DAN'S BOOGIE (BLACK & CLEAR SWIRL VINYL)

What is a "boogie"' In the common tongue, it's a dance or an occasion to dance. This
being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like
Dan's
Boogie
are at once more alluring and dangerous. "A boogie is a hustle, a scam that doesn't
quite work, the moves we make when we're up against it," explains Dan Bejar. "I think of
spy work, double agents, sleeping with one eye open, an eye on the exits. But I also think
of petty street-level victories and losses and improv."
To record
Dan's Boogie
, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional
barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas
would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the
completion of
LABYRINTHITIS
turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar
gave himself a New Year's resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted
about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution-"Cataract
Time," "Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World," "Bologna," and "Dan's Boogie"
among them-are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his
collaborators have established for themselves: spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano
ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and
cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy