Can you weave yourself into a tapestry that’s already finished?
Depending on how you were introduced, Dan Bejar was either the genius behind Destroyer, a cryptic child of Dylan and Hunky Dory era Bowie, or the shaggy dadaist playing foil to AC Newman’s bubbly pop in the New Pornographers. Halfway through the ‘00s, the Pornos had become indie darlings, beloved in their native Canada and sprawling into broader pop culture thanks to 2000’s breakout/debut Mass Romantic.
Bejar burned the candle at both ends. By the time 2006 rolled around, he had been a major player or soloist on seven albums in six years. Steel sharpened steel. His own bewildering mind had, by osmosis, pilfered Newman’s most pop particularities, and though he never tried the same sort of howl that fellow Pornos songwriter Neko Case could unleash, he did tap into her mystic imagery. And he realized he was in the middle of a new canon being created.
Destroyer’s Rubies, released 20 years ago today in the States, was a welcome, baffling evolution from Bejar. His nostalgic revelries began to take on modern forms without ever forgetting the foundations. Opener “Rubies” sprawls out in luxurious splendor, starting the album on a note of surreal yet tangible worry. “Dueling cyclones jackknife / They got eyes for your wife / And the blood that lives in her heart,” Bejar sings over two crunchy guitars emulating those steely tornados.
“Rubies” is the entire album in miniature. Over its nine minutes, there’s a snatched guitar lick from Guided By Voices’ “Teenage FBI,” and Bejar quips about Otis Redding, Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Beatles, before cheekily quoting his previous album Your Blues, sneaking himself into rarified company. This mishmash of influences and time makes Destroyer’s Rubies wonderfully anachronistic. It’s a soiree where The Spiders from Mars and GBV exchange notes on guitar tones.
Bejar’s constant self-referencing doesn’t come from a place of loathing or ego-stroking. Instead, he agrees with fellow vagabond Bill Callahan who, the year before, sang “I did not become someone different / I did not want to be.” Both asserted that any evolution was natural and part of a continuum, but Bejar’s timeline stretches far and wide. Ted Bois’ saloon-style piano, which dominates “Your Blood” and opens “European Oils,” conjures images of Bejar lounging over a Wurlitzer in Prohibition-era New York—but then, on “European Oils,” the chiming near-schmaltz is broken wide open by a self-described “monster riff” that would’ve fit on a Wolf Parade record.
Sift through Bejar’s lyrics and you’ll find a strange mythos about the Atlantic divide. Born to a Spaniard and an American but raised in Canada, Bejar perhaps inevitably had an obsession with his lineage. Europe was an exotic, fading beauty, the States an alluring and dangerous place filled with conmen. “Founding fathers, what did you find?” are the last words he slurs on the album. Elsewhere he giggles “I left England to the English,” before briefly visiting Italy during a “mildly successful killing rampage.” “It’s just your precious American Underground / And it is born of wealth / With not a writer in the lot,” he smirks on “Rubies,” taking shots at indie nepo babies while still worshiping at the altar of American rock stardom.
On “European Oils,” Bejar attempts the seduction of some Old World beauty, only to be denied by fate and blood. “I made a tomb for all the incompatible cells I could take,” he opens with a sigh as Nicolas Bragg’s fading guitar hangs in the air like a hot breeze. There’s a (miraculously) straightforward story to be read about a doomed romance, but it’s just as likely that Bejar was turning the mirror on himself. His dad grew up in Francoist Spain, and Bejar was only born a few years before the dictatorship collapsed, giving the “Death to the murderers we’ve loved all our lives!” line a historical and morbid taste.
Bejar has a remarkable ability to sound like he’s singing while slung over your shoulder, just able to stand on two legs. He delivers “You can huff and you can puff / But you’ll never destroy that stuff,” like a drunk with a sudden, shamefaced revelation. He swaggers through one of my favorite madcapped couplets in the same feverish voice: “Have I told you lately that I love you? / Did I fail to mention there’s a sword hanging above you?” In a cantankerous, cheeky interview with Pitchfork at the time, Bejar explained how his singing had changed thanks to his bandmates. “I don’t think I’ve ever hit less notes in my life, yet I think Destroyer’s Rubies probably [has] the best set of vocals I’ve recorded. Everyone else in the band is coughing up so much melody that for the most part I felt pretty free to do whatever I wanted with the words.”
Coughing up melody is an apt description for Destroyer’s Rubies. The looseness of the band recalls, well, The Band. Drummer Scott Morgan (better known now as ambient mist lord Loscil) channels Levon Helm with shuffling motions that always seem at the edge of falling apart, giving a drunken feel to the entire album. Closer “Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever” sounds like a Booker T. jam that Bejar stumbled into, book of poetry in hand.
