Recently Dan Bejar was interviewed by CBC Radio 3 about (what feels like last year’s) Destroyer’s Rubies. These are really some of the most interesting insights into his relationship with his music that I’ve heard; plus, you get to hear the first 20 seconds of “3000 Flowers” like five times.

Thanks again to the Streethawk LiveJournal community for getting this to me. Click through to the full entry for a painstaking transcript.

Bejar: I like to start off with, like, some fanfare usually. Maybe it’s because for me to use a line as a springboard to write a song, I gotta feel pretty strong about it in the first place, to think that something else can follow it. That’s something I’m still a sucker for, is an opening line of a song that doesn’t sound like an opening line of a song usually. It’s a pretty good trick, it works most of the time, or just annoys people.

CBC: Tell me a little bit behind your process of writing lyrics. Where does this stuff come from and how do you get it down?

Bejar: I don’t know, something just comes into my head, and I usually will either try and remember it or write it down, and I’m kind of attached to phrases that have some kind of built-in melodiousness to them, whether they’re rhyming or not. Then a long time will go by, and with a couple exceptions, I’ll pick up the guitar, which I never usually touch, and try and strap some chords on to these vague melodies that are attached to the words, and then eventually get the guts to play it for the band. Or, with a couple examples, just piece it all together in the studio.

I think there’s some decent comic writing in Destroyer’s Rubies. I mean I think there’s always been that element in a Destroyer record. Not maybe funny “ha ha,” but funny that someone would say that in the first place? I don’t know if that’s a good funny, but, I think on this record there’s kind of just like lots of goofy asides, and it’s pretty laid-back. And I just wanted, like, a lot of images. I know I was anti-images for a while and I thought, “That’s just like, hippie, Dylan, easy thing to fall back on.” But this seems to have just, like, more taking joy in the act of writing, and finding threads in strange, very visual acts. And usually there’s a train, the words just kind of organize themselves for the most part, usually by, like, chronological batches of what was written when, or where.

CBC: Really?

Bejar: A lot of times, yeah. Even though it’s not intended that way, I’ll end up using a bunch of stuff that just occupies the same page together, even though I never wrote it with that in mind. Which is really great for me.

CBC: Two for the price of one?

Bejar: Yeah, there you go.

CBC: You can see that in the songs, I was gonna ask you about that. There’s a sense of continuity between a lot of them. It feels almost like a thread running through.

Bejar: Yeah, I mean some people think it’s just gibberish, or it’s just, like, cut-up, you know, like, that ’70s Bowie-style of pulling sentences out of a hat. And, no, I mean it’s never been like that. I think, even if I’m bad at, like, iterating what the thread is throughout one song, I think there’s always, like, some kind of internal logic that works with the words, even if it’s just phonetic, you know?

CBC: So what do you hope your lyrics do?

Bejar: What everyone hopes their lyrics do, which is just garner some kind of emotional response, and reflect upon the music wisely, and you hope to come up with a voice that is recognizable as your own, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s possible, lots of people say it’s not, but, you just, like, wanna have a mode of speaking, or singing, or whatever, that seems true to how you imagine yourself, and keeps yourself, you know, entertained, for real, that, a song you can sing more than five times without getting sick of it, that’s always nice. I don’t know, I don’t know what other people look for, I assume it must be something similar. I’ll ask ‘em.

I can say that if it was like a Destroyer 101 class, it’d be like, something epic, and fatalist, followed by an aside, which is “Trust me I had my reasons,” which is something, you know, that you mumble to your friend who’s non-existent. And then something really material and maybe banal, and then another aside commenting on that which just came before it, the material or banal thing, “Had a dress for every season, it was worth it.” There, now anyone can write a lyric like that, and see how easy it is?

CBC: And do you just conjure these scenes up in your head, like, are these things that you just imagine to be happening?

Bejar: I just have a version of what rich language is, and I want to entertain myself with it, and, just like, a balance of, kind of, action, and image. I guess maybe I went through, like, a rediscovery of poetry, I guess. I’ve never really read poetry before. I’ve dabbled with it, but I’ve never, like, gone through a real poetry phase.

I have a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, because it doesn’t work in music, because that’s always the first thing, is that, it has to work as a piece of music, and the two things are actually really different, for obvious reasons, you know? I mean, lots of things that look really good, and when it’s time to try ‘em and sing ‘em, sound really bad, or just wrong in that context. And maybe are bad and wrong, I’m not sure, I don’t know if singing something is a test of how inherently good it is, but there’s, like, a certain musical quality to language that doesn’t always work out.

And things have to be simple, you know? Like, you have to simplify; that’s something I’ve kind of discovered in the last few years. I mean there’s still, like, a lot of words, but I guarantee you that if you compare, like, Destroyer’s Rubies to City of Daughters, say, the sheer amount of words has gotta be, like, I mean there must be way less words on the new record, I hope. I mean I know sometimes they get really garbled and sped-up on the new record, but that’s ‘cause I’ve grown attached to this new, kind of barky, spoken-word delivery. You know, that kind of Lou Reed style, which I’ve always loved but always thought would be a really hokey thing to try and pull off, but now I’m just not scared of hokey things.

It’s really the least intellectualized it’s ever been, you know? I’m just, like, jamming with the band, and singing this stuff, and there’s some threads that run in and out of it, but it’s still a lot of it has to do with, like, putting two things together and seeing how they can possibly fit, or be even remotely close to being the same thing. “Oh ‘fire’ rhymes really well with ‘harbored an elementary desire,’ that’s so, it’s gotta be in there! What else can rhyme with that? ‘Tire’? ‘Wire’?”

CBC: “‘Dire’?”

Bejar: “‘Dire’? Good, that’s good.” Yeah none of those really worked at the time. It had to be fire, I’m pretty into fire these days.

But, aside from that, I think that there’s a lot more space in the songs. I don’t think they’re trying to impress with words anymore. I hope not, ‘cause that’s, I couldn’t care less about that.

CBC: Really?

Bejar: Yeah. I mean that’s not a good reason for doing something. You know, if you discover that you’re really good at this one thing when you first start writing songs, and then you steer into your strengths as much as possible, good things can come out of that, but I think it’s something you have to, like, grow past. For God’s sake!