THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Dan Bejar started Destroyer as a solo home-recording project in the early to mid-’90s. Exploring and overturning genres such as glam, MIDI, yacht rock, and even underground Spanish independent artists, Bejar has produced a body of work that consistently flouts convention in favor of musical leaps of faith, statements of purpose cloaked in subterfuge, and the joyous refrain of an optimist’s heart cloaked in cynicism.
Dan’s Boogie is, in true Destroyer fashion, a contradiction: A breakthrough album for Bejar that began its life as a disappearing act and, as such, does things no Destroyer album to this point has ever done. Its nine songs — spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema — imagine Bejar as a lounge singer, a hustler, and, at times, a supporting character in his own fantasies. Dan’s Boogie offers nine all-timer Destroyer songs that have the urgency of a state secret hiding in the mind of a tortured spy.
Bologna is a radical reframing of the Destroyer milieu, the first song Bejar has written for the band in which he plays second fiddle, providing behind-the-scenes commentary on the song’s main action, trapped in the dingy green room on the cover of Dan’s Boogie, while Fiver’s Simone Schmidt operates like a person on the lam, here one minute and gone the next. Schmidt’s voice, tough and expressive, pierces through the murk of the scene, its gravity pulling Bologna into order around a sense of impending doom.
“I haven’t written many songs like Bologna,” says Bejar. “I struggled singing the first and third verses, the most important parts of the song. They needed gravity and grit. The threat of disappearing needed to be real. So I called Simone.”
The video for Bologna meets the song’s cool tones with the panicked frenzy of first-person footage on a long-lost VHS tape, its narrative lurid and incriminating. As director David Galloway explains: “How do you begin a Dear John letter? I suppose there are lots of online tools available to anyone with a phone that can help you get that type of thing started. In fact, you can learn all kinds of stuff with the internet. It’s amazing. How to pick locks, how to access your neighbours’ WiFi, how to meet a challenge, how to put on makeup. Makeup is pretty big these days, hey? You can also definitely find tips and tricks to help you start a whole new life if the one you have doesn’t seem to cut the mustard. Rather, Bologna.”
