Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission Thirty years ago, Dan Bejar picked up an acoustic guitar and started performing as Destroyer the project has consistently evolved: into a full band on 1998’s City of Daughters into the electronic realm on 2020’s Have We Met and 2022’s Labyrinthitis Bejar had been messing with keyboards since Kaputt but he wanted to take a more traditional approach with the instrument “This was about balladry and getting back into chord progressions,” he says “I was probably thinking of the only kind of music I really listen to You stopped writing songs for over a year after Labyrinthitis. Where did that idea come from?From reality? It came from just not doing it. It did feel like an extra-long time. I noticed some people, especially people my age, take years between records. But I’m not used to that. Going five years without writing a song would be panic-inducing for me. So one year was a good exercise. Instead of just walking around and expecting to walk through the magical mist and all of a sudden you’re visited by songs, this album was more workman-like. I eventually forced myself to sit down at the piano. Not for very long. I wasn’t that forceful, I did it for about a week or two, and wrote these exercises. Then I dove into whatever lyrics I thought I might have — which I first thought was nothing, but it turned out to be something — and just spat it out over that piano and organ music. There are lines about horses on two different songs on the album.Really? There’s “You check out a horse’s ass, it’s not bad” on “Dan’s Boogie” and “I remix horses” on “The Ignoramus of Love.”I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think I was going through a horses phase. Those lines are pretty different. The one is supposed to be a dirty old man who’s, like, you’re so out of it, you’re checking out a horse’s ass. And whatever “a horse’s ass” might mean, because that’s also an expression for an idiot. We should talk about the title of the album. How did the idea of a boogie as a caper or a grift become interesting?The title song started off as a kind of typical jazzy vamp that I started singing endless verses over. At one point, I was gonna do it like a ridiculous, ’80s Dylan style — just have, like, 18 verses over this one basic piano boogie. “Dan’s Boogie” was a placeholder for that song. Is it still just forward from here?How I do it is so unconscious. I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I really don’t. I know I’m writing. Slowly, slower than I ever have, but I’m never gonna stop doing that. I still get off on it. In Dan’s Boogie, it sounds like I get off on it, maybe more than I’ve sounded in quite a while. But nothing gets easier as you get older. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. 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Northern Transmissions also features music news from around the world everyday. the spectacular fourteenth LP by beloved Canadian outfit Destroyer where Dan Bejar–its chief lyricist and captivating frontman–introspectively says “You don’t know what you’re doin’” on the beautifully intricate single “Cataract Time.” It’s a revealing moment one followed by a rich man pointedly asking the protagonist shifts its focus on the lyricist’s interiority while examining the world around them Bejar noted (and elaborated on in this interview) that during the writing of this record The page was blank and Bejar wasn’t sure how long this would last he made a New Year’s Resolution to play the piano everyday for an hour it kickstarted a fruitful period of writing new material which evolved into Dan’s Boogie These are amongst some of Bejar’s most intriguing expansive and compelling songs in how he continues to hone his idiosyncratic approach to engaging with his immediate surroundings and the characters that inhabit them as well as creating extremely vivid alternative realities and spaces Dan’s Boogie is another triumph from Bejar and his long standing collaborator John Collins Northern Transmissions spoke in-depth about Dan’s Boogie with its charismatic creator Dan Bejar We talked about how Bejar felt he was entering a new period with Destroyer the always exciting project he started almost 30 years ago the elements that appeal to his approach to world building and scene dressing across his songwriting and his dream of making a piano trio record It’s such a great record and it’s been a lot of fun to listen to the opening song provides such an immediately incredible introduction to the record I feel like that’s become a Destroyer signature Do you have an all time favorite opening track for an album I feel like it’s important to me so I need to think about it All my answers are going to come from my youth because that part would be my anticipation to hear that song I’m not saying that I don’t have the same passion that I did when I was 15 compared to being 52 and I don’t know if it’s the greatest opening or not but to hear the first song on Loveless when it came out in 1991 was a very big first two seconds for me The overall sound of that record really blew my mind That’s also because I was marking X’s on the calendar until that record came out I was like a person in jail just waiting to be released and the release was getting that record I saw them in the following few months after that record came out in 1992 and it was incredible I’m going to see them live for the first time later this year and will definitely have my ear plugs ready for that I think my old ears would melt out of my brain but at the time I was loving the punishment NT: I read that you had a period post-Labyrinthitis where you intentionally didn’t write in the hope that songs would build-up and then flow out of you when you eventually sat down at your desk what was the first song you wrote for Dan’s Boogie that helped the songs flow I can’t remember what that sheet says but I guess that’s kind of a benign way of phrasing it because it’s not that I was intentionally not writing I think what I was trying to focus on was not to panic at the idea of never writing a song again the idea that my old way of doing things was done; that this was some kind of new era of work or something I finally forced myself to sit down at the piano and see if anything would come out I basically had to do it like a New Year’s resolution I probably wrote about two-thirds of what’s on Dan’s Boogie They started as little piano exercises that I then sang over top of I used to do that in the early days of Destroyer when I would play guitar all the time I would just see what scraps of writing I had kicking around and sing over top I’ve been pretty skeptical of that way of writing so I was a little worried about how work- man-like it was but the first real songs that came out weren’t songs that I wrote like that They have more of a dam-bursting vibe and that’s “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” which I had these song fragments and I had to fill-up three minutes with something and so is “Cataract Time” which is a song that I just made-up on the spot which I’ve never… I don’t really do that it seems kind of more emotional or more personal or something that it has a bit more of a now or never vibe NT: You’ve talked about having a fraught relationship with songwriting or the idea of writing and then singing the work and putting it with music Something that I’ve really enjoyed with this record is that your delivery is so captivating in its stream of consciousness-like flow but the words very much feel like colors coming from a paintbrush and each stroke brings out a vividness in the pictures you create within the songs What exactly does songwriting–the process of it the experience of looking back at your notebook– give to you on a personal level Does it help you navigate through life or process things I had always written but I was a bit late to music Once I found that I had a bit of a knack for it it picked-up a lot of momentum and I got really into not just doing it but I got really into the idea of the tradition of songcraft That’s probably when I started really listening to older music as opposed to just indie music of the time That’s pretty much the story up until the late 2000s I looked at all the chords I would make on a guitar with disgust I looked at the challenge of trying to fit all these words into bars of music as something that was no longer interesting to me it just started happening; words and melody at the same time and that took over for a while But it doesn’t seem to be happening as much anymore I think that was one thing I was kind of side-swiped by I’m someone who thinks change is bad I guess part of Dan’s Boogie was me wondering how am I going to get out of this a lot of my identity seems to be wrapped-up in it and it’s just not happening the way it used to and I don’t know if this is just a product of age and me entering the third act of my life or if it’s just things slowing way down It used to be like a release and the writing part is still I still just scribble things down and I don’t know why they mean something to me even if they don’t mean anything to anyone else It’s little moments of the actual world revealing itself to me That makes me sound like I think I’m a wizard it’s just like the true world revealing itself I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone the music is kind of like trying to attach it to the world somehow and that’s why it’s laborious because I’m not that good at it and B how do these words and how does this voice…What does the world look like that it’s going to walk around in That’s the challenge and sometimes maybe the more disengaged you are with the world the harder it is to pull off that part of it NT: With that period of finding the process a bit more challenging it’s good that you went for the more positively leaning title of Dan’s Boogie instead of Dan’s Funk I still can’t even believe it’s called that I feel that was a failure on the part of many different friends There’s all sorts of opportunities for it to not be called Dan’s Boogie and they all It really was just a placeholder name for a song that then became “Dan’s Boogie” and somehow that spirit just crept over the whole record by the time it was done NT: I think it captures the essence of the record really well in how it features some recurring imagery and world-building across your career such as including details of day and night I was taken by how prominent religion is in it One of my favorite lines from the album is “God is famous for punishing” and there’s a moment in the song where a priest mistakes you for a priest There’s also a line about you speaking to the breeze and it answers you and says that it doesn’t need religion and rules That exchange between you and the wind made me think of one of the most iconic songs of the last sixty years: “Blowin’ In The Wind”; people looking for the answer in the wind because there are strong religious overtones in that song was that something that had been on your mind a lot while you were writing the record and you were interested to explore more I don’t know if either of them are really the true ones and maybe this is something that’s been running through the last few Destroyer records but there’s just no way that Dan’s Boogie doesn’t harp on death I probably conflate the ideas of death and ideas of religion or how we deal with that or how we even perceive it The second thing is that I still think of myself as a very traditional songwriter Religious imagery is just catnip for a certain brand of songwriter because it just comes so loaded already with a set universe and everything is in these set boxes for you to use and play with You color in the shapes the way you feel like I still find that religious imagery is really potent even just talking about religion is really potent It grounds a song the way the name of a street would ground a song except the street is massive because the street is eternal and takes up many dimensions It’s just tempting to me and it’s something I don’t really do consciously but when I’m grasping it when I’m putting two or three things together it kind of is becoming more and more tempting to grab things like Also the idea of wrestling with any kind of old philosophy I would say it feels like or seems different from what the current concerns are I’m generally pretty attracted to old stuff so that’s kind of part of it I’ll also say that “Hydroplaning” is definitely supposed to be a moment of reckoning Which seems like something that falls under the umbrella of a religious concern NT: Is there a reckoning also with your recent work Later in the album on “The Ignoramus of Love” you mention “The old grey mare” you talked earlier about listening to older traditional songs and you’ve previously mentioned that song in “Your Blood” on Rubies Had you been consciously looking back on your previous work as a way to aid the process of moving forward with Dan’s Boogie Dan Bejar: I was trying to remember where the other “old grey mare” was and yes part of me likes to think that I have three or four hang-ups that I write about That’s been the case for 25 years now I thought it was the most Destroyer-sounding record I’ve made in a long To the point where I think even five years ago it would have been really different or I would have been really self-conscious about putting out a record that sounds like this I think something’s happened and this project it can’t just be anything but just a representation of shit we’re into Not that those records are concept records it was ‘Let’s make a house record!’ That’s not something we did but it’s something that got us going and it provided a framework Have We Met had a similar idea but I can’t even remember what it was This was just songs and us making them sound in a way that we like It reminds me a lot of records like Poison Season or Your Blues Those two records are really different from each other but this record kind of synthesizes a lot of that stuff in a way that is not forced and feels really natural and it’s one of the reasons why I like the record a lot As far as me referring to stuff that I’ve done before I think there’s a bit of a history of that in Destroyer I think I’m probably shameless about it now just because I’m fine building this cosmos the Destroyer cosmos that these records exist in I don’t know if it’s pretentious It just blurts out that way so it feels good NT: You first collaborated with John Collins 27 years ago on City of Daughters I’d love to hear about the demo stages for you and what they look like when you send them to him were the demos mainly you playing piano and singing All I brought was the main melodic riff and the chords and the vocals The whole record was a challenge because I wrote the songs in a very piano ballad style and I didn’t want to change that style of singing I wanted the vocals to be really loud so I was kind of like ‘John fuck it you can do whatever you want but this is what at least my corner of the record is going to sound like and so knock yourself out if you want to make it sound heavy’ The song “Sun Meet Snow” was supposed to be a vaguely boogie-woogie kind of poetry riff and piano song but it ended-up being maybe the heaviest Destroyer song ever put to record especially because we weren’t ever in the same room together These records are all done super piecemeal It’s just me and John in the same room but everyone else is scattered around Then there’s other songs which just sound like really good versions of the demo in that it even uses the bulk of the demo vocals I kind of had the sound and John liked it and he was like well let’s keep this really like you did it but make it big sounding and with real drums’ in some ways the parts of that got really abstract The record is a mix of fleshed-out but true to the demos and then just couldn’t be more different from how they started out NT: Was there anything in particular that when John sent it to you or played for you when you were together that you were completely taken aback by I think of the song “I Materialize” which has this steadiness to it and then you just suddenly go away and we’re abruptly dropped into the next song I remember the first time listening to that thinking that my stream had crashed but I tried to sing it well and Ted [Bois] played really good schmaltzy piano and John played good schmaltzy bass and there’s a loungy drum pattern on it That song is probably the first song I actually did write but I didn’t consider it a song because I didn’t really feel as though I was hitting the ground running with it Even though it’s the closest to the music that I listen to and picture myself singing as someone who just listens to Billie Holiday and Helen Merrill and those kinds of jazz vocalists that’s the tradition that I see myself in that’s the kind of thing I like but I didn’t want to overwrite it I didn’t want to turn it into a traditional song for a couple different reasons; I liked what I had and I didn’t really know what to do with it One thing that we did this time was that we sequenced the record from beginning to end I knew it was going to go into “Sun Meet Snow” We had the sequence before we had anything else which is the first time I’ve tried that trick As “Sun Meet Snow” got spaceier and weirder and extra heavy it seemed to be a cool fucked-up middle of Side Two style medley I’d love to hear more about “Bologna.” I remember the first time I listened to it and one of my friends had the same experience aka Fiver’s vocals in the opening verse was actually you but pitched-up Your vocals correspond and relate to one another so nicely on the song and work really well together Did you write that specifically with Simone Schmidt in mind to join you Their involvement was born from my panic at the fact that I couldn’t fucking sing that song to save the life of me I could kind of sing the middle verse because that’s more of a typical… or it has an unreliable I’m in a weird role with that character with that kind of hissy the storm’s been listening,” like those kinds of lyrics There’s something vaguely villainous about it but the important stuff is the first and the third verse and it needed to sound like something was at stake It needed to sound like there was an actual outside chance that you were gonna never see that person again it almost sounded sleazy or made it sound like the song was about a one night stand or something like that which is absolutely not what I was trying to go for I wanted it to have a noir-ish feeling but I didn’t want it to sound goofy There was vague talk of getting someone else’s voice on the album John and I bandied that around all the time I definitely didn’t have any plans for someone to be the lead singer of a Destroyer song it all really came together and the song became much cooler We were also just struggling with that song I feel like we were coming up with excuses not to open that file and work on it because we just didn’t quite know because it’s supposed to be like a torch ballad but I haven’t written that many of them I don’t know exactly what to do with them and I really don’t know how to sing them I won’t stop trying if I write another one everything could become way trippier and just cooler sounding All those crazy congas got reverbed-out and things became very spacey and the effects got really in your face there’s a version where it’s me singing the lead and the mix actually doesn’t work There’s something about Simone’s vocals that just lend themselves to that kind of like My vocals always tend to have to sit on top of a mix They can’t seem to fight their way out of like a busy fucked-up mix While Simone’s vocals are very strong NT: As you were talking about the world you were trying to create I was imagining it being set in an Orson Welles noir has a Massive Attack or Portishead feel to it But I just wasn’t interested in what I was bringing to it in the tone of my voice or just even the phrasing of even That song went from a point where I didn’t know if it was gonna make it onto the record to us asking the mastering engineer if there was a way that they could make every single song on the record sound like that song And it was very like the mix that John did and not just in his standard multiple box of wine kind of way let’s move on to the rest of the album because we can’t fuck with this because we’re gonna mess it up because we don’t know how we got here!’ That’s really different from almost every other song on the album NT: That’s so funny that it went from almost not being on the album to then being the song that announced the album and introduced audiences to the world of Dan’s Boogie I went from being really uncertain about it if he ever spoke his mind on it would have said something But it was funny to go from that to being like ‘We just need to use the momentum of whatever happened here to power the rest of the album’ NT: “Bologna” has such an enveloping nocturnal feel to it night and darkness are kind of intrinsic to the worlds and backdrops you create for the songs I remember reading around the time Have We Met was released that you recorded a lot of the vocals in your kitchen at night time and that image always appears in my head when I listen to that record there are lines like “It’s all the same thing under a certain light” or “Death by illumination” and there’s just so much nighttime and darkness in it Is that a very conscious element to your writing playing with the lighting of the song’s settings I think it’s something that I gravitate towards in other art that I like I always liked artistic universes where it’s explicitly said that there’s two worlds There’s a night world and there’s a day world because there’s a lot of mystery in the daytime I come from a rainy place where the city looks a certain way at night in the rain I set most of my songs in cities at night in the rain but I think they’re all set in the city at night in the rain It hits me physically and it’s just what I like it’s not what I like because it doesn’t give me a warm it’s more that that’s where the puzzle is that needs to be solved It just happens to be in a rainy city at night I also like the idea of being really consistent to a point of like here we go again!’ and Destroyer songs being such a specific distinct thing that you just shake your head ‘I can’t believe I’m listening to the 800th song about someone walking around in the rain at night!’ I feel there’s still some untapped stuff things go bump in the night and that’s when all the scary stuff happens I think that I just know how to use those symbols the best They’re the ones that interest me and excite me and so it’s cool to just place your dramas there There’s other cool dramas that could probably exist at noon on the side of a mountain “Travel Light,” it brings us back to the idea of recording in an intimate way just you and a piano hearing your fingertips or fingernails tapping on the keys made me have an image of a little Fred Astaire dancing along while you played that was an attempt to have a palette cleanser just cause I think even though this is a breezier I don’t even know what that word means It’s still a John Collins production which means it’s really cooked and still very sound design heavy and I liked the idea of having a palette cleanser or a sigh at the end of some kind of experience I went into a studio with a proper baby grand piano but also mic’d so that I could sing and play at the same time I make any recording situation sound like it’s done in my basement It was supposed to be an intimate sounding recording almost where you could hear me get up from the bench when I was done and walk away it also has a Bacharach feel to the melody I kind of wanted to keep it simple because it was an unabashed Carole King-style number or one of those Brill Building style songs that I liked and I didn’t want to toss out just because it was so much in that vein and because it was really short so it was always going to be at the end of the record NT: Dan’s Boogie is your 14th Destroyer album and each album has its own distinct personality Do you think about the albums and how they correspond to one another How certain albums or certain songs got you to progress to certain places Do you have ones that are particularly special to you in terms of either having fun with the songwriting or that it was made during a special time in your life Dan Bejar: I don’t think about the records too much I think about the recording process or the process leading-up to that even in the hope that I don’t go through that again the period of writing or leading-up to the writing I was definitely ill at ease and not myself I’ll look at the easiest thing or at least what felt like the easiest thing I’ve ever done That’s not a gauge of something being good or bad but just right away when we started to play those songs to practice them and we didn’t practice very much because we didn’t need to it just came together and it was very pleasurable There’s no trying to figure it out because it just landed there could be some real heartbreak in there and I’m not remembering but I remember those songs coming together and I could tell that I was at the apex of a certain style of writing at that point I didn’t know if I had an audience for this music It really felt to me like it was way too laid back and kind of dad-rockish or something which in 2005 wasn’t really the vibe but I felt like I couldn’t miss The singing and the words melded into one thing and the band just felt super just super in the pocket and really great to sing over ‘Let’s just try and capture what we’ve been doing’ the fact that I think the record turned out good also helps this kind of view of it being a relaxed affair Which member of the Houston Rockets did you get confused with I refuse to be held accountable for a lot of the words in that last three minutes of “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” because there’s just a shit tonne of riffing going on just had scraps in front of me and I was just making it up as I went along There’s all sorts of things in that song It just feels like there’s no filter,’ which I think is an age thing I just wanted it to come out the way it comes out There’s weird lines like the Houston rocket line and the priest mistakes me for a priest and all sorts of stuff which was fun to sing and it wasn’t written it sounds like I was releasing something that needed to be released It’s different because I felt kind of empowered by “June” That was extra fractured because I’d never done anything like that before It seemed like really digging into surrealism “Hydroplaning” is actually kind of a more composed and emotional and personal piece of writing I knew what the last little verse was gonna be and I knew it was gonna start with “We’re now entering a new phase,” it’s just that the middle of the song is a strange journey what’s really interesting is that a line like “The last time I saw Georgie” I’ve been saying that over and over and over to myself The fact that something so inconspicuous can become a hook from such a big song There’s a lot of going in and out between speaking and singing I guess I was conscious that there’d been a lot of people speaking in music singing shit day and night with writing that really lends itself more to just like blurting it out and speaking it I feel like one thing it does that I like is it goes in-and-out of melody and spoken word in a way that’s kind of hard to detect strange things that shouldn’t be hooks at all become hooks like the one you just mentioned because another thing I really love about the first listen of a new Destroyer album is hearing all the different cultural references you slip into the songs One of my favorites on Dan’s Boogie was the mention of “ Da Do Ron Ron” films or books you’ve been enjoying recently that I am reading a 1300-page experimental novel which goes against every rule I have because I’ve become such a slow reader in my old age I generally refuse to read a book that’s more than 200 pages long not that I would know because I’m stuck on page 180 I’m gonna be reading it for the next five years of my life Dan Bejar: It’s called Miss Macintosh by a writer named Marguerite Young and it’s from the early 1960s It’s one of these lost books that just got republished and is maybe destined to become incredibly classic amongst a handful of people I can’t think of what else I’ve been listening to or enjoying my things that I am into haven’t changed too much I’m always still just listening to jazz music I always threaten to just make a record with a piano trio and then I chicken-out NT: They’re not bad things to have in your mind Pre-order Dan’s Boogie HERE There’s a moment about eight minutes into Dan’s Boogie the expansive 14th studio album by Destroyer when Dan Bejar drops the niceties and gives into his Freudian id: “Women fill out men crumble inwards,” he pontificates with an audible smirk I didn’t want to say it but I did!” The lyric came to mind as I watched Destroyer perform at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre in late February dressed in denim and a tweed blazer with his all-access pass dangling from his neck which he had lowered to waist height in such a way that it resembled a cane “Crumbling inwards is a big part of it,” Bejar told me the day after the Kings Theatre performance one of two New York shows supporting Father John Misty (“We’re both brutally words-forward,” he observed of his tourmate) “That’s a habit I got into when I first put the guitar down and started touring with a giant band for Kaputt I didn’t know what to do with my hands more or less — a showbiz cane.” Showbiz is “like sports,” he explained Part of me used to enjoy sparring with that I’m just confused and disoriented.” “There are topics that I’ve always loved — the world erasing itself decay — that stop being academic and get really real when you get old.” He stopped before he could elaborate further: “If I had a handler ‘ixnay on the age-ay!‘” Luckily it was just Bejar sitting at a bustling café in Fort Greene last month he described aging as a process that was as disorienting as it was artistically freeing: “I can’t censor myself anymore I don’t know how.” The resulting album is “the most Destroyer-y sounding Destroyer record in a long time.” Bejar’s career trajectory has arguably bucked the “showbiz” expectation of expiration: Over the past two decades Destroyer has gone from a quiet home recorded solo project to the sophistopop heir apparent Since the “possibly despicable jazz” (his words) of 2011’s Kaputt his ninth album and the only one to chart on the Billboard 200 he no longer composed on “the despicable guitar,” which he found limited his imagination to “the same stinking 12 chords.” preferring a diet of film scores and jazz vocalists from the 1950s coming to the words almost subconsciously afterwards “Traditional songwriting just doesn’t interest me at all as opposed to 25 years ago when it was all I cared about,” he said “I like to just compose my shitty sonata and then write my shitty poems,” he added but I can also give people the sheet music and a little tiny notebook and see what they make of it.” Their process generally follows a pattern: Bejar sends demos written on piano “John’s first job is to envision a rhythm section He hears lots of things I don’t hear things get more grandiose and broader.” For the past two records they came into the process with musical motifs in mind: “For Have We Met because it’s everywhere — ‘Let’s make a Y2K sounding record a trip-hop sounding record.’ It was just a starting point because neither John nor I knew what any of those things meant Then the same thing happened with Labrynthitis ‘Let’s make a house record.'” We rely on reader subscriptions to deliver articles like the one you’re reading Become a member and help support independent media “The band feels more present,” Bejar said it’s a Poison Season/Your Blues mash-up and it doesn’t need to be some concept or some bold new step forward.” as Bejar declared on “Hydroplaning Off The Edge Of The World,” Destroyer is still “entering a new phase.” Many lyrics on the album were fragments of poetry combined as Bejar listened to the mix On the sprawling yet minimal “Cataract Time,” he improvised the lyrics on the spot It’s what I was feeling,” he said which was dark but hopeful at the same time The fact that I could sing at all became the hopeful strain of it.” For the slinky and downtempo “Bologna,” the band brought in Fiver’s Simone Schmidt to sing lead “The song wasn’t working with me Why does it sound like this song’s about a one-night stand but I wasn’t getting those verses across,” Bejar recalled Destroyer records are so steeped in the proper nouns of Bejar’s surroundings — his native Vancouver layered into collages of fleeting references I came to our meeting armed with annotations scribbled in the margins of the Dan’s Boogie lyric sheet hubristically determined to get answers directly from the Gen X prophet himself When he sings “I remix horses” on “The Ignoramus Of Love” — was that a reference to the Bill Callahan song “I Break Horses” “I think it was a riff on ‘I Break Horses,'” he said “and also a riff on me making a techno record of Horses by Patti Smith and things that influence me in an obvious way And the fact that it’s preceded by ‘There’s nothing in there/ Everyone’s been burned’ — it has this end of the line vibe.” Then there’s a reference to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on “Sun Meet Snow.” “Is there?” he asked there is: “I see you come through/ Down Rue Morgue Avenue.” Doesn’t Dylan sing about the same street on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” off his record Rattlesnakes.” Was he referencing either of those songs on “Sun Met Snow” A lot of that writing is instinctual momentum and that’s the one that popped into my head I know it’s incredibly specific though.” While we were on the topic — had Bejar seen the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown “Are you trying to get me in trouble?” he asked What about the line on the title track about the “stockbroker” who “weeps for his ’80s, makes beats for the ladies in grey.” Was that based on David Solomon, the Goldman Sachs CEO who spun records in the Bahamas under the name DJ D-Sol I don’t even know who that is!” he replied “I was thinking of a sadder version of that It’s not even a word that gets used anymore A movie like Wall Street is the ultimate ‘80s movie It would be impossible to think of a movie about stockbrokers right now.” “It’s kind of impossible to think about movies at all.” How so It definitely seems like going to the theater and seeing 2001 is not in the books for America again.” In general though Even though I was born and live 10 miles from the American border one thing I’ve discovered in the last 10 years is that this place is more wild and confusing than I thought it was when I was growing up I’m not qualified to really make statements about it.” Destroyer closed with “Notorious Lightning” from the 2006 album Your Blues “And someone’s got to fall before someone goes free!” Wasn’t that a statement It was definitely part of the Destroyer “burn it down” ethos You need a political backdrop to romance for it to have any power right?” There was also a more practical reason for its placement in the set list: “I definitely can’t sing anything after it the Vancouverite is grappling with his status as both a singular lyricist with a cult-like following and a musician who opens for artists 10 years his junior “I’m in this strange liminal mid-zone where I make a living through music but I’m not a celebrity,” he said “I would still make records even if no one was listening I know I would.” On Dan’s Boogie It’s the sound of realizing you’ve been had that the royal scam goes all the way to the top Dan's Boogie by Destroyer The most important stories and least important memes With the arrival of Destroyer's 14th album Dan's Boogie Dan Bejar talks to Samuel Cox about his five favourite songs from a kaleidoscopic career “I’m sick of reminiscing,” drawls Dan Bejar on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All” the most recent addition to the perpetually shapeshifting Destroyer canon when asked about the format of this interview – a plunge into the labyrinthian depths of his twenty-nine-year recording career as Destroyer – he is reluctant to cast his gaze towards the rearview mirror letting slip with a smile that this is his “least favourite” kind of interview “Maybe because I’ve made so many records and because I’m of a certain age now people want me to look back and reflect on the catalogue.” low-budget solo project in late 1990s Vancouver has slowly but surely transformed into a many-headed monster with a rotating cast of band members and collaborators; from long-time producers and musicians John Collins and David Carswell to American artist Kara Walker and ambient composer Tim Hecker Smith aphorism about grannies and bongos seems an apt way of describing Bejar’s relationship to the Destroyer moniker Bejar’s is a body of work well worth gazing back misty-eyed upon but equally understandable is his unwillingness to do so relied upon the ability and willingness of himself and Collins to repeatedly tear up the book of rules stating what a Destroyer album should look which could quite easily have become a template from which Bejar dutifully borrowed in the decade-and-a-half since its measured and meticulous Gaucho-era Steely Dan grooves and its refracted mutant disco danceability all serve as a trojan horse for Bejar’s dense and fevered poetics and for the album’s more avant-garde moments namely its eleven-minute closer ‘Bay of Pigs’ – but more on that later The result was Destroyer’s most commercially successful album to date a record which broke through into something at least vaguely resembling a mainstream eschewed the simple route of repeating the formula following up the album’s success with Poison Season a lusciously arranged suite of crooner ballads and earthy baroque pop-rock that plays more like early Scott Walker or a heady reimagining of the Sinatra songbook than anything on Kaputt and its predecessors Dan’s Boogie shows Bejar once again refusing to cut and paste villainous characters inhabited on many of the songs from 2020’s Have We Met and 2022’s Labyrinthitis are largely absent this time around replaced by more irresolute and languorous voices The pitch-shifting narrator of Labyrinthitis standout “June” snarls about a snow angel being “a fucking idiot someone made in the snow” while Have We Met opener “Crimson Tide” casts withering looks upon “chicken-shit singers” and a “dead rich runaway” It’s hard to imagine the narrators in Dan’s Boogie being so self-assuredly petty really?” Bejar sings on “The Ignoramus of Love” a lyric which could have been written by a wide-eyed young Brian Wilson / Where do I run to?” Perhaps this is a narrator from those previous records simply looking around with his head pounding and realising that the sun’s come up and his tirades have finally alienated his usual crowd moments which any seasoned player of the Destroyer drinking game would recognise: fog and rain musical moments which glance backwards too from the synthetic brass on “Sun Meet Snow” that recalls 2004’s MIDI-masterpiece Your Blues to the piano on album closer “Travel Light” which half-mimics the chord sequence on Poison Season opus “Bangkok” Smith and the Fall is applicable here: always different Bejar agrees that there is just enough room for a little nostalgia on Dan’s Boogie If it’s not quite a case of having one eye on his musical past – the new album is stuffed pleasingly with new sounds new Bejarian gags – there is at least a tacit awareness that he has a past at all and one which is worthy of embracing: “I think this new record reaches back into older Destroyer songs but it seems the most Destroyer-y sounding record that we’ve made in quite a few years I don’t really mind trying to make sense of it in the larger scheme of things.” DAN BEJAR: I was trying to do it like a radio play which is a format that I think about a lot And I would aspire to do something like that in a long form It was at a time when I first started thinking about ambient music about writing in a way that didn’t involve a guitar It was during the making of a record called Kaputt and a song called ‘Bay of Pigs’ but at different times I thought it was soul-sucking and I wanted to capture the drudgery and the banality of studio work the way that Sympathy for the Devil by Jean-Luc Godard does I wrote this kind of fake diary about the making of a song called ‘Grief Point’ that doesn’t exist was just me writing about my time in the studio I haven’t really done anything like that since I loved Scott’s music and the musique concrète part of it I felt it was so easy to speak over and write over and it kind of is a standout as far as what I’ve done in music Did working on this song inform the making of Kaputt itself And there’s probably nothing as personal-sounding as that song Because in a lot of ways I see [Kaputt] as a very warm record but it’s kind of impersonal in its way I was just feeling adventurous and I just wanted to do new things and that was probably a harbinger of that I might be reading into it too literally but you reference working on a song called ‘May Day’ on this track and I read an interview in the Village Voice where you say that ‘May Day’ was a working title for ‘Bay of Pigs’ it definitely goes hand-in-hand with a kind of faux behind-the-scenes reportage about the making of this song ‘Bay of Pigs’ ‘Bay of Pigs’ was a trial-by-fire song for the making of Kaputt 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 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 but also I just wanted to have long stretches 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 I completely gave up on that and haven’t really picked up the mantle since in a lot of ways I still write in this certain way but it’s not something I feel passionate about strange language constantly coursing through a song 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 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 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’ I don’t know why I placed the drama of ‘Bay of Pigs’ on the Kennedy Compound with kind of a drunk it was just a grey day on the Kennedy Compound 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 I don’t know why I was so hellbent on that name sometimes things just come to me and they have some inflated purpose in my mind but that name was really important for the song It’s an important moment in the song when I say that name and it anchored things because there’s a lot of images flying around It’s interesting because it’s also the most – no offence to Christine Whites out there – but it’s kind of a shockingly generic-sounding name DAN BEJAR: I think I was trying to follow the melodic lead that he did and then of course there was a title and the word But I played pretty fast and loose with it in a semi-improvisatory way And I enjoyed myself so much singing that song and writing to that song it really sparked a lot of how I ended up doing the record Have We Met John Collins’ production style and Sandro’s are quite different I don’t know…it was a shot in the arm for me And I’m just really proud of it because it has a lot of lines I really like I find the vocal on it very gentle but almost flippant as well Did the texture of Sandro’s work inform that It sent me down the path of not working on music and then setting up a microphone in the studio and singing your proper vocal track to the music you’ve been working on I’m just going to sing quietly because I’m in my house” I just felt relaxed so you can hear me play around more than I had on the last couple of records Even just the way the song starts which is “Did I really mean to do this?” That’s a line I like a lot and a way to start a song that I like a lot and I think I made that up on the spot because I felt really comfortable for some reason DAN BEJAR: This is now a song that we made coming-on twenty-two years ago and that’s a long time I know that I was knee-deep in my Scott Walker-obsessive state I knew that I was going to try and sing this song acapella which for someone with a voice like mine maybe for the first time and also probably the last time a set piece of writing that was a scene in an act in a play I felt like it could withstand this very arch dramatic – in the sense of theatre – treatment But the main thing is that it has my proudest musical moment and I don’t have any proud musical moments because I can use a guitar or a piano to sling chords together and come up with little melodic bits but there’s a MIDI trumpet solo on ‘Your Blues’ that’s my proudest musical moment of all time It’s the only time you can hear me improvising music in the history of Destroyer records And I really like it and I’m surprised I like it So the next best thing to a muted trumpet solo is a MIDI muted trumpet solo that I played on a keyboard probably because I wasn’t thinking about it I think everyone just took a bathroom break and I just laid it down So in the end that’s why I put that song [on the ‘Personal Best’ list] because it contains my one proud musical moment in the history of making music BEST FIT: On the use of MIDI on the album more broadly Was that a budgetary decision or was it about wanting to experiment with the technology and push up against its limits I thought the hundred-and-one violins setting sounded like a-hundred-and-one violins I just wanted to have orchestras and obviously I did not have a budget for that whatsoever Nor would we have known how to really wield that I knew I didn’t want to make a record with bass and drums and guitar even though acoustic guitar seems to still sneak in everywhere I haven’t really listened to it in a long time It’s the most insane that Destroyer probably sounded And it was kind of the last record to be really into the craft of writing songs there’s chord changes and there’s proper songwriting shit which I’ve definitely abandoned since then [Destroyer’s Rubies] was all about abandoning that Yeah…it’s probably the strangest record we’ve made but a more integrated way of using that aesthetic DAN BEJAR: I think it’s going to go down as an important song for me It just sounds like a mellow Destroyer song to people who listen to it but its genesis was intense I didn’t do anything for a long time and then just blurted that song out and made it up which is not normally what I’m used to doing I’ve had this kind of collaboration with John Collins this will be the third record we’ve done in a row in a pretty specific way I think it’s also probably the best singing I’ve ever done I know everyone says that about their latest record I’m not saying it’s the best thing I’ve ever done but I can defend the fact that it’s the best singing I’ve ever done Anyone that says I used to sing better just isn’t listening too hard or has probably just moved on to other things BEST FIT: The arrangement is really beautiful Was that something that came about between you and John or did one of you take the lead It was the song that John first glommed onto I’d done a version that just had a very dummied-down plinky synth version of one of those arpeggiating harps and he created these way more complex duelling arpeggiating harps and flattened out the rhythm so that it’s walking tempo Once the song became low-level groovy it really found its spot because those plinky harps are actually the backbone of what is a fairly simple song The rest is just me trying to deliver the words in an even keel which was really easy because that’s how I wrote it and that’s how I sing it Is there anything that this song does that nothing else has in the Destroyer catalogue so far it’s not the kind of song I would have even called a song fifteen years ago or twenty years ago or twenty-five years ago the sound of me walking around and that’s what I’m saying in my head Usually in Destroyer there’s the babble of several voices competing at once and things are slightly more excited but a state of the union address by someone who just turned fifty Get the Best Fit take on the week in music direct to your inbox every Friday This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page “There is a lightness that points to a future even if I think it’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever written,” he said of the single Watch its John Collins–directed video below Once Bejar wraps up his Destroyer tour of Europe, which includes a set at Primavera Sound Barcelona he returns to North America for a long run of shows That autumn leg begins on September 23 in Eugene and lasts on through to October 26 when he returns to soak up his hometown of Vancouver Find Destroyer’s tour dates after the fold Revisit Pitchfork’s 2022 interview “Dan Bejar Breaks Down the Gloriously ‘Incoherent’ New Destroyer Album.” All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Menu Listen Destroyer Is Back with New Boogie “Bologna” Ahead of Forthcoming LP Dan’s Boogie lands March 28 following Dan Bejar’s tour with Father John Misty With 232 pages and an expanded 12″ by 12″ format our biggest print issue yet celebrates the people and Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records the sophomore album from the endearing Brighton duo is a jolt of punk-rock beauty The NYC-based project’s second album delights in its confident sense of chaos with vocalist Cole Haden knowing full well there’s no way we’re going to avert our gaze for a single moment Channeling Ziggy Stardust’s glam transcendence Will Toledo resurrects the album as a grandiose narrative vehicle while marking his valiant stride into the rock canon Destroyer is back with the wonderfully titled new LP Dan’s Boogie which will arrive March 28 via Merge Records Lead single “Bologna” sounds like the music for a ’70s spy thriller and atmospheric synths providing the perfect backdrop for Bejar to sing lines like: “There’s an outside chance you’ll never see me again.” The name’s Bejar Accompanying the track is a David Galloway–directed video which stars Bejar and Simone Schmidt of the band Fiver “I haven’t written many songs like ‘Bologna,’” Bejar shared “I struggled singing the first and third verses The threat of disappearing needed to be real The Destroyer brigade will be hitting the road with Father John Misty next month. Talk about a couple of personas. Get ready for a lot of banter. Or none at all. View those dates here, and check out the video for “Bologna” below. You can also pre-order Dan’s Boogie here Already a member? Log in Not a member? Sign up Explore our Food Tours → The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure Comments and it features nighttime footage shot by Bejar himself “Me and Sydney started this off as a ‘Hydroplaning’ visualizer dusting off her 24-year-old Canon GL2 after many dormant years,” Bejar said in a press statement Then things ballooned into a full-on video Dan’s Boogie is out March 28. This month, Bejar will support Father John Misty on his North American tour with the two artists playing their first shows together next week Revisit the review of Destroyer’s last album, 2022’s Labyrinthitis. obliterates any notion of stasis when approaching songwriting I stopped looking at records as documents of what a band sounds like and more just like studio constructions,” he tells the Weekly the band’s massive 13-album discography ranges from folk to lounge pop to ambient spoken-word experiments Bejar’s ability to reinvent himself has kept Destroyer’s sound as unpredictable as it is resonating captivating and often cryptic lyrics have been the constant “The writing part has always been the most natural while the music part has always been the toil “It’s kind of the exact opposite of most musicians On the synth-pop forward track “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” Bejar exposes the pseudo-glamour of Hollywood and how the corrupt cycle only continues He offers a form of escapism through dreams: “Now let me tell you about the dream/I had no feeling/I had no past/I was the arctic/I was the vast/Spaces without reprieve/I was a dreamer/Watch me leave.” Bejar notes that he’s in the homestretch of completing his latest project And although this will be the band’s 14th stage of evolution given his tendency to shed his musical skin “But it can waver between the excitement of the finish line and the dead-eyed stare of being bludgeoned by combing over songs for months on end.” only enlisting his longtime collaborator David Carswell on electric guitar “There’s a lot of older songs that I play that the band doesn’t really touch Destroyer’s upcoming show at Swan Dive is bound to be special The last time Bejar graced a Vegas stage was in 2018 where he played to a small yet attentive crowd where the group went on super late and played to a crowd he assumed washed up at the bar to end the night Bejar never quite knew what to expect from Vegas and neither does Vegas know what to expect from Destroyer The sound is a moving target and we’ll be here to bask in the result every time DESTROYER October 20, 7 p.m., $20+. Swan Dive, swandivelv.com Click HERE to subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts The “Save the Roach” started as a joke but became a meaningful metaphor for preserving the artist’s passion for hip-hop The nonprofit Jazz Society is celebrating its anniversary with a festival at Winchester Dondero Cultural Center April 25-27 On “Through the Cherry Gates,” Sabriel draws influence from funk music Meditate on how apparent limitations might lead to inviting innovations "I had no idea how the band was even going to play these songs," Dan Bejar says of ambitious new album 'Dan's Boogie' BY Daniel SylvesterPublished Mar 24 Gearing up for the release of his latest full-length album, Destroyer's Dan Bejar treated fans to four solo acoustic shows across Nova Scotia and Ontario But there was one problem: fans didn't get to hear a single note of new material "I couldn't picture a lot of the ones that I try and do now on an acoustic tour," Bejar tells Exclaim "The acoustic sets lean pretty hard on old Destroyer songs Reflecting on the recording process for the nine sonically studious tracks that comprise Destroyer's 14th LP "I had no idea how the band was even going to play these songs." Working alongside longtime producer and on-again-off-again New Pornographers bandmate John Collins Bejar has once again transformed the otherworldly ideas and swirling lyrics churning about in his head into masterful recordings "I generally don't play instruments whatsoever "The band doesn't learn the song until the record's been done for ages and it's time to get on a bus to go on tour." That's why it's so remarkable that the album feels so cohesive and fully realized "And we stuck to that from the very beginning to the very end which is the first time that's ever happened." Bejar's Destroyer bandmates — a seasoned sextet of mostly Vancouver musicians who've been with him for more than a decade — played a major role in reviving the symphonic sound last heard on 2015's Poison Season but it's still there in a way that I'm not totally against," admits Bejar Songs like opener "The Same Thing as Nothing at All" and the title track "Dan's Boogie," showcase Bejar's brooding lyrics and singular sing-speak delivery set against a wall of sound Joshua Wells's thunderous drums and Collins's waxy basslines ebb and flow beneath the song's melodies "I didn't predict that this would be as much of a band record because the songs in their initial stage were just dry," says Bejar Building on the spontaneous delivery of his previous LP, Bejar freestyles the lyrics to conclude the brooding and adventurous "Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World," which stands out as a highlight. Reflecting on the similarities between that track and 2022's "June," Bejar explains, "I did something similar on this record. It was more of a juggling act really than a straight rap, but there's some similarities." While many of Bejar's contemporaries are busy repackaging and touring legacy albums, Bejar remains dedicated to creating some of the most exciting and genre-defying music of this generation — a vision he continues to realize with Dan's Boogie. "What I can do is make records that interest me and try and go out and play music in front of people in a way that pleases me and feels like there's some kind of conviction behind it," he says. But one question remains unanswered: will audiences eventually be able to hear these songs in a live setting? Bejar promises, "The band's smart, they'll figure it out." Be the first to get our biggest stories delivered to your inbox. The song arrives with a David Galloway–directed music video featuring banal snapshots of daily life: the hardware store and scroll down for the album art and tracklist “I haven’t written many songs like ‘Bologna,’” Bejar said in press materials Bejar is currently on tour supporting Father John Misty. Revisit Pitchfork’s 2022 interview “Dan Bejar Breaks Down the Gloriously ‘Incoherent’ New Destroyer Album.” 01 The Same Thing as Nothing at All02 Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World03 The Ignoramus of Love04 Dan’s Boogie05 Bologna [ft. Fiver]06 I Materialize07 Sun Meet Snow08 Cataract Light09 Travel Light A pair of cryptic Instagram posts hint that new music is on the way BY Megan LaPierrePublished Jan 6 The first features a photo of a drum head with a couple pieces of black tape and the following overlaid text: "The Foil. The Rival. A Location Scout. The Guest Villa. Upstate New York. Old Money. Honey. New Songs Sun. In a similar fashion, the second post pictures a pair of percussion mallets as well as two pieces of tape, this time folded up and attached to each other. "The Reeds of Desire. The Spider II. A Singer's Misery Revealed. Riverside Bridge. When I write you from Granada," it reads. "Love Without End." Are these lyrics or song titles? Does the fact that there are two separate posts mean it could be a double album? We can't be sure — but Destroyer's label, Merge Records, being tagged certainly seems like a good sign that some sort of official announcement is on the horizon. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Destroyer (@destroyer_band) View this post on Instagram A post shared by Destroyer (@destroyer_band) Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker The world of Destroyer‘s Dan’s Boogie is one of sweeping beauty tumbling towards erasure “‘There’s nothing in there/Everyone’s been burned,” Dan Bejar sings on ‘The Ignoramus of Love’ which nods to the Bill Callahan song ‘I Break Horses’ and reimagining Patti Smith’s Horses is evidence of how other pieces of music – as well as film and literature the boundaries being so blurred in Destroyer’s estimation – permeate Bejar’s subconscious lyrical process “I think for Destroyer songs in general “It’s the tapestry of the world in the background of those songs – the world they live in Not to say that it exclusively feeds off other people’s art but it’s definitely not scared to.” You can’t always trace a direct connection between them as a listener but you also can’t shake off the way a particular tangle of words or images might have bled into Bejar’s madcap expression It’s Destroyer at their most undiluted and fearless and the results are both satisfyingly murky and illuminating We caught up with Dan Bejar to talk about Billie Holiday and other inspirations behind Dan’s Boogie I was reading an interview about the making of Poison Season and you talked about listening to her later records which were more orchestrated while her voice was more worn down That fits into this idea that some of your inspirations remain kind of static What era or quality of her work did you find yourself gravitating to this time around I feel like it started around then and just kept amping up probably around the making of Poison Season it’s been something I listen to every single day I immerse myself in her voice from all eras hoping that it can be like a mist you walk through and I’ll have a scent of it on me when I open my mouth in front of a microphone I think there are a couple of songs where you can tell I’ve been under that spell even though my voice has nothing similar and it’s not an intrinsically appealing voice There’s an approach to phrasing she has that’s just unmatched where you can kind of tell I’m in thrall to that Probably not the songs people think about much off Dan’s Boogie – I’m not sure which ones people think about but there’s a 90-second song called ‘I Materialize’ that’s kind of me channeling my version of that that’s probably the best example of where my singing is at these days I listen to a lot of instrumental music these days but I don’t listen to a lot of people singing Does it make you think about your voice differently now than maybe listening to her did 10 years ago I think I listened to it 10 years ago in a way that was very much like I was digging the aura of it I listen for pleasure – and not in the sense of I’m more focused on the contours of her voice but I’m kind of zoomed in a lot more compared to 10 years ago You cited ‘70s Tom Waits around the cycle for Labyrinthitis How do you see that influence carrying over into Dan’s Boogie so it’s very gutsy for me to put him on this list [laughs] But I guess I also don’t listen to him much as an adult and mostly his ‘80s stuff that was more critically lauded and experimental But I’ve been really into his schmaltzy ‘70s records these days and Blue Valentine is maybe the best example of that I’d been more into songs that are orchestrated piano ballads even though what I can do on the piano is very limited was mostly written quickly over a couple of weeks while forcing myself to play the piano I think the instrument you use to write informs the sound of the songs and even the lyrical quality The piano brings out a certain lyric in me There are a couple of songs where I just wanted there to be a certain jazzy which is a pose Tom Waits was famous for in the seventies and probably got a lot of flack for I can do that kind of thing and not get in too much trouble I saw a comment under a YouTube video of the title track from Blue Valentine that struck me as quite bizarre – it was someone recalling a childhood memory of their parents dancing to the record Is there a memory that comes to mind when you think about listening to Tom Waits for the first time of seeing the video for a song called ‘In the Neighborhood’ It’s a very surreal black-and-white video with circus freaks everywhere just kind of marching through the main street of a small town I don’t know where they would even show this video but I remember thinking it was really creepy – it kind of freaked me out I don’t think I’d actually heard Tom Waits properly when that song ‘Downtown Train’ became slightly popular Even when making a song like ‘The Ignoramus of Love’ I was thinking of the way he would do a circus waltz kind of song which is different from the typical rootsy There’s something more cartoonish about his version but also something more theatrical and musical I think I started reading him not that long ago – maybe three or four years ago He’s like the least famous Nobel Prize laureate in the history of that prize It’s just a series of street names and people’s names You’re not totally sure what’s real – it’s all just fuzzy memories.” But for some reason the last couple of pages always reeled me in people’s names coming in and out of the mist some vague mystery which never gets solved and my attention span as I’ve gotten older is really bad so I love that these books are all under 200 pages [laughs] But they are these poetic accounts of the world being erased and something I can’t get to the bottom of I like it when mysteries don’t get figured out in books it’s something I’ve been into for the last few years I was just reading the latest one that came out in English – I read them in translation – just a couple of weeks ago It sounds like that feeling like there’s nothing in it they’re kind of these vaguely noirish mysteries without a lot of the tropes – definitely without the desire to solve anything A lot of it wrestles with Europe after the war but they exist in the shadow of something horrible That’s very specific to that time – maybe that time in Paris I read Roger Ebert’s original review of the film in which he wrote that “it cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.” That seems in line with what you’re talking about in terms of mysteries remaining unresolved I’ve been asked a lot about the title Dan’s Boogie it’s one of these titles I remember from my childhood – these hard-boiled ‘70s crime novels or espionage novels or maybe a film.” I saw Hustle after Dan’s Boogie was made but it shocked me how much it inhabited what I was thinking of when I was defending the title but if it had been something like So-and-So’s Hustle it would’ve been exactly what I was thinking of self-consciously ‘40s noir aesthetic – probably because of the director people get to talk in a heightened level of poeticism The dialogue is borderline ridiculous sometimes because that’s just understood in noir – you can speak in this exaggerated mode and I like that for when I have to stuff lyrics into songs because you can try to be as over-the-top Shakespearean as you want the aura is some Burt Reynolds crime thriller That movie is interesting also because it has this Catherine Deneuve angle and it’s lit in a way that’s kind of over-exaggerated It’s a strange clash of styles – a really weird It’s interesting how you’re creating or referring back to a cinematic world that validates that kind of poetic speech because Destroyer songs are pretty in-your-face where I purposefully wanted the vocals cranked – they have to be at a crooner level When the style of writing is kind of arch – not florid but aggressive lyricism – you need to find a world that style can attach itself to I was reading an interview with him – he’s only made two feature-length films One’s called Long Day’s Journey Into Night He also talked about being really into Patrick Modiano but he’s younger than me – I think likes a lot of the things I like But that’s not always enough to make me want to watch or listen to something he mashes it all up into something very distinct I find he’s visually so arresting – so good There are so many potent images and shots in his movies I think it’s some of my favorite poetry I’ve been exposed to in the last 10 years It’s rare for there to be a double whammy like that When I think of the amazing poetry in a Tarkovsky movie I’m trying to think of other examples where the visual and literary components line up in an incredible way I think Bi Gan might stand alone as the greatest example Do you think about how the visual world and the poetic world of the record line up more over time the apex of that – as far as my idea of songs having a cinematic feel to them Working with John is really important because he’s a sound design freak and an incredible mixer of sounds He creates these tapestries where it’s literally a joy to sing into them even though the vocals are usually the first thing done – they’re all done before any of that stuff gets worked on But the way he juggles the band and the canvas he makes for me to spew onto is there’s a line between something sounding cinematic and something making what I’m experiencing feel more cinematic A song like ‘Hydroplaning’ definitely does that I think that’s an important distinction to make There’s a song that’s trying to sound like music from a movie and then there’s a song that’s trying to sound like a movie even though I’m really into film scores and things like that more and more every year when I think of something having a cinematic quality it’s maybe more what you said: something that gives me the feeling I get when I’m watching a film I really love Was it a case of revisiting his films more or certain themes or images being stuck in your head but it doesn’t come off like filmed theater he started really getting going when he was old enough to be pre-cinema consciousness – kind of an old-school European approach to theater and artifice which he then filmed in this very interesting an example of people speaking in over-the-top poetic ways but somehow creating a universe where that kind of language and speaking feels normal or just right – it’s the right way to speak even if everyone sounds like they’re reading from pamphlets or essays There’s an approach to artifice in his films that I find really liberating when I watch them It makes me interested in how people speak on a stage and I’m always on a stage – what you can do to mess with those notions of how you’re supposed to sound when you open your mouth He’s a director who’s kind of stuck with me for a long time Do you think about messing with that notion even when you don’t have performance in mind I’m not natural enough or academic enough to get on stage and be conscious of what I’m doing and I either feel really good about it or really bad about it I think about it a lot – not when I’m writing them and I have a hard time really delving into the actual writing process how it’s supposed to come across as a recording and how my voice is supposed to come across as something that carries it Maybe not always in the most conscious way And how you can mess with it – not for any philosophical intention I read that this is one of the longest novels ever written just so densely packed with a mind saying incredible things all the time There’s no real narrative to latch onto – just a few vague ghostly characters who say incredible things But it’s not just stream-of-consciousness; it’s like a crazy wind you have to follow we can still discover these amazing works that were just kind of lost to us Or maybe only a few people knew about them I feel like I should just read one page from it for the rest of my life Is it also inspiring in a way that makes something click about the way you’ve been writing or aspiring to write in recent years it kind of validates everything I think about in art You just went and did it.” Everything I thought art was supposed to do – this onslaught of language where I start reading and I literally get swept away by the words That’s just what I want to feel when I’m reading I just want to feel like that all the time It’s bloated – it just goes and goes and goes But the force of vision to make this 1,300-page blast is definitely very inspiring It doesn’t make me think that I could do that which is something that’s really easy to forget It also seems like an incredible book from a time when there was more at stake It’s impossible to imagine a novel like that being written and published in America right now So it makes you wonder about what we’ve lost If I could single out one phrase from Dan’s Boogie to encapsulate it it would be “carve yourself out of illusion.” Does that line hold a similar weight for you in the context of the album If I had to pick out a song and the lyrics in a song It’s the most automatic writing that happened I just sat down and started singing it over a little chord progression and melody A lot of the writing is very uncensored – it wasn’t written beforehand I don’t have it in me to just improvise a song There are lines that feel very personal or very much describe where I was at while walking around the day I wrote that song “Carve yourself out of illusion” – what is it – “You choose the wrong way around a setting sun.” That song speaks to a lot of the stuff I picked as examples of influences: wandering through the streets and not recognizing the streets having what used to be familiar slowly erased as you get into feelings of entering the last act of your life Just how disorienting that can be at first the speed at which the world wants to erase itself these days whether through some violent act or just a slow fade It seems to be a feeling that sticks with me or even the later Billie Holiday records – there’s always a looking back on something that’s almost gone which gives them their power and their tragedy This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length Destroyer’s Dan’s Boogie is out now via Merge Dan’s Boogie by DestroyerDan’s Boogie by Destroyer All our content is free to read; if you want to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 2/1/2025) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 2/1/2025) The material on this site may not be reproduced except with the prior written permission of Our Culture Mag Limited (Merge)Frightening fates await the protagonists of Dan Bejar’s 14th album but the mercurial Canadian’s perspective and lavish instrumentation are a reminder of beauty’s potential Fri 28 Mar 2025 10.00 CETShareIf Dan Bejar’s musically shifting Destroyer project has a trademark The Canadian is a master of strange lyrical koans that transcend the singer’s acerbic tone to brim with weird To share his headspace is to see a city in a different light – how “the opera house is a jam space for the desperate and insane” as on the title track of Dan’s Boogie; to take pride in failure: “The family curse was our signature scent,” he sings on Sun Meet Snow Dan’s Boogie Photograph: David Galloway/Destroyer Music LimitedThis time the protagonists of Bejar’s 14th album are feeling similarly side-swiped Ghosts and inclement weather creep in without warning Darker forces leave Bejar “sick of women missing / In the dark light that hangs / O’er the low-backed side streets” On the strikingly sweet highlight Cataract Time Bejar tenderly observes the folly of assuming that “we think we know / Enough to go on” Gentle closer Travel Light waves off the “dopers and pushers” who think they can outrun fate But Bejar is committed to the beauty in chaos: how “the sun mostly rises / A great golden spike through the heart of the world” as he sings on the oddly calming The Ignoramus of Love That outlook beams through this gorgeous ruined palace of a record one that swaggers from rococo to shambling It is just as rapturous as his 2011 breakout Kaputt – unerring quality being another Destroyer trademark BY Allie GregoryPublished Jan 8 which includes a stop at Toronto's Massey Hall (a full-band tour of Europe and the UK begins in June) The record is previewed today by new single "Bologna," which features fellow Canadian alternative troubadours, Fiver. "I haven't written many songs like 'Bologna,'" Bejar shared in a release. "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 [Schmidt of Fiver]." The track arrives alongside a music video by David Galloway, who shared in a statement: The album art is above. Check out Galloway's video for "Bologna" below, along with the tracklist. 1. The Same Thing as Nothing at All2. Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World3. The Ignoramus of Love4. Dan's Boogie5. Bologna (feat. Fiver)6. I Materialize7. Sun Meet Snow8. Cataract Light9. Travel Light Dan Bejar is a musician from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known as a frequent collaborator with The New Pornographers and for fronting his own band, Destroyer Here Bejar chats about the relative formlessness of his own creative practice and addresses the ways in which aging has and hasn’t influenced his process as a musician The song kind of wafts by and I walk into it.” It’s a nice way to describe the mystery of the creative process for someone who’s recorded well over 20 albums over the past two decades you do seem to have a fairly strong work ethic I think I write more than a lot of people without actually realizing it My mind is always blown when people take six or seven years between albums I think I do have a work ethic when it comes to being in the studio because to me the music part of things—coming up with a song coming up with a bunch of words that truss together nicely and have some kind of melodic phrase that feels natural and memorable—has always seemed more mysterious and not like work somehow Records certainly haven’t gotten easier to make over time I think about writers who are kind of like poets people who will sit down and write endlessly and then overwrite and whittle things down and edit and edit basically carving away at ideas in an attempt to get to what is essential in their words I wish I would work in the way that I imagine they do When something is really foreign to you I think you tend to romanticize it or you aspire to it in a kind of hopeless way If I think about it too much I start to question what I’m coming up with and when I sit down to write I don’t even really know how to do that I wouldn’t say I necessarily stumble blindly into things but I like the song idea to present itself to me in some kind of natural way before I start working or before I start to attack something with my mind Do your lyrics evolve in tandem with your music Maybe at some point I’ll go back to the old way which is writing constantly in a book and playing guitar constantly and then grabbing what I would call “melodious language” or language that seems like it wants to be sung and then sticking it into a song It hasn’t really been like that for a few years now It’s been more just like stringing singable thoughts together Once in a while I’ll write something that seems completely divorced from music but I won’t think about it in terms of something to look at and think I wonder if this could go in a song.” It just seems like prose Do you have a writing practice that’s separate from music making while writing was something that I’d done from a younger age I always thought of writing as more in keeping with what kind of person I was Even through the making of many Destroyer records I still thought at some point I had a book in me I came to terms with that notion possibly not being true I turned 40 and I just kind of woke up to the idea that “It’s possible you’re just a rock and roll singer with some kind of flair.” I have a hard time speaking in a way that seems real to me otherwise there’s a certain amount of anxiety if I think it’s supposed to be a work of literature or something like that then I can really bust loose and be myself It’s a fairly natural thing for people to formulate an idea of who you are as a person based on your body of work—to assume that the “I” in the songs is always really you They often deflect that sort of interpretation For me it feels really natural to think that when someone is singing something you’re getting an idea of who they really are to say someone has an ugly voice is like a real material damnation It’s not like saying that they said something ugly There’s something hideous to behold about them I’m curious how your work changes—or the experience of playing rock music changes—as you get older I’m reminded of this other quote from you that seems appropriate here: “Pop culture is ageist If you’re a singer or a dancer or an actor and you get to your 40’s you’re fucked—and 99% of me thinks it serves people right for getting into showbiz in the first place.” people whose bodies are part of what they do It’s just that when you think of something as art It’s strange that half of someone’s life isn’t really supposed to be addressed because you’re not really privy to the rock and roll spirit anymore At least that seems to be true about the singers I like Maybe it would also be true about singers I don’t like but maybe they just disappear or something Has the experience of touring and playing live—whether it’s by yourself or with a band behind you—changed radically over the years as you get older It used to feel more like a cool drunken frolic and it’s become more anxiety ridden or confusing to me The thing that most people dig when they’re younger is just to get up on stage and go for it I used to have to drink for two days just to get on stage and then drink for another two days after I got off to be able to deal with how shitty I thought it was I needed to get literally one thousand shows under my belt before I started to relax and feel good and confident on a stage I still often crave the rope ladder to come down five minutes before the show that I can just shuffle up and a helicopter takes me away or a rescue SWAT team that busts down the door in order to get me away from the stage the performing part is now the part of touring that I like It’s just now all the other stuff around it which kind of sucks I also like the band that has been Destroyer live for the past five years Between your work in Destroyer and in The New Pornographers you collaborate with a lot of really talented musicians What do you like about collaboration as opposed to working solo People sometimes think that Destroyer is all me and only me the bulk have my job has been to find a grouping of people who do something cool when they’re together in a room Maybe in the mixing process I have more of a say or if there’s some sort of yes or no decision that has to be made it ends up on me but on the musical side it’s always been really collaborative That’s one of the reasons maybe why the Destroyer records jump around a lot why there is something dilettante-ish about it There’s a lot of really good things in music that I like I also love the way good musicians just go off on their instrument As someone who can’t just pick up any random instrument and express themselves through it in real time, I get overly excited by that shit and I want to record it. I like to surround myself in it. Making this last record, ken was kind of strenuous in some ways because it was a conscious exercise to get as close to minimalism as Destroyer is probably ever gonna get My tendency generally skews towards having as much stuff happening as possible at all times Are you someone who feels the compulsion to work on music all the time do you have a compulsive music-making practice My process is letting things fester in my mind I might make little notes or scribbles in the van but I have let those things build into a critical mass until I address it and say “I wonder if there’s a record here?” Maybe it would be good if I just forced myself to do some kind of music on a regular basis instead of choosing these strained perhaps—because it looks any other person’s I make my daughter’s lunch or something like that The split between my personal life and my “artist” life is very I’m just kinda leading the family life or I’m living for two or three months in a bus driving through the night and living in bars I do kind of relax a little bit when I’m not working on music or not touring then I’m kind of generally ill at ease and I seize up and I can’t read I start to have weird sensations that I can dwell on more and more until maybe they seep into an idea for a song or a record I find the idea of “creative practices” so fascinating When I hear about people that keep a rigorous schedule or follow a strict set of rituals in order to get certain things done on a regular basis I’m totally fascinated because for me the process feels so formless Do reviews or outside feedback affect what you make in any way Your work elicits such interesting reactions and comparisons people saying I sound like Al Stewart when I’m trying to sound like Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys It’s usually just a pretty classic indicator of what I think I’m doing versus what I’m actually doing There’s always been a pretty amazing disconnect between the two—what I think I’m doing versus how it comes across I have always felt like that divide—that gulf—was bigger for me than it was for most people “Most people can’t be that far off the mark with what they do As long as in my mind I think I’m making something amazing Destroyer - ken (2017) The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005) Swan Lake - Beast Moans (2006) Hello, Blue Roses - WZO (2015) Destroyer - Kaputt (2011) Here's a space to search our entire website Try typing something like "creative blocks" "green" or "blue" and our snail will find what you're looking for The following message was sent to the university community by President Kenneth A I wrote to you regarding our moment of transition as a university community and how we would come together and walk a path of academic excellence and innovation We have accomplished much in the past year One of the ways we ensure our continued forward movement is to identify and retain the best talent to help meet the challenges of our time As such, I am thrilled to announce the appointment of Dr. Elizabeth M. Béjar as our next provost executive vice president and chief operating officer Béjar’s understanding of the dynamics of higher education administration alongside her ability to lead and meet opportunities and challenges with confidence Committed to the success of our students and our faculty Béjar has advocated for faculty-initiated improvements to our academic programs at both the FIU Board of Trustees and the Florida Board of Governors Béjar believes strongly in the value proposition of anchor public research universities and the critical role faculty have in the academy today and is dedicated to ensuring that our students are prepared for the careers of today and tomorrow are global citizens and are able to achieve their goals Béjar is also a trailblazer as the first Hispanic and first alumna to serve as provost and in 2009 became our first vice provost for Academic Planning and Accountability she was named vice president of Academic Affairs when FIU merged student affairs with academic affairs she was named senior vice president for Academic and Student Affairs She initiated the innovative educational redesign that has now become a model for success Béjar provided strategic oversight and guidance in mobilizing and collaborating with teams of education professionals to research develop and implement 21st-century higher education initiatives focused on the academy Béjar has served as principal investigator on several grants she received a $975,000 Department of Education grant to build on the success of completion grants and financial wellness programming to re-enroll students who stopped out during the pandemic or are at risk of stopping out She has spearheaded efforts that have increased our four-year graduation rate to nearly 60 percent - a histor high for FIU In the past few months, Dr. Béjar has led the re-organization of the Office of Engagement, which has become the Center for Community Impact and Public Purpose focused on aligning engagement opportunities related to faculty Our focus continues to be on efficacy and efficiency through shared services with the goal of achieving savings to ensure we have funding to invest in faculty and student success Cendan in the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and Dr She is supporting searches for deans for the libraries and the Green School of International and Public Affairs in higher education administration from Boston College a master’s in international and intercultural development education from FIU and a bachelor’s in psychology and elementary education from the University of Miami As a community focused on solving some of the greatest challenges of our time we are dedicated to our vision and to keep achieving excellence in everything we do.  Please join me in congratulating and supporting Dr. Béjar Receive daily FIU stories and updates directly to your inbox « Back former Facebook employee and consultant for Instagram testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy and the Law during a hearing to examine social media and the teen mental health crisis File - The Instagram logo is seen on a cell phone in Boston Former Meta engineer Arturo Bejar is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday about social media and the teen mental health crisis hoping to shed more light on how Meta executives knew about the harms Instagram was causing and chose not to do anything about it is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy and the Law hearing to examine social media and the teen mental health crisis known for his expertise on curbing online harassment recounted to Zuckerberg his own daughter’s troubling experiences with Instagram But he said his concerns and warnings went unheeded it was Béjar’s turn to testify to Congress “I appear before you today as a dad with firsthand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram,” he told a panel of U.S Béjar worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 attracting wide attention for his work to combat cyberbullying But between leaving the company and returning in 2019 as a contractor Béjar’s own daughter had started using Instagram “She and her friends began having awful experiences including repeated unwanted sexual advances “She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing.” and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.” He believes that Meta needs to change how it polices its platforms unwanted sexual advances and other bad experiences even if these problems don’t clearly violate existing policies sending vulgar sexual messages to children doesn’t necessarily break Instagram’s rules but Béjar said teens should have a way to tell the platform they don’t want to receive these types of messages “I can safely say that Meta’s executives knew the harm that teenagers were experiencing that there were things that they could do that are very doable and that they chose not to do them,” Béjar told The Associated Press makes it clear that “we can’t trust them with our children.” a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary’s privacy and technology subcommittee introduced Béjar as an engineer “widely respected and admired in the industry” who was hired specifically to help prevent harms against children but whose recommendations were ignored “What you have brought to this committee today is something every parent needs to hear,” added Missouri Sen Béjar pointed to user surveys carefully crafted by the company that show that 13% of Instagram users — ages 13-15 — reported having received unwanted sexual advances on the platform within the previous seven days Béjar said he doesn’t believe the reforms he’s suggesting would significantly affect revenue or profits for Meta and its peers They are not intended to punish the companies “You heard the company talk about it ‘oh this is really complicated,’” Béjar told the AP Just give the teen a chance to say ‘this content is not for me’ and then use that information to train all of the other systems and get feedback that makes it better.” The testimony comes amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations aimed at protecting children online Meta also introduced “kindness reminders” that tell users to be respectful in their direct messages — but it only applies to users who are sending message requests to a creator Béjar said it is “absolutely essential” that Congress passes bipartisan legislation “to help ensure that there is transparency about these harms and that teens can get help” with the support of the right experts .css-1sm5mum{margin:0;font-size:14px;line-height:1.4;font-family:'Libre Baskerville',serif;font-weight:400;display:none;}Home 2023.css-3vr8u{margin:0;font-size:14px;line-height:1.4;font-family:'Libre Baskerville',serif;font-weight:400;}Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press former Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar testified to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy Bejar testified about Meta's knowledge of the harm its platforms cause to children and teens Bejar discussed evidence he presented to top executives regarding the prevalence of harmful experiences on Facebook and Instagram He criticized the company for engaging in a strategy of distraction and for disregarding recommendations to make the platforms safer Bejar also highlighted the need for legislative reform and transparency from social media companies Senators expressed concerns about the addictive nature of social media and the need for legal liability for these platforms Josh Hawley (R-MO) pledged to seek a vote on the bills passed by the committee before the end of the year and emphasized his view of the importance of holding social media companies accountable through a private right of action Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) discussed Facebook's failure to address the harm caused to kids Blumenthal expressed his support for the Kids Online Safety Act and the need for transparency and accountability from social media companies The hearing concluded with a commitment to vote on the bills before the end of the year See Bejar's written testimony here What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the hearing This hearing of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology Thank you everyone for attending my thanks to Ranking member Hawley and particularly to the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for giving us this opportunity and he is vitally interested in this topic and I'm going to call on him after Senator Hawley for his remarks We are gathered today to hear testimony from a blower widely respected and admired in the industry and not just any expert but a engineer hired specifically by Facebook to help protect against harms to children and make recommendations for making Facebook safer We've known for more than a decade that rates of teens suffering from suicides hospitalizations for self-harm and depression have skyrocketed As he knows these numbers are more than statistics They're real people and his daughter is one of them Arturo Bejar is the former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook and he will tell us about the evidence he brought directly to the attention of the top management of Facebook and Meta Mark Zuckerberg He resoundingly raised an alarm about statistics showing Facebook's prevalent and pernicious harms to teens telling Mark Zuckerberg in a memo that more than half of Facebook users had bad or harmful experience he will testify that Facebook engaged in a purposeful public strategy of distraction They hid from this committee and all of Congress evidence of the harms that they knew was credible and they ignored and disregarded recommendations for making the site safer and they even rolled back some of the existing protection Bejar is not the first or the only whistleblower to come forward We heard from Francis Haugen who showed that Facebook's own researchers described Instagram itself as a perfect storm and that it exacerbates downward spirals of addiction not just in his recollection but in documents how he warned the top management of Facebook and Instagram of the ongoing harms their products were causing We're going to present those documents for the record and they show 13 to 15 years old report receiving sexual advances on Instagram Nearly a third of young teens have seen discrimination based on gender A quarter of young teens report having been bullied or threatened and nearly a quarter of young teens report experiencing feeling worse about themselves about their bodies and their social relationship the type of experience that lead to serious depression and eating disorders And when users reported harmful content to Facebook There's a history here in August of 2021 Senator Blackburn and I wrote to Facebook about the impact of their products on kids has Facebook research ever found that its platforms and products can have a negative effect on children's and teens mental health or wellbeing We heard from Haugen about Instagram's harms That email actually demonstrated even greater harms than were then public a chilling and searing indictment of Instagram and Facebook and I'm going to ask that it be made part of the record without objection Sari then testified to the committee to our subcommittee after he met with Mr Bejar discussing these numbers and statistics relating to suicide a number of us asked him about Facebook promoting suicide around 7% of Facebook users overall counter content promoting suicide and self-harm with 13 to 15 year old It hides risks by saying things like bullying and harassment is only 0.08% of content When in reality Meta executives know that 11% of those 13 to 15 year olds face bullying every single week that's millions of children and teenagers It's not just a number behind every one of those numbers is a real person a child whose life is changed maybe forever we can no longer rely on social media's mantra we can no longer depend on its putting the blame or responsibility on parents What's needed now is legislative reform Senator Blackburn and I have enlisted more than 45 of our colleagues almost half the United States Senate in favor of the Kids' Online Safety Act and the final point I would make is that social media in particular Facebook still fails to take these threats seriously the Wall Street Journal found that Instagram was hosting open markets for child abuse material even recommending pedophiles to each other Young teens were being extorted and coerced into sexual acts and others in management with specific recommendations to prevent teens from experiencing this unwanted sexual contact and harassment You have put your career on the line to come forward an experienced and trusted industry expert whose job was to make Facebook safer and your recommendations were purposefully ignored or disregarded or rejected I'm just going to remind my colleagues that we've heard from young people as well as parents about these harms and one of them told me how many more children have to die before Congress will do something I want to thank all of my colleagues who are present truly a bipartisan group on behalf of this cause and turn to the ranking member Senator Hawley This is such a vital hearing on a vital topic and to be honest with you I think every parent's nightmare and I see you're nodding That subject composes that reality composes some of your testimony I'm also a father of three and what you have brought to this committee today is something that every parent in America needs to hear The numbers are really stunning that one in four teenagers minor children will experience sexual solicitation on Metis platforms One in eight say that they have experienced unwanted sexual advances Children have experienced unwanted sexual advances just in the last week within the last seven days and of course we know from Meta's own internal research that they knew the extent of this problem even as they were ignoring you And I want to turn to some of that research that Senator Blumenthal just referenced these are Meta's own words from their own internal research on the effect of their own product on children We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups Teens told us they don't like the amount of time they spend on the app They often feel addicted and know that what they're seeing is bad for their mental health This is the reality that Meta and Instagram These quotes are years old that I just read What your testimony shows is when you brought these concerns to them when you expose this reality rather than respond including Congress and of course every parent in America that But what you expose is in fact those AI systems are catching only a small percentage of that kind of abusive material online So when Facebook is out there promoting to the world And in fact they know it's not true and that statistic is designed to mislead They're deliberately misleading parents about what's on their platform They're deliberately misleading parents about the safety of their children online And I just want to echo something that Senator Blumenthal has said It was time years ago for Congress to take action It is an indictment of this body to be honest with you that we have not acted and we all know the reason why If I could just start with a little plain talk here this morning most powerful lobby in the United States Congress They spend millions upon millions upon millions of dollars every year to lobby this body and I hope you'll report it after this hearing They successfully shut down every meaningful piece of legislation every year I've only been here for four years and I have seen it repeatedly We'll get all kinds of speeches in committees we'll get speeches on the floor about how we have to act and then this body will do nothing It is time for it to be broken and the only way I know to break it is to bring the truth forward and that's why we are so glad Mr The only footnote I would add is this time must be different chairman Blumenthal and Senator Hawley and let me follow up with Senator Hawley's comments after some graphic hearings where parents and victims came forward and told us what had happened to them online six bills and something happening that was miraculous Every Democrat and every Republican take a look at the folks who are up into the table Six bills waiting for a day on the calendar Six bills passed unanimously on a bipartisan basis and they put real teeth in enforcement too and I think that's why they've gone nowhere Big tech is the