unconscious thing with me,” he said. “The big difference is that for the first time in ten years, I started writing on the guitar again. And there’s a brevity and a directness to most of these songs that I assume is a result of that.”
And now that he’s getting on in age, he’s become retrospective. He said this album is him singing to his “teenage self.”
“Conjuring up my teenage self — I might as well be singing to a dream,” he said. “But for some reason, the mantra, or the prayer, or the aphorism, is the mode of writing that I’m attracted to.”
But at the same time, the songs sound like their coming from a young person.
“…There’s a casual extremism to the writing, and that feels like it’s coming from a young person, even though my voice sounds more decrepit and distant than ever,” he said. “I like that contrast.”
By “casual extremism,” he means how young people are “chiming in on things in an impassioned and extreme way, which you don’t always feel comfortable doing when you get older.”
But, it seems, he’s reverted to writing like his younger self. His body and mind continue to age, but his soul seems to be taking after Benjamin Button.
Watch a live rendition of “Something in the World” from a show back in March in Vancouver below:
