March 28 street date. 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. 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 2022's "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 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. Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, "Dan's Boogie" dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar's eye may be on the exits, but he's not leaving anytime soon.
Merge Records was started in the summer of 1989, by Laura Ballance & Mac McCaughan, the same summer they formed the band Superchunk in Chapel Hill, NC. The first couple releases were cassettes (remember those?), by WWAX and Bricks, followed by the first Superchunk (then known only as "Chunk") 7" single. The vinyl 7" was the format of choice for the first 3 years of the label, with cash borrowed from friends to finance projects (including singles from Erectus Monotone, Angels of Epistemology, and more Superchunk) and bedrooms serving as Merge HQ until 1992, when the first Merge full-length release, Tossing Seeds by Superchunk, was released on CD, LP, and cassette. With this release Merge also forged a relationship with Touch and Go Records of Chicago, who have done an admirable job manufacturing and distributing the bulk of Merge's full-length releases since then. Since '92 Merge moved from one charming-yet-run-down office to another until 2001, when we finally made the move from Chapel Hill down the road to a fine old building all our own in historic Downtown Durham, NC. In 2004 Merge Records is celebrating its 15th birthday, and while our roster has changed, rotated, permutated and expanded over the last 15 years, the quality we look for in records as fans is still there in the music we put out on Merge. Thanks for listening!
March 28 street date. 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. 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 2022's "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 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. Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, "Dan's Boogie" dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar's eye may be on the exits, but he's not leaving anytime soon.
Merge Records was started in the summer of 1989, by Laura Ballance & Mac McCaughan, the same summer they formed the band Superchunk in Chapel Hill, NC. The first couple releases were cassettes (remember those?), by WWAX and Bricks, followed by the first Superchunk (then known only as "Chunk") 7" single. The vinyl 7" was the format of choice for the first 3 years of the label, with cash borrowed from friends to finance projects (including singles from Erectus Monotone, Angels of Epistemology, and more Superchunk) and bedrooms serving as Merge HQ until 1992, when the first Merge full-length release, Tossing Seeds by Superchunk, was released on CD, LP, and cassette. With this release Merge also forged a relationship with Touch and Go Records of Chicago, who have done an admirable job manufacturing and distributing the bulk of Merge's full-length releases since then. Since '92 Merge moved from one charming-yet-run-down office to another until 2001, when we finally made the move from Chapel Hill down the road to a fine old building all our own in historic Downtown Durham, NC. In 2004 Merge Records is celebrating its 15th birthday, and while our roster has changed, rotated, permutated and expanded over the last 15 years, the quality we look for in records as fans is still there in the music we put out on Merge. Thanks for listening!
March 28 street date. 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. 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 2022's "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 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. Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, "Dan's Boogie" dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar's eye may be on the exits, but he's not leaving anytime soon.
Merge Records was started in the summer of 1989, by Laura Ballance & Mac McCaughan, the same summer they formed the band Superchunk in Chapel Hill, NC. The first couple releases were cassettes (remember those?), by WWAX and Bricks, followed by the first Superchunk (then known only as "Chunk") 7" single. The vinyl 7" was the format of choice for the first 3 years of the label, with cash borrowed from friends to finance projects (including singles from Erectus Monotone, Angels of Epistemology, and more Superchunk) and bedrooms serving as Merge HQ until 1992, when the first Merge full-length release, Tossing Seeds by Superchunk, was released on CD, LP, and cassette. With this release Merge also forged a relationship with Touch and Go Records of Chicago, who have done an admirable job manufacturing and distributing the bulk of Merge's full-length releases since then. Since '92 Merge moved from one charming-yet-run-down office to another until 2001, when we finally made the move from Chapel Hill down the road to a fine old building all our own in historic Downtown Durham, NC. In 2004 Merge Records is celebrating its 15th birthday, and while our roster has changed, rotated, permutated and expanded over the last 15 years, the quality we look for in records as fans is still there in the music we put out on Merge. Thanks for listening!