big kid on the block when it comes to this issue and many other issues before us I want to thank Chairman Blumenthal and Senator Hawley for bringing together so many members at this hearing Our philosophy in putting together the subcommittees was to say to each of the senators in charge of them Take your issue that means something to you and do your best to bring it to the American people and legislation to the floor of the United States Senate This committee is one that I'm counting on to be successful in this regard thank you for the courage of stepping up and speaking up The only amendment I would make to the chairman's remarks and Senator Hawley's is it's not only a parent's issue So thank you for what you brought us today I'm particularly intrigued by your idea of a survey so that we find out from the source what's really happening My experience at Capitol Hill goes back several years We were hitting our head against the wall trying to penetrate this vast lobby the one way we managed to penetrate it was to make it a children's issue protecting kids from addiction to tobacco and then a lot of good things started happening which relates to our kids so much more and is so much more dangerous even than tobacco We're really fighting the biggest kid on the block when it comes to this issue Senator Durbin and thank you for your leadership on this issue I'm going to turn to Senator Graham if he has some opening remarks and then to Senator Maybe number seven is the magic number of bills I hope and one thank you Senator Blumenthal and Hawley for doing this is to sunset Section 230 The other bills are going nowhere until they believe they can be sued in court The day they know the courtroom is open to their business practices they will flood us with all kind of good ideas they're going to go to the floor to die and be known So the bottom line is a society that cannot take care of its children or refuses to has a bleak future Thank you for the time that you've given Senator Blumenthal staff my staff as you've met with us and for being so open When you met with Senator Blumenthal and I last week I really appreciate this as Senator Blumenthal said and we have worked on this for years and he built the timeline out going to 2021 but the work we were doing looking at big tech and looking at some of the problems the frustration of people not being able to control who had access to their virtual you is what led us to this point to begin to look at what was happening to our children And as I told you in our meeting the day we had that first hearing looking at what was happening online with children it was like the floodgates opened and we started hearing from moms and dads not only in Tennessee and not only in Connecticut The reason they did this is because their hearts were breaking They had been exposed to cyber bullying and had committed suicide They were looking up ways to commit suicide there are laws in the physical world that protect children from all of this but online it has been the Wild West and as my colleagues have said we have fought this army of lobbyists for years Big tech has proven they are completely incapable of governing themselves and it is so important that we move forward with this one thing I'll add and I think is so important for your being here and for our colleagues that weren't a part of what we were doing when he came before us as the CEO of Instagram indicated We find out from the advice and the awareness that you provided Mark Zuckerberg and Mr They made a conscious decision to ignore your advice and guidance and use our kids as the product So they have monetized what comes from our children being addicted to social media Arturo Bejar is a former security engineer with very significant experience working on user safety and wellbeing at Facebook He served as director of Engineering for Protect and Care He then came back as a consultant to help Instagram's wellbeing team from 2019 to 2021 He's also a parent to a courageous young girl young woman who spoke up about her experiences online I'm going to administer the oath to you now please do you swear that the testimony that you will give to this committee is the truth ranking member Graham Chairman Blumenthal ranking member Hawley and members of the subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to appear before you and for your interest in addressing the most urgent one of the most urgent threats to our children today to American children and children everywhere My name is Arturo Bejar and I appear before you today as a dad with firsthand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram as an expert With over 20 years of experience working as a senior leader including leading online security for and safety and protection at Facebook it is unacceptable that a 13 year old girl gets propositioned on social media In a carefully designed survey by Instagram in 2021 we found that one in eight kids age 13 to 15 years old experienced unwanted sexual advances in the last seven days This is unacceptable and my work has shown that it doesn't need to be this way I was the engineering and product leader for Facebook's efforts to reduce online threats to both children and adults I met regularly with senior executives including Mark Zuckerberg I took the work personally and I worked hard to help create a safer environment I felt the work was going in the right direction She and her friends began having awful experiences including repeated unwanted sexual advances She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing in large part because of what I learned as her father I returned to Facebook this time as a consultant with Instagram's wellbeing team We tried to set goals based on the experiences of teens themselves the company wanted to focus on enforcing its own narrowly defined policies Regardless of whether that approach reduced the harm that teens were experiencing I discovered that most of the tools for kids that we had put in place during my earlier time at Facebook had been removed I observed new features being developed in response to public outcry a safety feature in name only to placate the price and regulators I say this because rather than being based on user experience data they were based on very deliberately narrow definitions of harm Instagram knows when a kid spends significant amount of time looking at harmful content content that they are recommending Meta must be held accountable for their recommendations and for the unwanted sexual advances that Instagram enables I did this because for six years that was my job to let them know of critical issues that affected the company It's been two years since I left and these are the conclusions I have come to one Meta knows the harm that kids experience on their platform and executives know that their measures fail to address it there are actionable steps that Meta could take to address the problem they're deciding time and time again to not tackle these issues Instagram is the largest public directory of teenagers with pictures in the history of the world Meta which owns Instagram is a company where all work is driven by data but it has been unwilling to be transparent about data regarding the harm that kids experience and unwilling to reduce them Social media companies must be required to become more transparent so that parents and public can hold them accountable Many have come to accept the false proposition that sexualized content or wanted advances misogyny and other harms are unavoidable evil We don't tolerate unwanted sexual advances against children in any other public context and they can similarly be prevented on Facebook What is the acceptable frequency for kids to receive unwanted sexual advances 11% of kids said yes in the last week and one in four witnessed it happening and the company does nothing about that When asked if they saw a post that made them feel bad about themselves I thought the company would take my concerns and recommendations seriously to heart and act Yet years have gone by and millions of teens are having their mental health compromised and are still being traumatized by unwanted sexual advances harmful content on Instagram and other social media platforms There was a time when at home on the weekend at least a kid could escape these things but today just about every parent and grandparent has seen their kids' faces change from happiness to grief to distress the moment that they check social media It's time the public and parents understand the true level of harm enabled by these products and it's time for Congress to act We're going to now begin with the questions and each of us will ask five minutes of questions and because of the turnout I'm going to limit it to five minutes and then we'll have a second round if folks want to do that we put in the record your memo to Mark Zuckerberg of October 5th where you recommend that there be in effect not only a change in the business practice of the company I'm going to ask that that document be made part of the record as well where you presented more of these statistics and very powerful evidence of harm and it seems to me that the reaction was to pat you on the head and in effect tell you to go away Senator Hawley's referred to cooking the books I think what they did was bury this evidence and deny it in effect to Congress and to the public they've actually cut around 21,000 jobs or a quarter of the global workforce in what Mark Zuckerberg has called the year of efficiency hundreds of jobs involving content moderators and safety jobs including from Instagram's wellbeing team What is the impact of cutting those resources devoted to online safety If you start from the point that the work was already heavily under-resourced when I was there 10% of people experiencing this and that there were a small fraction of people dedicated to address that harm and then they take more resources away from that including the people who are doing the work to understand the harm that kids are experiencing then it seems to me that the company culture is one of C We don't want to understand what people are experiencing and we were not willing to invest in that and the tools that will help We spoke in advance of the hearing and you told me a story about meeting with another senior executive and it was just so striking to me that he already knew a lot of the numbers and statistics and evidence of harm that you were bringing to Mark Zuckerberg's attention like when I began seeing a culture that was consistently ignoring what teens were experiencing And I did spend a year researching vetting validating with people across the organization and I would ask people do you know what percentage of people are experiencing this And nobody was able to answer on the top of their head The first person to do that was Chris Cox and I found it heartbreaking because it meant that they knew and that they were not acting on it their expressed caring about teens and safety and protecting children was all a charade to mockery They already had the evidence that you were bringing to their attention They knew about it and they disregarded it And then they rejected your recommendations for making Facebook and Instagram safer And let me ask you before we go to our next witness do you think that the Congress of the United States should now act Don't you think action is long overdue in this area given the total lack of credibility on the part of social media My experience after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards is that they knew there are things they could do about it They chose not to do them and we cannot trust them with our children and it's time for Congress to act I'm very hopeful that your testimony added to the lawsuit that's been brought by attorneys general State Attorneys general across the country added to the interest that I think is evidenced by the turnout of our subcommittee today will enable us to get the Kids Online Safety Act across the finish line along with measures like Senator Durbin's proposals and others that can finally break the straight jacket that big tech has imposed on us I urged Congress to act the same kind of addictive product That big tobacco pedaled to kids now is advanced to them and promoted and pitched by big tech and we need to break the rait jacket they've imposed through their armies of lobbies and lawyers I just want to first establish a factor two just to make sure everybody understands you composed an email which is now I think in the record you disclosed to them that according to your own research children now had experienced unwanted sexual advances within the last seven days had experienced unwanted sexual advances outside of the seven day window a third of children outside of that window the people who had recruited you to come back to Facebook They ignored your findings when you presented data to them This is from the Wall Street Journal's report earlier this year Instagram helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage sex content but unlike the forums and file transfer services that cater to people who have an interest in illicit content Instagram doesn't merely host these activities Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share these interests The journal and academic researchers found this is a stunning that more than buttresses bears out what you were telling trying to tell the executives who ignored you Why are people like your daughter Every time they get on Instagram they're being bombarded with unwanted sexual advances My experience of that is that most of the resources go towards this very narrow definition of harm And so I would encourage anybody here when you're looking at this issue if you find an account that seems to be a pedophile account selling things but see what happens if you like it or follow it what you start getting recommended and of all of the things that get surfaced by the systems One of the things that you said changed from the time you left Facebook in 2015 I think it was and came back in 2019 was that Facebook had shifted to an automated driven process of safety It appears that these harms are proliferating Tell us about the shift towards automated safety monitoring and what that has meant in your experience but what I can say is that algorithms are as good as their inputs which something that you can do for an ad today you can take an ad and say that is sexually inappropriate but there's no way for a child to do that when they get a message or other areas How do these systems even have a hope of addressing these issues How can they as a company have a hope of addressing these issues if they're not willing to listen when a teen is trying to tell them that they're experiencing gross content So what your research found and what you elevated to leadership was at least in part that these automated systems were not catching the vast majority of this unwanted content out there I mean the sexual advances of this pedophile material it simply doesn't begin to capture yet and here's the thing that really gets me and I'll end with this Mr I know there's others who want to question I have been reading over and over and over again this case filed by my home state landmark First Amendment case in which two federal courts federal district court and a federal court of appeals have found that Facebook among others actively coordinated with the present administration to censor First Amendment protected speech not this garbage that is not protected by anything in our constitution is that Facebook devoted all kinds of resources and people actual human people to doing things like monitoring posts on COVID-19 vaccine efficacy There's one example of a parent in my home state of Missouri who wanted to post something about a school board meeting Facebook used human moderators to go and take down that post We can't have them posting about school board meetings for heaven's sake but the things that your daughter experienced this ring of pedophiles rings plural that Facebook just can't find the time for They just don't have the resources for it that we just have to leave to We just don't have the resources for it They had plenty of resources to censor First Amendment speech you said earlier in your opening statement that when you work for these companies There's very ingrained understanding of what is happening People set their jobs on that the next six months I'm going to make this number go from this to that But the ultimate answer is they were dollar driven too and my question to Adam was what percentage of teens should be experiencing unwanted sexual advances If there's not a team that that's their goal If they can't answer your questions about how many teams are impacted by this and if they cannot give you detailed data as to who's initiating those contacts they've made a decision that it's not a priority to them because of profit motive have they not in terms of what it's going to cost them in their business model if they have to interrupt it and monitor the content I think that would be a wonderful question to ask Mark and Sheryl On Adam because they can speak to why they made these choices It can only speak to the fact that they keep making these choices over and over again I would just back up what Senator Graham said If this becomes expensive to them to continue this outrageous conduct But you have suggested here as well that we need a survey of young people as to their experience The way that harm should be tracked on these products is you go up to teens and ask them did you receive an unwanted sexual advance in the last seven days And they are going to know it doesn't matter what the message is and then what you can do to help that team is give them a chance to tell you and the measures that I talk about are not even expensive to implement We were also briefed by the DEA in terms of narcotics transactions and the use of platforms for that purpose but what you can do is if you look at the numbers that I provided the committee there is a category for that class of issues and you should ask the company how much of that content which teams experience as that they take down It's interesting to me that if one of my kids when they were kids our grandkids now came home and said there was somebody lurking outside the playground at school that'd make the kids feel uncomfortable We would know what to do and to move on it quickly We find it unacceptable and yet what we know for a reality is that there is danger lurking in the iPhones that they're opening up every single day and we seem to feel that we are unable to respond to this Senator Graham's suggestion about 230 do you have any thoughts on that Section 230 but I can say that these companies should be held accountable for the content they recommend You're doing the country a great service here Did anybody call you up and say you don't know what you're talking about I must have spoken to 20 or 30 people including Adam Mosseri saying anything that's inaccurate in my data and nobody did is it fair to say that in its current form what you're describing is a dangerous product And that millions of families are affected by this dangerous product As a father who had a 13 year old affected by this product If you could sue on behalf of your daughter I believe you just have to be held to account and being transparent about it Do you know you can't sue them under the current law Your testimony is millions of people are in the same situation they know what they're doing and they keep doing it anyway I can't think of a company in the world can do this crap and not get sued except these people basically what we've done here to a group of people So I've just asked my office to find out how much money I've received from Facebook I think we ought to all boycott the giving because if Senator Hawley is right Their leverage here is just power over the political system So I'm calling on every member of Congress today don't take their money until they change Don't accept what they're offering you until they change Because the money you're receiving is coming from people who have created a dangerous product for children and they seem not to be willing to change Now that I know what you've told me of people I want to associate myself with have you ever heard them talk about being afraid of anything or anybody He's telling them what you're doing but they feel like they're immune from action because they pretty much are bottom line If we did create a system where parents like you could sue and hold them liable in court do you think that may change your behavior to have the tools that they need when they're experiencing these things what I will tell you is that I believe it would I think we should dedicate ourselves on this committee which has been a pleasure to serve on Senator Durbin All of you have been great on this issue to not just pass bills but insist on change The ultimate change comes to my colleagues is when they can be held liable in a court of law you'll be amazed how many good ideas they knew about they didn't tell us So I'm going to dedicate what time I have left in this business to opening up the courtroom I don't think nothing else will do and until that day comes I'm not going to take any of their money that might be the first step toward change We owe you and everybody in your situation better And that's why many of us have joined you in a call for abolishing Section 230 we can talk about this and have hearings and keep reminding people that we need to get things done these are no longer companies that started in a garage with two guys tinkering around with platforms or computers or in their college dorm room this is real lives that are getting lost and I really appreciate Mr Bejar that you are willing to come forward and testify I'm going to focus on one area that I don't think we've talked about enough and that is the platform's inability and refusal to take down sites that are selling dangerous drugs Recently the DEA found that one third of drug cases had direct ties to social media one pill kills on the internet thinking it was something else It was laced with fentanyl as the mom said all of the hopes and dreams we as parents had were erased in the blink of an eye and no mom should have to bury their kid That's why Senator Durbin and I and others on this committee have been working with Senator Shaheen and Marshall as well as Senator Grassley on this bill that has come through this committee already and needs to go to the floor along with another of other bills we've talked about through requires social medias companies to report fentanyl and other dangerous drug sales on their platforms they have basically the cartels who don't really care if people die or not because no one knows it in Mexico and China have basically harnessed these platforms Do social media companies have the correct incentives to identify and eliminate drug sales to kids Thank you for the question and the concern on all of those important things until there is disclosure of what kids experience as drug content until there is transparency about these things which is why I think transparency is so essential as parents and grandparents That's what the numbers they have to share one thing for everybody here to know is that when we talk about any category that you care about and then when the company talks about that category they're likely talking about a fraction of a percent of what we as a society are experiencing And we all know there's a lot of other things to do with fentanyl including at the border but this would be a major game changer for the ability to take these cases on Prosecutors have also reported an emerging trend where offenders collect photos of children that may fall just shy of the definition of child pornography and distribute them on websites with the intent to harass or abuse the child victims And there was a major story on this in the Washington Post Senator Cornin and I have a Bill the SHIELD Act to fill in gaps in federal law so that prosecutors can hold those who abuse kids in this way accountable In your role as a person at Facebook who was responsible for efforts to keep users safe can you talk about the deficiencies in current policies If you look at content that sexualizes minors is that something that actually violates company policy and would be removed and is that what the company is acting on Or does it end up being something that because it is content that the company does not act on they actually end up recommending and distributing If you were to look and open the app and look for it And these are all things that the company is I believe aware of in terms of reach and can do things about and I've chosen not to do so and he's right that there's one big thing we can do is to allow these cases to go forward in court but I also think some of these things I'm discussing actually makes it easier for people to proceed with these cases and create incentives and I think Senator Blumenthal's involved have a bill to allow independent researchers to look at the algorithms that you know are designed in a way that manipulates these kits and can lead to their deaths to require these digital platforms to give independent researchers access to data thank you and we can again