Dan Bejar's Personal Best

BEST FIT: I really like the line where you say, “At some point when it’s made, I’ll explain this record word-for-word”. And as the next song you’ve picked is ‘Bay of Pigs’, I guess you can make good on that fifteen years later!

DAN BEJAR: I mean, ‘Bay of Pigs’ was a trial-by-fire song for the making of Kaputt. It was the first thing that we did, it took a long time, months and months and months. I’d never worked on a song that long before. Partially because we didn’t really know what it was supposed to sound like. It was supposed to sound like ambient disco and we were these three rock dudes who didn’t really know what that is. In the fall of 2008 that wouldn’t have been a term as omnipresent as it is now. Now, all I hear is ambient disco. Then, we weren’t really sure what that meant. We’d put on a side of The Wall to see if that was ambient disco [laughs]. Someone played side two of The Joshua Tree to see if that was ambient disco. We were just flailing. I knew this song had to be really long.

Firstly, because there was a lot of words, but also I just wanted to have long stretches. I think the version that first came out, the twelve-inch version, is thirteen minutes long. I kind of poured all of my conviction into trying to meld poetry and rock, which was the main project of Destroyer through the ‘90s and ‘00s. It’s safe to say that was Kaputt. I completely gave up on that and haven’t really picked up the mantle since in a lot of ways. I mean, I still write in this certain way but it’s not something I feel passionate about, this feeling of having severe, strange language constantly coursing through a song. That’s not in me, that’s not what I’m doing anymore. I would say ‘Bay of Pigs’ is the last stand of that and you can tell when you listen to it. It’s so chock-a-block full of images and strange situations, there’s no room for breathing, really. And then just the fact that I wanted it to be trippy and droney and also somehow dancey.

In the end we never really figured out how to make ambient disco, we just had an ambient half that then turns into a disco half, which is cheater-y but works for the sake of momentum. I’ve never really used the studio as an in-itself tool before. Before that, for the most part, you’re just supposed to go and document your song. ‘Bay of Pigs’ was the beginning of the end of that.

I’m curious about the vague allusions to the Kennedy administration in this song – I read in the Village Voice that you had Jaqueline Kennedy in mind when you began writing it. I’m not going to be so facetious as to say this is your ‘Murder Most Foul’ [by Bob Dylan] or anything but I don’t know, maybe it exists in the same psychic universe?

I was really trying to shrink it down as opposed to ‘Murder Most Foul’, which kind of blows it up. I don’t know why I placed the drama of ‘Bay of Pigs’ on the Kennedy Compound with kind of a drunk, melancholic woman trapped by insane, powerful men – or something like that. I’m not sure what the image was, it was just a grey day on the Kennedy Compound, trying to drink your woes away, surrounded by strife.

Has anyone named Christine White ever approached you since you put this song out? Are there legions of Christine Whites who are now Destroyer fans?