Dan Bejar Quotes

I'm just a sucker for new-agey synth sounds and instrumentation. I wasn't really thinking of soft rock, but I know that kind of quiet-storm format uses a lot of these sounds.

Even though people like to say Destroyer [albom] is gibberish and all that, I usually know exactly what I'm saying at every single moment.

No one appreciates a professional anymore. Everyone's a mystic. Which is why I take drunk Jim over acid Jim - the argument all roads eventually lead to.

Of course, no lyrics are ever unintentional, but I think bands like Wolf Parade and the Arcade Fire have a tendency to touch on big themes without really following through on them or tying them in to a particular logic.

I don't really listen to rock music anymore. But were I to write a song that sounded like it could be a rock song, I'd probably give it to the Pornographers, and I'd be excited to try to make it work.

I think the more removed I feel, the more I warm up to the role of singer.

I force myself to care about the music end by wrestling with it for years.

Big, evocative words get thrown around, and people can sing along to passionately as if the lyrics just materialized out of the ether, largely because they don't ever seem to coalesce into a writerly voice.

There are too many Destroyer records to just start rattling them left them off, but they're there.

I can't fool myself into thinking that musically I don't need other people, whether it's as a foil or just to come in and make real the ideas that are kind of vague and wispy in my head.

I was a member of the band when it was just, like, a conversation at a bar. Then we constantly practiced, we played shows, we tooled around in the studio. And then, when I moved and kind of bailed on that, is when ... So, yeah, for the first, Mass Romantic, I was heavily involved. Then, for a couple records after that, I was not really involved at all.

Generally, if you could picture a bunch of rock and roll momentum behind a song and it was particularly melodious, maybe the Pornographers would do it. If it was kind of moody and more lyrical, then maybe it would be a Destroyer song. Anything that's really lyrically driven I would keep for Destroyer.

I guess my guitar parts are usually precise, but the execution of those parts is downright treacherous, since I'm not very good on guitar.

The more I abandon ideas of myself as a musician, the better a singer I become.

I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them, and I'm not feeling any sense of ease or camaraderie when I'm on stage.

Kaputt was just a record that did really well for us, and therefore our record label and our booking agent said that we should go out and take our message to the world.

It never really interested me in the past but, for the first time, I wanted to make a pop record. I thought a good way of doing it would be to make songs that didn't really make sense to me as songs; songs that I couldn't just sit down and play in front of someone and then get them to play over it.

Once you feel like you can safely quit a melody, you are free to explore more important things.

Really good musicians don't think of "self-reflection".

I'm not really sure that I have the same definition of things as other people. Like, when people talk about being "engaged" with the audience, I'm not exactly sure what they mean.

I'm probably more into a more spacious, even meditative, quiet delivery of singing.

I'm just kind of lazy and messed up and self-managed - self-mismanaged.

I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.

I don't really know what's going on with the Pornographers - everyone's kind of doing their own stuff. I mean, they play shows here or there.