talk about this all we want and we'll remember you and your story but until we get these things in our allowed floor time by both sides and can maybe put them together into one package we're just not going to get the solutions that we need because just getting mad at these platforms haven't changed their content Bejar social media can make people less lonely And isn't it a fact that much of social media but much of social media has become a cesspool of snark is it happens all so often and it doesn't need to be that way One of the numbers that I talk about is this 20% of kids who witnessed bullying in the last seven days and this is content that does not get taken down Isn't it a fact that social media has lowered the cost of being an a-hole And isn't it true that social media removes any geographical border to the harassment of others And isn't it true that some forms of social media optimize for engagement And isn't it true that some forms of social media use surveillance to identify our and our kids' hot buttons Isn't it true that some forms of social media use algorithms to show us and our kids stuff that pushes those hot buttons recently my daughter had somebody going to one of her posts about cars and said you'd like to drive and you like cars because you saw a man doing it no women just belong in the passenger seat to every point that you just made I will say that when I asked her about that post if she would delete it because she knows reporting would do nothing I will not delete it because I'm worried that that will mean that less people will see my posts I'm not going to ask you this question I'm going to make the statement because you're probably not familiar with Louisiana thank God for our TV news and our radio news we are in Louisiana and that's print media and paper which is on the internet when it comes to print media in Louisiana We've only got about two real non-New print media journalists left who were fair and aren't opinion Most of our print media members are now sports sub journalists but there's a lot else going on in the world And everything else is just cottage cheese I look forward to the day when members of the United States Senate will come together and establish a new rule not used every day or every week or every month or even every year But that rule would say when there is a consensus and when you as a senator can demonstrate that you have 60 votes to pass a bill that you have the right to bring that bill to the floor of the United States Senate no matter who doesn't want it I was curious about the fact that so many of the young people on these platforms are exposed to cyber billing and that can be anything Your daughter experienced some of that because some of the things that she posted online but there is also an addictive quality to keeping these kids online for the platforms Keeping these kids online means money for them is there anything we can do to address the addictive aspect of what is happening to our young people where they continue to go on to these platforms and expose themselves to this kind of harmful content I think that it is essential to have good data about the impact that this product has You could take a teenager after half an hour and go like Let's say that we have this kind of data as to the harmful impact I think that products should adopt measures and where appropriately compelled to figure out a good way to help teens have a use of the product that serves them I think what happens right now is it distresses them and I think every parent here has experienced is that sense of urgency of needing to be on there and the impact that it has on their emotions Do the young people understand the harmful impact themselves Would it help if part of your testimony is about how all of us should be Would it help if the kids themselves also understand the harmful impacts I think what helps in my experience the most is changes to the product so that it's less harmful and it's those changes and the refusal to do those changes while there's not much incentive for these platforms to change their product because they face no consequences for the content including the state of Hawaii where I come from alleging that they designed their products to harm users And I think most of these cases have been consolidated in California The defendants are saying that they are limited in their liability exposure because of Section 230 but if these companies were exposed to legal liability and of these lawsuits And if the companies have found liable and forced to pay money as a result of these lawsuits do you think that would change their behavior as far as them paying attention to the harmful impact of the contents on their platforms I'm not qualified to weigh in on that But you did testify that it's all about money for these companies That's why they keep doing what they do if they had to pay money as a result of their content do you think that would change their behavior and what I believe will change their behavior is the moment that Mark Zuckerberg last quarter we made $34 billion.And the next thing he has to say is and in Instagram this is the percentage of teens that experienced unwanted sexual advances Because it would be incentivized to work on it Because right now there are no goals to reduce unwanted sexual advances as far as I am aware if there's no law that prevents them from having this kind of content or there are no court cases they're not held responsible for content then the fact that people know that they have an incentive that they have exposed these kids and this is why there's so much attention being paid to Section 230 and the limited liability and you say that they have a very limited understanding of what is harmful content But one of the things that can also happen I read a letter asking the FTC to investigate matters made us alleged practice of censoring advertisements for health products related to menstruation And there Meta decided that this kind of advertisements was harmful I hardly call that a very narrow definition of harm So all these companies left to their own devices they get to choose what they deem to be harmful they've decided that women's cell health products that is harmful and they're going to censor those kinds of products it's a lot more complicated than at first but I know we're going to try and do something Thank you!You have successfully joined our subscriber list And thank you for your testimony and your frankness we have attorneys here from our attorney general's office today and they are pushing to also get something done about the overreach of Facebook And we're grateful that so many states have stepped up to hold Facebook and Meta to task I want to return this to December 21 and Chairman Blumenthal mentioned this He and I at the Senate Commerce Consumer Protection subcommittee that we led had Mr And you were consulting for Instagram at that time you sent him two emails that talked about youth harms on the platform Now I'm going to quote you some things from his testimony we care deeply about the teens on Instagram which is in part why we research complex issues like bullying and social comparison and make changes we don't allow people to bully or harass other people on Instagram and have rules in place that prohibit this type of conduct We've also built tools that prevent from happening in the first place and empower people to manage their accounts so they never have to see it I think it's profoundly misleading because at a time at which this public statistic was a fraction of a percent One in five teens had watched it happening and you have to bear in mind they're standing right there Let me give you one more talking about the executives and I'm interested to see how they reacted to the information that came out in 21 about their disregard for harms to minors Do you think that Meta executives were motivated to do more or to address the problem or were they interested in covering up what was going on at Meta at the time I think you will need to ask them about their intentions but I also deeply believe that actions speak louder than words Did any of the members of Meta's team did any of them respond to your email in a way that suggested that they were going to take an action to correct the wrongs For six years when I sent that kind of message I would get a meeting within 24 hours to spend meaningful amount of time talking with them and what needed to be dealt with the meeting sometime later and then the lack of action again speaks about the fact that they Money was more important than protecting children I would be interested to know who took responsibility for making policy determinations about youth safety and one conversation you had with my staff you suggested that Mark Zuckerberg had a hand in such decisions during your first stint at the company but that when you returned he would tell employees not to raise youth safety issues to him Chris Cox and Sheryl would be who you raise these issues to and they would engage very proactively that's why I felt that was probably one of the most qualified people in the world to bring it to their attention I was not aware when I sent my email that it was hard to talk to Mark about this but I could say that my experience of how the entire company was behaving when it came to the harms that teens were experiencing was a cultural issue that was grinding on that decision prayer tracing prevalence over harm is something that Mark sets direction for that whole executive team And that's why I realized it was necessary to appeal directly to them They had the research that pointed this out And they made a conscious decision to do nothing about it Did they ever talk about profits as opposed to enacting these protections who would've claimed responsibility for dealing with youth safety and youth harms I just want to start by acknowledging my gratitude to my colleagues on this committee for the work that you have been doing on a bipartisan basis Senator Blackburn and I began working together when we were both in the house together and introduced I think the first privacy bill So I haven't been with you in this effort but I was with Senator Blackburn and I can't elaborate on the excellent opening statements Senator Blumenthal and Senator Hawley that you made I'd like to associate myself with your remarks express my shock at what's happening to our kids and how it's all because there's a lot of money to be made Senator Blackburn revealing just the disregard for the mental health of our kids is truly shocking So I'm all in with you on your efforts here our attorney general has joined the lawsuit And also I want to thank you for your stepping forward and providing such clarity and also embedded in the concern that you have A couple of issues that have come up from letters that I've received in comments and I know you're getting the same questions as well is from and I want to make sure we can do this legislation that doesn't do any harm And I've been receiving a number of letters from folks in the LGBT community who are concerned that some of this legislation included the KOSA Act would compromise their ability to get together online and be mutually supportive So I just want you to talk a little bit about how if we proceed with the legislation we're not in any way going to interfere with the capacity of kids who legitimately are getting together mutually supporting none of the exploitive stuff I think I trust that you are extraordinarily qualified for that part I think that my job here is to help bring light to the harms that these teams are experiencing and the fact that the way the company talks about them in my experience is misleading And that's based on all your years really at the forefront of Facebook And then the other thing I really would want you to know and for any kid that again ends up having these awful experiences Instagram is standing right next to them as these things are happening and they should be able and I know because I built these kinds of things for six years And then get help with whatever's happening for them So it's the exploitative content that in the algorithms that you're focusing on you're taking a school and you're in the hallway and somebody comes to you and says I'm going to make sure that you don't get invited to any party ever again that is a post that implies a person doesn't name them And the kind of stuff I am talking about because I deeply care about every child we can talk about in every context is that that child who gets left out insulted because of the reasons that Sherman ment outlined that child should be able to get help independent of what the content is And I believe that's important for all children no matter what their gender or… another question that's come up is about encryption and there's real privacy benefits to maintaining encryption So I would hope any legislation that we have wouldn't compromise the privacy rights of individuals who are on the internet I deeply believe in privacy and in everything that I'm talking about if a child gets a direct message that makes them uncomfortable it doesn't matter what the content is It only matters that that child feels uncomfortable and is able to say can we please add a button when a child receives this message that says And it doesn't matter what the content is And if somebody's initiating those messages going into those kids' houses and telling them these things they should know that's not appropriate I think we've met the enemy and the enemy is us We actually have six bills that Senator Durbin referred to that were voted out of the Judiciary committee the only person who can actually schedule those bills for vote are is the majority leader And so I would suggest that we focus our attention on trying to get Senator Schumer to schedule a vote on those six pieces of legislation So one wise person said one time when trying to figure out a complex topic like this You've mentioned a number of times the data Do social media applications like Instagram and Facebook collect huge volumes of data about the users And that data is then used mainly for advertising products It's amazing to me when I go to a website and I look at something an advertisement from that same company shows up And the way that that happens is that Instagram sells that data to companies who then use that information to promote their products I was shocked to read an article here in the MIT Technology Review which talks about it's shockingly easy to buy sensitive data about US military personnel Duke University did a study at the request of West Point and others and determined for as little as 12 cents per record that data brokers would sell sensitive information on US military members and veterans this is not an area where I have any expertise I have expertise from the perspective of being a security professional and ensuring that the systems do what they're set to do but I don't have expertise on how the data gets brokered I think it's pretty much common knowledge that that's the case that this data accumulated by social media companies is then sold And that's the reason why when you go on Instagram or Facebook you don't actually have to pay a subscription or a fee And they've talked about if they couldn't recover that revenue from selling that data about me then they would have to charge a fee in order to make this economical And as shocking as what you have discovered and you shared with us today about this one social media company the truth is this is not unique to Instagram or Facebook It's the entire social media sector that serves teens And here in the Congress we've talked a lot about our concern about China's increasing belligerency and militancy and buildup of its not only its economy but its military and threatening peace in Asia and elsewhere But we also have talked a lot about apps like TikTok that are Chinese applications that then do much as Instagram does and vacuum up all this data addict our children to by using the algorithms or codes to figure out what to recommend to them this is all about the data and all about the money Senator Durbin mentioned the use of social media applications when it comes to selling drugs synthetic opioids is a single leading cause of death for 18 to 45 year olds in America today And much of it has transacted those sales and through the use of social media And then there's other scary things like deep fakes It is when you use technology to create an image that appears to be a person but it's not an actual video or a photograph of that person And I've read in the last couple of days that deep fakes are now being used to basically portray young girls for sexual gratification using these deep fake false images due to this incredible technology could be used for a lot of good but can be also used for ill as well I just want to thank you for answering some of these questions We have a lot of work to do here in the Senate and in the Congress and as parents and grandparents and to try to protect our children thank goodness my daughters are adults now and they don't live in the they aren't of an age of Senator Hawley's kids or others is ask the one person who can actually schedule a floor vote on some of the bills that passed unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a vote and I can't speak for Senator Schumer but I know he is vitally interested in reform in this area and I'm sure that he will make that interest real on the floor of the Senate at the right time Chair Blumenthal and ranking member Hawley this is a topic that I could not show up to engage in for fighting for and leading on behalf of not just my daughter I appreciate very much also your comments to my colleague here when you're talking about taking an all children approach I want to direct my comments to really engage in a space that where maybe all children the all children approach hasn't necessarily been taken And I'd love to get your thoughts on some gaps that we could try to fill now And we know that the internet can be a hateful place I understand that among your research in Meta's user experience you looked into instances of identity-based hostilities on the platform and you found that over a quarter of Instagram users under the age of 16 said they witnessed hostility against someone based on their race one study published in the Journal of American Academy of Children and Adolescent Psychiatry looked at the issue of online racial discrimination between March and November of 2020 It found that black youth experienced increases on online racial discrimination that their white counterparts did not And those instances of discrimination predicted worsened same day and next day can you talk with us a little bit about what more you think the company should be doing to protect against these kinds of race racial and ethnic harassments and hostility online The fact that a child today black any identity It gets called out in front of the entire shared audience the difference between when this happens in a school and when it happens online And there's no way for that child to say And I use that language because 10 years ago We knew that in order to help a child dealing with an issue and help them A 13 year old does not like to report things because they're worried they're going to get in trouble and get other people in trouble And if you look at the work that I submitted from 10 years ago this is awful for me because of my identity And the company should be able to take that into account to help that child be protected and then give them resources and then also make sure that that is not acceptable behavior in the community Because the most tragic thing about that 20% number witnessing these kinds of attacks is that the lack of action on part of the company and the very narrow definition of the content that they would take down means that they're normalizing their behavior Children watch and children learn from the way other children are behaving what would it look like to create a good experience The ability to exercise some agency in the button that you're making reference to And one of the questions for the platforms is how many hateful or harassing messages should somebody be able to send before you tap them on the shoulder and you tell them that it's not appropriate behavior So it creates information that you can then act on then you know that they're up to no good any systems do not have a hope of making a safer environment for youth And what do you think has been the barrier for companies We're talking about the company that you have the most experience with What do you think is the barrier to change and what do you think could help to create that I think they're just not incentivized to make this change It's been two years and our kids do not have that button in their direct messaging where the content doesn't matter that's sexually inappropriate or it's not for me The thing about this is until the information is transparent and I would strongly encourage that that includes identity-based youth because if it turns out that the overall number is 10% 80% of youth that experience these things is because of an identity issue the data is there to be had if the company makes it a priority and collects it And that is at the heart of why I am here today again for your leadership and advocacy on behalf of America's children A number of our colleagues may be joining us returning in the next few minutes but why don't we begin a second round of questions now speaking of which Senator Coons is arriving and I can give you a couple of minutes to go ahead ranking member for convening this important and timely hearing thank you so much for taking of your own personal experience as the senior engineer responsible for the wellbeing section within this unbelievable platform Quick surveys suggest that something like two thirds of all American teens are currently on Meta's platforms I am very concerned about the likely impact on our children and our future and I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to question you for just a few moments about a possible path forward was marginalized by the very team that had recruited you to return to a leadership role at Meta Your testimony highlights the dangerous lack of transparency at social media companies The dangerous consequences of this ongoing global experiment with our children and documents ways in which they are on the receiving end of both images that make them feel worse about themselves and unwanted sexual advances Our own US surgeon General has issued a clarion call for Congress to act to recognize we are experiencing a crisis in mental health in particular amongst our children and to find ways to restrain these platforms and their impact A bipartisan bill I suspect Senator Klobuchar or Senator Blumenthal may have referred to before called the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act that's co-sponsored by Senator Cornyn and Senator Cassidy and Senator Graham would make critical advances in transparency and require platforms to disclose some of the public safety information that they currently hide Can you give just two or three examples of the kinds of data and the kinds of insights into algorithms and how they work that would be critical for our public to know and that companies like Meta refuse to report And do you expect that companies will ever voluntarily fully disclose what it is about their algorithms that make these platforms addictive or even dangerous for our children I think that for as long as these companies get to make up their own definitions of what is harmful I looked into that issue when I was in the company asking around about the understanding of it and what I found is that it was an internal term called problematic usage and the definition of that was so narrow that does it really capture what we as parents all see And so I think without transparency of the harms that teens are experiencing by their own word without instruments that help us understand the role that social media plays in their lives and without ensuring that for example there's something that when they need help actually helps them This was something that we proposed saying let's measure our help by whether it helped and that was not adopted I don't think anything is going to change and that's why I'm here today Could you explain for us how empowering independent researchers would provide a much more balanced understanding of how safe or dangerous social media platforms really are and say something about what kinds of safety research could be done in order to facilitate a better mental health and better safety outcomes for our teenagers I can speak well to that because that's what I did and my team did for six years we brought in experts from different universities in the United States including Yale and who understood that for example a 13 year old is more liable to take risks because where they are developmentally and they knew that it was important that the most important thing that you can do for a child that's having a distressing experience is to make sure that they feel supported at that moment Us as product engineers and designers are not qualified to give teams tools and that's why independent research and the data that enables that is