“When I was younger I would have found it somewhat hammy and questionable,” Dan Bejar said of his new album, “Poison Season,” which comes out on August 28. The singer, who records under the name Destroyer, is known for his sardonic personality, so much so that I was warned beforehand that trying to get to him to answer questions might be difficult. But sitting down in a coffee shop in Brooklyn in late June, I found Bejar, fresh off a red-eye flight, in a somewhat talkative, if deadpan, mood. Maybe it was the jetlag.“You can tell that before making the record I listened to ‘Mack the Knife’ a thousand times,” he said with a laugh. But the songs on “Poison Season,” which range from E-Street Band struts to Rat Packy ballads — hence the Bobby Darin reference — are more diverse and contain a greater level of depth than he’s willing to admit to a journalist. The album’s first single, “Dream Lover,” is the most explosive and classic-rock sounding recording he’s ever made, a brash mirage of horns and propulsive drums that concerns the mystic escape path of runaway lovers, a Springsteen-like ode to getting away from it all.It’s also something of a bait-and-switch: thrown toward the front of the album, it announces a theme the rest of the songs refuse to deliver on. “It was an accidental song,” Bejar admitted. “When I brought ‘Dream Lover’ to the band, it was like, this song probably won’t even be on the record,” he added. “It’s so thick-headed, let’s not even bother practicing it. You get the gist of it. But then it turned out in a way that’s quite cool. But that’s because the band is cool.”Bejar also spoke several times of the importance of the band — a group of musicians that joined him during the tour for his previous album, “Kaputt,” in 2012. “The ease of playing with the band, and how comfortable I felt as a singer with it, was one of the main reasons why the album occurred,” he said. “I went through a bunch of cockamamie schemes in my head,” he noted, including making “Poison Season” a disco-salsa record. “But it became apparent quite quickly that I hadn’t written 12 disco-salsa songs…. The songs asked for something else. And I always kept coming back to the band.”When I mentioned that “Poison Season” feels like an album about being lost, he reluctantly agreed. “It’s more the idea of wandering around a space, which maybe at one point you knew quite well, and realizing it’s been erased,” he said, mentioning the “violent tendency” of redevelopment in his hometown of Vancouver. “I definitely feel more distant from the world than ever,” he added. His acceptance that “showbiz” is now his life, he said, is really more of his own failure to come up with an alternate plan. During our conversation, I began to realize that the lyrics on “Poison Season,” more stripped down and simplified than on any other Destroyer record, seem to echo different things we talk about regarding alienation and the spiritual concerns of growing older. But Bejar deflected the notion that the new album might be confessional.“I think with songwriting especially, that’s still the main mode of working, especially in America,” he said. “Pouring your heart out. When you think of the great American traditions of songwriting, there’s not a lot of remove. And as it should be because once you open your mouth, once you’re singing, that’s your body laid bare.”I pressed the issue. “It wasn’t like diary entries, but for the most part a lot of Destroyer songs sound like a monologue that’s going through my head,” he said. “That’s why I never understood when people would paint Destroyer lyrics in the light of some ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ style gibberish or some kind of language poetry. I never saw it that way.”The biggest change Bejar sees in the progression from “Kaputt” to “Poison Season” has less to do with lyrics or sounds but of confidence, of finding himself as a performer. “I don’t like to be really put into the world that much,” he said, grinning. “Maybe subconsciously there was some kind of burnout. It seemed like there was a demand.”“But it also seemed like for the first time I became more and more comfortable on stage,” he added. “I was finally getting to the heart of what I wanted to do as a singer. I think that’s one of the main things about this album. It sounds like me, finally.”
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