Kaputt might be Destroyer’s catchiest record, but there are full sections of Destroyer’s Rubies that act like “Billie Jean” or the Breeder’s “Cannonball,” with more hooks than a Bass Pro Shop. Album centerpiece “Painter in Your Pocket” reaches that echelon, a gobsmacking tour of catchiness. Bejar’s first melody swoops into a hushed preview of the chorus with a simple, perfect guitar riff ringing out above the band. Bejar essentially smashes two separate choruses into the song, with the ribald “where did you get that rocket / where did you get that painter in your pocket?” liable to worm its way into the medulla oblongata and etch itself there forever. And that’s all before the song bursts into sunny psychedelia. There’s an alternate world where “Painter in Your Pocket” became Bejar’s own “Mass Romantic,” inescapably catchy, even for the normies. But Bejar can’t let the lyrics get away without a twist of fate. A song that is, at first blush, about a flighty ex-flame turns into something deeper, darker. “You couldn’t be bothered to say hello or goodbye” becomes “you needed reminding to stay alive.”
The act of doing these 20th anniversary reviews cuts indie rock into halves: “Of its time” and “out of time.” While Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, and Arcade Fire are inseparable from the year they broke out, Destroyer’s Rubies, thanks to its constant pilfering of different eras and Bejar’s singular charisma, is an “out of time” classic. Every musical choice that could be pinpointed to an exact month in 2006 is evened out by a wayward synth line from Berlin Bowie, or the soft, plush production choices that recall the velvet touch of Carole King. The smallest moments stand out on repeat listens—the “Whiter Shade of Pale” organ on “Painter in Your Pocket,” the chorus of Bejars synching up with the drum fills on “A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point.”
That out-of-time feeling is further emphasized by a total lack of cash, banks, or credit cards. There’s plenty of wealth on Destroyer’s Rubies from the title down, but it’s always in gemstone terms. There’s a “jewel-encrusted roan,” “sapphires vie for your attention,” and when he desperately whispers “I wanted you, I wanted those treasures,” it feels like he’s following a map where “X marks the spot.” And Bejar plays with Dread Pirate Roberts tales because, no matter what he claims, he is a romantic at heart. He gets shitfaced on nostalgia on “Watercolors into the Ocean.” Later he crows “I went down to the garden with the noblest of intentions / I felt the need to be brief / I stuck a rose between my teeth and had a laugh,” on the sweet-and-low Allman Brothers groove of “A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point.”
In that same ribbing Pitchfork interview, Bejar complained about the reception to his live shows and drew a line between himself (writerly, poet, “not a musician”) and stadium-filling live acts like U2 or Bruce Springsteen (energetic, religious, “shit I could care less about”): “Things usually have to be balls-out rockin’ or brood teetering on the verge of collapse. It’s quite possible that if you’re not interested in creating cathartic moments for the audience, both you and your audience are fucked, to which I say, ‘Oh well.’ No one appreciates a professional anymore. Everyone’s a mystic.”
What’s so funny about Bejar saying this in 2006 is that “European Oils” would become, maybe to his chagrin, his “Born to Run.” I finally caught Destroyer for the first time last year, and the second that slinking piano came on, the entire crowd was revving up for a single moment. Just before Bejar rips into that “monster riff,” multitracked vocals, a cavernous piano, and warm bass rush into an eruption. “She needs to feel at peace with her father,” Bejar hollers, the band egging him on before dropping out as he leans into the microphone, whispering behind a cupped hand: “The fucking maniac!” It’s the exact sort of climax that Bejar wasn’t (allegedly) interested in making. It’s the best ten seconds of music from 2006, perhaps of the entire decade.
“You wonder, ‘What exactly do you get out of that line that you want to yell it like you would say the line “Thunderstruck” or something like that? Like it really sounds like AC/DC when you guys shout it back at me, but you’ve taken it someplace where I never foresaw that song going,’” Bejar said years later, rueful and grateful. And maybe he’s being completely honest. He somehow never saw that shattering, heartrending moment of catharsis for what it would become. At the time he sang “a life in art and a life of mimicry, it’s the same thing” while asserting “I am proud to be a part of this number!” ironically then, earnestly now, weaving Destroyer into the long-finished tapestry next to the Beatles, Bowie, CCR, and every other rock hero Bejar once had. The bastard canonized himself.
Read our 2025 cover story with Dan Bejar here and listen to Destroyer’s 2013 Daytrotter session below.
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