absolutely necessary to help our understanding of what people are experiencing online Senator Hawley said earlier that Instagram's algorithm doesn't just promote but accelerates the connections between pedophiles and our kids For anyone who is a caring and concerned parent And the fact that you dedicated years to conducting research on safety and did everything you could to get it to the attention of the leadership of the company and are only here before us as a last gasp attempt should motivate all of us to advance legislation that will unlink what I think is a corrosive harmful malign connection between algorithms and self-harm and assaults on our children We're going to have a second round of questions limited in length I want to assure you but thank you for your patience and your perseverance here today Let me just begin by saying that the lawsuit filed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts yesterday which is one of nine individual lawsuits filed around the country by states and it is complimentary to the federal lawsuit filed by 33 states in district court I am going to ask that the complaint be made of the record without objection says that 90% of young people in the United States So we're talking about millions of young people And its cites Mark Zuckerberg saying in October in response to Francis Hagen's whistleblower testimony before our committee at the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and wellbeing He said further it is very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids Taking your admonition that actions speak louder than words His actions certainly demonstrate the falsehood of those claims there's something from that same note that I would like to bring to the committee's attention but when it comes to young people's health or wellbeing It is incredibly sad to think of a young person in a moment of distress who instead of being comforted has their experience made worse And I believe that is what Instagram does today The reference was made earlier to the policies of Facebook and social media in general being data driven My experiences of extensive data-driven culture Or in this case Facebook and Meta doctored the data to drive the dollars what happened is this data that should be public they shouldn't need to be here to talk about it I was struck in the memo that you wrote to Adam Mosseri dated October 14th everyone in the industry has the same problems right now Mosseri and in effect urged Meta to be a leader there is a great product opportunity in figuring out the features that make a community feel safe and supportive you were inviting them to design a better product that consumers would prefer because it was safer I don't want to be too philosophical here is that consumers go to products that are more efficient And you were appealing to the better instincts of Sheryl and Zuckerberg and the whole team Instagram is a product like ice cream or a toy or a car I ask you how many kids need to get sick from a batch of ice cream or be hurt by a car before there's all minors of investigations And there was an opportunity because they're standing right next to the teen they're the company that's delivering the unwanted sexual advance They're the company that's delivering the content that is upsetting to them and they're standing right there and they should be able there's the opportunity for them to be told there's something really awful happening here And then use that to make the community be one that's safer And the Kids Online Safety Act is also about the product If you have consumers give them some choices about what they want to see and hear so as to be able to disconnect the algorithms that drive something people don't want to see or hear Do you favor that approach to protecting young people and others on the internet as in the third paragraph on my email to Mark and in my experience from 10 years earlier where 90% of the content that teens experience as harassment The only way to address this is through the kind of measures that you're describing And the Kids Online Safety Act is also about holding social media and big tech accountable when they harm people they feel no sense of accountability in terms that really affect their bottom line When Mark Zuckerberg gives his quarterly report or his discussion to analysts would you favor that kind of accountability so that they are held responsible which I want to take a moment to say that in my experience the integrity and wellbeing professionals which are working on these issues firsthand are incredibly good people with wonderful ideas and management couldn't be letting them down more one of the issues that it's in one of the materials is we talk about a kind of content that we know is bad for body image issues They know teens are spending a meaningful time looking at it and they're unwilling as a product to address that So without being too held to account for what they're recommending And another part of our Kids' Online Safety Act provides for more transparency about the algorithm so that there can be more public knowledge and also expert knowledge and I will say that algorithms are as good as their inputs and can be measured by their outputs So you can take an algorithm and if the algorithm doesn't know that a kid experiences something as obscene it's recommending obscene things that should be held to account then the only way there is with transparency about these aspects And before I go to Senator Hawley for his second round of questions you mentioned that the people who worked on your team the people who work in these companies to quote you are generally good people who want to do the right thing and I'm quoting a point which might be good for you to know which I did not put in the document reviewed by the team is that many employees I've spoken to who are doing this work and are of different levels are distraught about how the last few weeks have unfolded and are heart slash mission driven to the work they were distraught by the public exhibition of Facebook's knowing that it was profiting by toxic content driven at kids and the company in effect concealing and hiding the truth rejecting recommendation for improvement and rolling back safety measures They were afraid that because the company was externally disavowing like body image issues while at the same time there were studies and data that were saying otherwise features getting proposed that were saying otherwise they were afraid that the work would be stopped that they wouldn't get the support they needed or they wouldn't be able to build what they needed to build And I say that the amount of investment that this company ought to do for those people should be commensurate to that table of harms that you now have You have been extraordinarily patient but also incredibly forthcoming in your responses and it's just been tremendously helpful I just want to come back to something that you said over and over because you've been asked about it over and over to quote you in response to an earlier question you said that changes to the product and you were just explaining that Instagram is a product like ice cream or opioids maybe changes to the product would be most helpful I mean that really just means there's no money in it for the company I mean isn't that what it gets down to the if they could make money on it I'm very excited for the day that Mark or Adam are sitting here Because one of the things that is in each recommendation you see there do you understand what data is causing these things Like here's the button that you can build in the systems Those are not a matter of significant investment It is a matter of how much they prioritize the work and whether they're willing to set their goals based on what teens are experiencing you commented earlier that it would be great to hear Mark Zuckerberg say here's the amount of harm that teenagers suffered I'd tell you what else I'd love to hear him say we made 34 billion this quarter and we have 34 billion in jury judgements pending against us that would get their attention if you want to incentivize changes to these companies You've got to open up the courtroom doors the FTC find Facebook what was a billion dollars or something a couple of years ago It made no discernible difference to their business practices they fear parents going into court and holding them accountable That's what happened with big tobacco we've talked about the bills that have passed this committee It's our bill together on child sexual exploitation abuse material CSAM exploitative material the best part about that bill is it contains a private right of action We're going to vote before the end of the year I will go to the floor of the United States Senate and I will demand a vote on the bills that we have passed in this committee We're going to put people on record because I'm tired of waiting Many folks on this committee have waited far longer Any senator can go to the floor and call up a piece of legislation and ask for a vote on it and I'm going to do it before the end of this year The other thing I just say is on the money the money that is flowing into this capital from big tech is obscene And if we really wanted to change something we'd get the corporate money out of politics we would stop these mega corporations from making political contributions that would change things we're going to vote before the end of 2023 and we'll just put people on record and we'll see where we go from there I hope your testimony today will really motivate people I think every parent listening to this will say And I think to have someone who is an engineer as you are has your level of expertise and been inside the company I think so often parents feel isolated and they feel like maybe I just don't understand this technology And the other thing that's been my experience in all my years doing this is that parents know how to parent And sometimes when I've had a parent of a child that's been groomed and come and talk to me about it The best way I've experienced of people to think about these things is just take social media out the conversation you know who your kids are spending time with You want to make it very safe for your kid to come up to you and say there's this thing that's happening And you want to make it safe for a kid to bring up an issue to you And then when you see that these things are happening on these devices if these things were happening at a school and you knew that one in five kids were witnessing or one in 10 were experiencing about the unwanted sexual advances and the kid turns to somebody in the school for help and they're like You would hold the school's administration into account and that's one of the reasons that I am here today I would just again make the point that the Kids Online Safety bill imposes accountability and I want to join the pledge to seek a vote before the end of the year I'm very hopeful we'll have not only a vote but an overwhelmingly positive bipartisan vote in favor of the kids' online safety Bill and I challenge social media and big tech to come forward and put your money where your mouth is we want regulation but just not that regulation No longer will kids or parents trust social media to impose the right safeguards We want to give them the tools that their products need so the kids can take back their lives online And thank you again for your patience today I wish that my colleague from Vermont was still here It was 2012 when he and I started on privacy and filed the first privacy bill in the house we've been at this for a long time and we've been fought by big tech every single step of the way And it's been really quite amazing to see because they are how did tech companies grow this big this fast the rules and restraints that the physical world has and we've seen that in how they choose to gather data and data mine and use that to make the dollar the eyeballs They've got to keep these eyeballs on the page Now I want to go back to the hearing we had with Mr I want us to build out a little bit more of this framework because I think it's important to the states that have joined the lawsuit I think it's important to us as we work to get the Kids Online Safety Act passed you built a structure that would allow for some online governance and you put in place what you thought was a pretty good process for keeping people safe online And you were putting in place a duty of care for the social media company to be responsive to the users that were on those platforms As I was going through one of these materials I remember talking about bullying and teenagers and said that we as a company had the responsibility not only to the teens within the product but to also improve the world's understanding of these issues so that the field could be moved forward and that is the spirit with which we engage the work Facebook decided they were going to change the rules and allow kids ages 13 to 17 to post content on Instagram I don't know the exact date that change happened What motivated them to drop that age and allow 13 year olds but what I can say is that if you look at those 2013 presentations and 2012 one of the things that is written about there is the fact that a 13 year old will do riskier behavior and feels things more intensely because that's where they are developmentally And so making a change that potentially increases their audience I think would be inconsistent with that understanding I find it so interesting that whether it was Zuckerberg or Sandberg or Cox when you highlighted with them how readers were responding to the survey users were responding and you kept trying to direct this toward the experience And that is noted several times in your emails to them even though 51% of the users may say they've had a negative experience And in most corporations allowing issues like that to just slide would never be tolerated So it is left and you laid out an agenda and an opportunity for items for discussion so that you would make good use of your time And you explicitly and specifically went through the numbers on kids that had received different negative interactions Then you broke out the data by age and you created a chart so that he could look at it in a Google Doc How did he respond when you broke it out by age or did he take the time to look at it It is my experience of all the years in Meta that an executive gets that email reads it thoroughly looks at all of the attachments And so it would be my expectation that he had read it he demonstrated understanding of everything I spoke about and we specifically talked about the button for a teen girl who received unwanted advances I think that what troubles me is knowing that harm was being done to kids and then to tell us and I quoted back to you some of his comments from his testimony that he gave to us and for him to allude to the fact to give the impression that they've built tools that prevent these adverse activities but then it's that old thing of the truth there are hundreds of children that we have met with their parents there is very strong bipartisan support for reform because actions do speak louder than words And my hope is that colleagues will join Senator Hawley and me and Senator Blackburn and Senator Durbin and others in seeking action on a very doable politically achievable bill that targets the design of this product much as we would a safer car or stopping addiction to cigarettes and tobacco and nicotine I would say it is the next Big Tobacco and am hoping that it will join in this effort to make its product safer what we face here is a garden variety challenge to improve the reliability and safety of a product that uses a black box that very few people understand which makes it more complex and mysterious but no less urgent and ultimately understandable by everyday Americans Everyday Americans understand the harm that's being done We have seen and heard it from moms and dads from teenagers who have come to us and pleaded absolutely implored us to act now not at some distant point in the future I'm very hopeful that we will have a vote and that it will be an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote In part thanks to the testimony that you have offered today It has been tremendously impactful and moving and very powerful in it's science-based persuasion but ultimately engineering is what may save Facebook from the perils and dangers that it's creating along with other social media and my hope is that we will move forward so that in effect we can make big tech the next big tobacco in terms of a concerted effort to reduce its harm and inform the public about how they can do it as well but the record will remain open for a week in case colleagues have any questions they want to submit in writing my thanks to you for your very impactful and important testimony today Schmid College of Science and Technology Join us in welcoming our new Schmid College Career Advisor Jose is here to help students find opportunities and resources regarding their respective career routes as well as answer any questions or concerns We asked Jose a few questions to get to know him and his interests I identify as a first-generation Mexican American man and I double majored in Psychology and Social Behavior along with Criminology Law and Society (long major name problems!) I decided to attend Cal State Fullerton and I received my Master of Science in Higher Education this past June SC: What are you looking forward to in this new role JB: “As the Career Advisor for Schmid I am looking forward to meeting all of you and being able to serve and support you to the best of my ability My goal is to help you achieve any career goals you have set for yourself during your time at Chapman and even after I am looking forward to getting to know you all and I hope you do not only drop by my office for advising but also to say hi or have a genuine conversation about anything else!” SC: Do you have any advice to share with our Schmidsters JB: “My best piece of advice for students is to have an open mind and take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way You never know if you may like a certain job until you take that internship Schmid College has a ton of resources for you Make sure to look at them and use them while you are on campus JB: “A fun fact about me is that I have rewatched The Office nine times I also listen to The Office Ladies podcast For those who have any questions regarding their career or career opportunities for their respective major, feel free to reach out to Jose at bejar@chapman.edu for further questions or inquiries Science Philosopher Thomas Pradeu is Chapman’s Newest Presidential Fellow Apgar Foundation Grant Expands Smith Institute’s Summer Scholars Program Chapman Continues Rise in the 2025 National Rankings From U.S April 11, 2025 by | Research finding effective solutions that deliver outsized impact becomes increasingly crucial assistant professor of environmental science and policy shows that a tiny marine mollusk native to the U.S West Coast may hold the key to more effective coastal restoration “Variation in thermal tolerance plasticity March 20, 2025 by | Faculty The university’s Grand Challenges Initiative is becoming a reliable stepping-stone for postdocs seeking permanent academic roles 2020Photos by Grant HarderSave this storySaveSave this storySaveDan Bejar is on the hunt for a pair of green socks who is working on a school project—a sock puppet So we hop in his hand-me-down Toyota hatchback and steer through Vancouver He says the shopping center used to be nicknamed “Murder Mall,” before adding “I don’t think anyone gets murdered there anymore.” Kingsgate Mall feels like an extension of the world Bejar, 47, has created over the last quarter century with his indie rock project Destroyer: It’s strangely out of time all the way down to the picture of a bulldog with a monocle in its eye and a cigar in its mouth hanging on one store’s wall The main passageway is lined with beige tiles and filled with elderly women hocking holiday tchotchkes bright green with a white toe and reindeer heads lining the ankle and sends a picture of them to his wife with the caption “Completely unacceptable?” (She confirms they are.) He heads into a dollar store and contemplates taking a green marker to some plain therapeutic socks I’m a big fan.” Bejar shrugs a half-embarrassed “thanks,” and “That person was paid $300 to come up to me in Kingsgate Mall at 3:50 p.m.” It’s where he bought a pair of cheap boots in the mid ’90s when he first started writing songs as a 22-year-old college dropout enamored with the local underground rock scene walking past a life-sized military mannequin BB guns made to look like actual Uzis line the back wall along with stickers and patches that read things like “FUCK OFF & DIE” and “I’M NOT TOO OLD YOUR MUSIC JUST SUCKS.” After some fast Bejar is sufficiently disturbed by the store’s testosterone overload: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The search is over He heads back into the city’s never-ending winter drizzle calls him “one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.” And in conversation barbed wit is often as disarming as his wheezing laugh He’s no longer the indie hardliner he was in his 20s when he wrote songs that unabashedly equated bad taste with actual evil he can still be refreshingly blunt on topics ranging from the Hamilton soundtrack (“I don’t want to listen to it for one second”) to music managers (“I don’t need someone to take 15 percent for me to say no to a bunch of shit”) to former labelmates Arcade Fire and Spoon (“Artistically I think I’m way more ambitious than both of those bands”) to music festivals (“Even though bands pay lip service to not liking them I feel like I don’t like them more than other bands”) to museums (“I hate museums”) Considering his seen-it-all attitude—and the fact that he worships French New Wave cinema but doesn’t really watch TV—Bejar would seemingly fit the pretentious curmudgeon stereotype pretty snugly But there’s an off-the-cuff nature to his pretentiousness that makes it more endearing than pompous “I’m not really a complicated thinker,” he says while tooling around one of his old neighborhoods “Anything that unfolds itself in a subtle way is usually lost on me I was always super inspired by this quote from Godard about how he’s read the first and last page of every book and just sucks the life force out of it to his own ends.” Bejar has hoovered the poetry of Baudelaire and Jim Carroll; the entire catalogs of mercurial icons like Bob Dylan Van Morrison; and the arthouse films of Jean Renoir it’s unsurprising that his impressionistic lyricism has left some people a bit perplexed the label that’s put out seven Destroyer albums over the last 18 years “It is always clear to me that he uses a lot of words but it’s difficult to figure out what he’s talking about.” Perhaps this has to do with Bejar’s relatively spontaneous method of songwriting where bursts of lyrics and melodies come to him as he goes about his days “I don’t know how to sit down and write something,” he says One of his favorite songwriting rules is: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of used to have to get loaded in order to step in front of a crowd at the start of his career “I prefer being hungover onstage.” He rarely banters with fans and he doesn’t want people singing along with him It’s all part of an overarching artistic philosophy that cuts hard against the personal connections many artists aim to forge with their followers: “As a member of the audience for all the shows I’ve ever seen We don’t need to go through something together.” He adds that his best shows happen when he turns his back to the crowd and starts singing to his bandmates some of whom have been playing with him for nearly two decades Bejar has worked with a number of loyal producers and instrumentalists who are crucial to Destroyer’s ever-changing sound They have assisted him in tackling everything from offbeat indie folk to freewheeling rock’n’roll to wandering disco to string-laden balladry bolstering Bejar’s singing as it’s evolved from manic to morose the extended Destroyer crew acts as a welcome bridge between Bejar’s fevered musings and his audience Bejar turned to two of these longtime conspirators producer John Collins and guitarist Nicolas Bragg to help him bring his latest dreams of art-pop dread to life the album finds Bejar sounding impossibly isolated a cracked mirror held up to a civilization burning and drowning toward extinction “It’s just the way it goes.” There’s a near-tropical jam about opening death’s door a cyber-funk odyssey narrated by a devilish ringmaster a nightmarish vision punctuated by a cataclysmic guitar solo Bejar recorded the album’s vocals at night singing of serial killers and drowning pit ponies as his young daughter slept making his twisted imagery that much more sinister “Even if I sound like someone who couldn’t be less in the world I also somehow sound really hung up on the fucking hellfire reigning down on my hermit’s cave,” Bejar says “The scary thing is I don’t think I’ve ever sounded more comfortable—or groovier.” Bejar’s relationship with Vancouver involves a tangled web of frustration and weary acceptance His songs are dotted with references to East Van punks and neighborhoods like Strathcona and Have We Met includes a ghostly lullaby called “University Hill” that shares its name with an area where he grew up as a small child he’s not an effusive tour guide as much as a local poking holes in a brochure’s cheesy spiel about gleaming skyscrapers surrounded by mountains and water as far as the eyes can see the most impossible thing to do in the world is to romanticize Vancouver,” he says citing the city’s lifelessness and its urge to erase its own past at a dizzying pace and I don’t mind complaining about this city for 30 years straight.” He was born to an American mother and a Spanish father at Vancouver General Hospital in the fall of 1972 but his early life was marked by constant movement and his older sister clocked time in Southern California Calgary; between kindergarten and 12th grade a physicist and engineer who grew up under the oppressive authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco that he liked.” Some of Bejar’s earliest memories are of him sitting with his dad to watch films like the iconoclastic French drama The 400 Blows and the morally ambiguous post-World War II noir The Third Man “It’s like the last thing that made me,” Bejar says “It happened right at a time when you’re about to bust loose into whatever direction you’re gonna go in—mine was to become super pretentious.”  He started reading “serious” books (scare quotes his) and listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain He got closer while attending the nearby University of British Columbia where he majored in English and minored in Philosophy he also wrote a short album review—byline: “Danny Bejar”—for the college radio station’s newspaper in which he praised how indie rock trio Galaxie 500’s 1990 LP This Is Our Music had the “feeling of floating over a shitty part of town.” But during the entire three years he spent at school before dropping out As he drives through residential East Vancouver he points out a couple lowkey spots where he used to scrape by in the second half of the ’90s after escaping university and immersing himself in songwriting and the Vancouver indie-rock scene It’s where he recorded his first Destroyer album 1996’s four-track experiment We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge as a twentysomething obsessed with the era’s proudly elusive standard bearers like Pavement “I definitely was judgmental of people who had any involvement in the mainstream I loved lines in the sand and calling people out But I get no pleasure from those things now.” He points out a tiny yellow house he moved into in 1997 the same year he started playing with the New Pornographers and remembers the rolling cast of local musicians who crashed there around that time including head Pornographer Carl Newman and Wolf Parade singer Spencer Krug “It was just crumbling beneath the weight of young A priceless document of this era is the 1996 video for a song called “Behind the Beehive,” by Newman’s early band The goofy clip features Newman in a regrettable bob haircut along with future Pornographers Neko Case dancing on a beach and John Collins dressed as a vampire wielding a trident (the dollar store must have been out of scythes) “He never took the mask off,” recalls Collins who has since had a hand in the production of nearly every Destroyer album “Nobody ever got to figure out who he was during the shoot He was being shy or weird or something.” Near the end of the video Bejar’s death does a little pop-and-lock dance move it looked like Bejar’s years of toiling in Vancouver’s indie scene were about to pay off in a big way and Bejar was putting together Destroyer’s ambitious and I thought the best thing for me to do would be to dissolve the version of Destroyer that existed and leave Vancouver forever,” he says with a laugh (He was back in the city by the end of that year.) But the unlikely moves boosted his burgeoning reputation as a shadowy indie rock renegade and for the decade after he dropped out of school he says he was likely living below the poverty line his songwriting contributions to the New Pornographers’ early albums helped him stay afloat as he continued to follow his freakier musical urges with Destroyer He wrote a few songs for each of the New Pornographers’ first six records which have collectively sold more than a half million copies though he hasn’t been involved in the last couple And while he’s still good friends with Newman Bejar isn’t sure if he’ll ever contribute to another New Pornographers record “I’d have to write something that screamed their name,” he says there’s no way I wouldn’t get on stage and do a song.” Bejar has spent much of the last 20 years of his life living and working in a notorious stretch of Vancouver just a few blocks from its touristy central hub Though parts of the area have been scrubbed clean it’s still common to see people openly doing hard drugs on the sidewalk or bent over at the waist for minutes on end “I feel pretty comfortable here,” Bejar says “Unless you have some kind of dog in the fight in the crystal meth game the area is a whiplashing example of late capitalist queasiness where a penthouse condo on the market for $1.2 million is two blocks away from a makeshift tent city where some of Vancouver’s 2,200 homeless people spend their nights without having to worry about any noise complaints thanks to the harrowing conditions outside the family decided to move a handful of blocks south “You can only blast Music for Airports so loud to drown out the cries of the damned at night.” While sidestepping puddles on one of the Downtown Eastside’s more gentrified stretches the recording studio run by go-to Destroyer producers John Collins and Dave Carswell “I spent a lot of time in that condemned building,” Bejar says It was pure chaos.” It was the sort of decrepit fire hazard where you needed ropes and a harness to get out through the back stairway JC/DC were evicted from the building after the city deemed the structure unsafe thanks in part to Vancouver’s punishing real estate market the rent for the space went from $2,000 to $13,500 a month Kaputt not only marked a commercial breakthrough for Destroyer—it landed at No 62 on the Billboard 200 and led to appearances at Coachella and on late-night TV—but served as a key evolutionary step for Bejar as a singer and songwriter Whereas his previous albums had him stuffing as many references which were sometimes delivered through a yelpy bray he cut back his songs’ word count and sang them in a terminally chill new manner Bejar describes the initial concept behind Kaputt thusly: “Let’s make a record that sounds like you put it on at the salon or a dinner party something that people wouldn’t instantly request to be taken off.” When the music started to meet those parameters I think I feel sick.” His self-sabotaging instincts kicked in and he considered getting the album’s backup vocalist and by now Bejar has come up with a very Destroyer-style rationalization for the album’s unlikely popularity and what people reacted to the most was my absence,” he says with a knowing laugh who suffered from what he called “treatment-resistant depression,” killed himself “We never really talked about what happened here,” Bejar says thinking back to the unfinished sessions with Berman Berman first emailed Bejar out of the blue in the fall of 2016 and the two soon made loose plans to work together “I told him to fire me right away,” Bejar says “My first act as producer was to say: ‘Don’t ask someone who was inspired to become a singer-songwriter by your records to produce your record.’ But he just thought that was funny.” The band for the sessions included members of Destroyer The recording process started out promising enough but it eventually became clear that Berman wasn’t into his own writing “There were lots of really wild lines that would have fit in more with ’90s Berman—just blasting images But I think he wanted to do something different So a lot of those amazing pieces of writing didn’t get used,” Bejar says It made me realize how different it is than what I do Bejar also remembers desperately trying to get Berman to sing in the studio and exchanging concerned glances with Malkmus I was the last person to know how fucked I was.” He says the improvisatory music they recorded is notably different from the more straightforward country-style songs that ended up on the Purple Mountains album “It was incredibly loud and brittle and dry and compressed with this Serge Gainsbourg-style voice-of-God over whatever is happening beneath,” Bejar says “But I don’t think that’s something that really spoke to him in the least.” Bejar says there’s “halfway to final mixes of an album’s worth of music” from the sessions adding that whether it ever comes out is up to Berman’s label Considering the possibility of its release “I don’t know if he would have wanted the world to hear it.” some sax from Kaputt—into uncanny soundscapes The final member of Have We Met’s creative triumvirate is faithful Destroyer guitarist Nicolas Bragg two good ones and a third one that just makes no sense,” Bragg tells me “and then they just use 80 percent of the one that doesn’t make sense.” On Have We Met Bragg’s berzerk style adds an element of unpredictability to Collins’ exacting production and Collins completed most of their individual work for the album separately in part because Bejar wanted to lean into the digital vacuum-sealed sound of so many modern recordings they did spend time discussing parameters and inspirations for the record’s vibe the five-hour director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ 1991 sci-fi bomb Until the End of the World “I wanted people to know it was a dark record,” Bejar says The day after our interview, Bejar sends me an email with the subject line: “creepy middle-aged guy at giant teenage protest.” I open it to find a picture taken at the march that appeared in a local paper. And there he is, at the center of the frame, in a blazer and sunglasses, sticking up out of a sea of kids. He looks a little lost. A little bewildered. A little flummoxed. Facebook and Instagram parent Meta is under fire for not doing enough to protect young users Meta is a company that encourages a culture of "see no evil hear no evil," former company engineer Arturo Bejar said on Tuesday He was testifying in front of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing centered on how algorithms for Facebook and Instagram (both owned by parent company Meta) push content to teens that promotes bullying Bejar's job at the company was to protect the social media site's users He said that when he raised the flag about teen harm to Meta's top executives "I observed new features being developed in response to public outcry kind of a placebo," Bejar said during his testimony "A safety feature in name only to placate the press and regulators." Bejar is the latest Facebook whistleblower to supply congress with internal documents that show Meta knows kids are being harmed by its products. His testimony comes after The Wall Street Journal reported on his claims last week Lawmakers have now heard testimony from dozens of kids parents and even company executives on the topic And it seems to have reached a boiling point "We can no longer rely on social media's mantra "My hope is that we will move forward so that we can make Big Tech the next Big Tobacco in terms of a concerted effort to reduce its harm and inform the public." several senators vowed to pass legislation regulating social media this year I will go to the floor of the United States Senate and I will demand a vote," said Sen Last year, Blumenthal and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced the Kids Online Safety Act which made it out of committee with unanimous support senators in the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy and the Law are pushing to pass the law this year Meta spokeswoman Nkechi Nneji said the company has worked with parents and experts to introduce more than 30 tools to support teens "Every day countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online," she said Bejar worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 He returned to the company in 2019 as a consultant to work on Instagram's Well-Being team He said one of the reasons for his return was seeing how his daughter was treated on Instagram "She and her friends began having awful experiences "She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing." Bejar spent the next year collecting data and researching what was going on He found 51% of Instagram users say they've had a "bad or harmful experience" on the app within the previous week And of those users who report harmful posts 21% said they'd been the target of bullying and 24% received unwanted sexual advances "It is unacceptable that a 13-year-old girl gets propositioned on social media," Bejar testified "We don't tolerate unwanted sexual advances against children in any other public context Instagram and other social media products." Bejar emailed his findings in a two-page letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg then Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Instagram head Adam Mosseri "I wanted to bring to your attention what l believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm and how the people we serve experience it," he wrote "There is no feature that helps people know that kind of behavior is not ok." Bejar wrote in the letter that the company needed to create solutions He said he was specifically appealing to the heads of the company because he understood such solutions "will require a culture shift." He said he never heard back from Zuckerberg The other executives responded at the time but Bejar said his concerns weren't addressed He left the company shortly after he sent the letter I thought the company would take my concerns and recommendations seriously," Bejar testified on Tuesday years have gone by and millions of teens are having their mental health compromised and are still being traumatized." The senators on the judicial subcommittee all appeared to agree that the only way to get Meta to change is to pass a law that will hold the social media company accountable Many of them said they'd bring the issue to their colleagues in Congress Become an NPR sponsor they set out to make what Bejar calls a “high-energy Cher record.” They imagined an unceasing four-on-the-floor beat going through an entire side of the LP with Bejar spewing his cryptic musings between the pounding bass hits “Making something groovy always seems to be the beginning of our conversation The 49-year-old art-rocker recalls the beginnings of what would become Destroyer’s 13th album, Labyrinthitis his bushy hair curling into tiny tornadoes around his head as rays of light from a window behind him smear through the Zoom frame Though the record didn’t turn out as originally planned There are traces of Saturday Night Fever disco and Madchester rave minimal techno and infinite New Order emotionalism One song kicks off with the sound of a blaring airhorn who matches each beat with one of the many voices he’s cultivated over the last quarter-century—and some he’s trying out for the first time The singer says the various vocal styles “speak to the really schizophrenic nature of the album I’m not sure these songs talk to each other I think that’s supposed to be something I should be worried about For Destroyer’s last album, Have We Met which was released just before the pandemic members of the band recorded their parts separately by choice COVID restrictions forced them to record everything remotely before Collins was tasked to make sense of it all “John will take people’s wildest moments and just create whole songs out of that,” Bejar says For all of Bejar’s impassiveness—his public persona is that of a man who’s seen eons of human chaos and is generally over the whole thing—he admits that the pandemic took its toll on him “Normally seeing social fabric dissolve doesn’t really interest me that much but I couldn’t get it out of my head.” With slight irritation he found himself scrolling through the news every morning clocking the charts and graphs we’ve all lived by for the past two years This unmoored atmosphere seeped into his creative subconscious and he soon started humming snippets of songs to himself cackling voice that he didn’t fully recognize Destroyer stuff is set in a crumbling world and that decay is a backdrop to some kind of 20th century-style adventure,” he says “But I didn’t see that in anything I wrote It was just brittle little blasts of writing—anti-songs Labyrinthitis is supposed to be really disorienting And it’s incoherent.” He lets out a small chuckle “I don’t really get comfort from the record.” Dan Bejar: “June” was originally a three-minute song that John just whipped up another three minutes of music for and then he got some rap off of YouTube—I think it might have been an old A$AP Rocky song—and sped it up by like 60 BPMs and put that on top “We can’t just grab this two minutes of rapping off YouTube maybe I’ll try my hand at coming up with something.” or just feeling worried about something I’ve done I would like to get to a higher place of art-making the songs are written words-first—if I can’t sing something from beginning to end before anything happens just one more sound effect for him to fuck with but it was just a form I’ve never really done spoken-word is still much maligned in my mind the most shocking thing was how much I liked doing it Recording it was really liberating ’cause it spoke to my confusion around songwriting but there’s just always been a style of writing that I’ve done that doesn’t get used because my taste in songs is Up until “June,” that style of music seemed like a no-fly zone I know there’s a lot of talk-singing out there right now but that’s not something I’m interested in I also don’t think that’s what I’m doing on the song It creeped me out and made me really nervous But it ended up being the wildest writing on the record and made me think I could handle doing a bunch more of that shit Though it definitely took me at least half a year to get used to the idea that that song should even exist but it’s slowly become my favorite part of the album “June” is definitely a song born of the subconscious I wanted the villain to be pathetic and laughable someone who tries to spoil the good time of children I don’t really know. I mean, there’s that old Fall song [“C ‘n’ C-S Mithering”] with a line about only striking for more pay I wasn’t sure if that was a Marxist critique or not; is it a critique that you’re striking for more pay but you’re not striking for a general workers revolution How does change occur if that’s the only reason Whoever utters that sentence better watch their ass in this day and age and for good reason—especially a well-to-do [laughs] I thought I’d sing it and see what happens I’m good. No one wanted to diagnose me with it, unfortunately. I don’t officially have it. But I kept staring at it as a word. It seemed insane to me. It seems so invented, like something that Borges would come up with, or from a weird Lovecraft short story. Does that mean you’re addicted to mazes? It’s not a word I find very poetic. It also has bad electronic music or bad prog metal connotations to it, which I didn’t really mind. That song felt super foreign to me. When you hear the demo of it, it was supposed to be almost like a Warren Zevon or a Tom Waits song. I’ve been into really schmaltzy ’70s Tom Waits lately. People have been backing away from me since I’ve gotten into my Tom Waits era. A lot of people find that reprehensible these days. It just came to me. The song is about the Grim Reaper, about it being your time to go. It’s just death talk from beginning to end, and I wanted to place an artist at the center of that drama. It might be one of the only times I’ve ever written a song from the title down. I felt like it was an innocent song in that way, and maybe that’s why I wanted to spice it up a bit and try and make it sound like Depeche Mode. Maybe I was feeling a little self-conscious about it being too revealing. Not that it reveals a lot, but it doesn’t take much in Destroyer canon to be called “revealing.” It’s taken four years for Dan Bejar to follow up Destroyer’s last record and Poison Season has left its creator bewildered “I think Bruce Springsteen is a simpleton” but there’s something kind of off about Springsteen I think maybe he’s actually kind of simple I don’t think my writing or my singing has anything to do with him and I don’t think Joseph’s wailing sounds anything like Clarence Clemons but this speaks to the disconnect that I always feel thought it was best suited to another environment "I thought we could just play jazz festivals It became apparent quite quickly that there was no way in the world we would actually be accepted as a jazz band and the three jazz festivals we did play were bogus maybe someone just said it was to please me In Toronto we supposedly played a jazz festival but we just played at one of the standard venues that everyone plays There was no banner saying 'Toronto Jazz Festival' I think they just fooled you in to thinking you were playing a jazz festival because of your cockamamie scheme' In the end I realised it was a kind of hare-brained idea Bejar wants people to know that it's certainly different Poison Season may as well come with a sticker on it proudly proclaiming 'SOUNDS NOTHING LIKE THE LAST ONE' Johnny-come-lately Kaputt enthusiasts might be thrown but Bejar doesn't seem to care much for them anyway There were people coming out to shows who wanted to hear I think if I was younger I could have really steered in to that but when you're 40 and you've done nine albums I wouldn't even know how to please an audience if I tried The four and a half years between Poison Season and its surprise hit predecessor was the longest gap in Bejar's nigh-on 20 year recording history as Destroyer Between Trouble in Dreams and Kaputt was three years I guess I just didn't think I had the songs trying to stick close to the idea of - like Kaputt - making a very concise But in the end I tossed that out and thought I'd just write some songs confront them on an individual basis and see what they sounded like - which is not a recipe for pop success I wanted people to forget about the last record completely and I thought four and a half years was a long enough amount of time There had to be a whole new world of indie rock consumers who wouldn't even remember Kaputt existed." it can seem like he's entertaining two contradictory opinions but neither of which is he keen on committing to fully Part of him seems to think Destroyer are doing something revelatory that nobody in the world really understands and another part doesn't get why the level of attention Destroyer receives is quite as high as it is I wonder if he's deliberately dodging the limelight Kaputt shone on him Does he just not want Destroyer to get any bigger But there's no real precedent for a 42-year-old in showbiz having their breakthrough moment I've never really courted that in the first place so it feels like to try would just be a terrible semi-public failure and embarrassment I think I can scrape by doing what I'm doing Worst case scenario maybe I can pull some strings Though it gets a bit of a dressing down from its creator these days it's important to note that Kaputt's success was no fluke - it's a truly astonishing record that succeeded in virtue of that very "concise much of which was down to the prevalence of saxophones and synthesisers While the saxophone is as much of a feature on the more sprawling but equally excellent Poison Season synths have "almost 100%" been ditched in favour of luscious pianos and orchestral strings "There's no precedent for a 42-year-old in showbiz having their breakthrough moment Usually that was an era I thought was completely onerous I spent all of 2012 playing with an amazing drummer and it's probably the way I'll go with things in the future." Though Destroyer albums have never shied away from the grandiose - the scope for embellishment is evident even on the early solo recordings that made up Bejar's debut We'll Build Them A Golden Bridge - it's remarkable how instantly smitten he is with the orchestral method especially for someone who had never arranged strings before alien musical experience I've ever had in my life There's a rigour present with strings that I'm just not used to because that part of the record was really important to me." It'll be interesting to see what shape Poison Season takes live what with half of it very much sounding like the world's best bar band bashing out the hits The band stuff just seemed to be a product of us having done a shit ton of shows in 2012 But then there's this whole other half of the record that's quite different I guess I thought that would make for a schizophrenic album But I also have the idea of this thing which is all 'of a piece' and I don't think this record is really like that." In comparison to its predecessor it certainly isn't, but there are still distinct themes that bind Poison Season - "Times Square" for example rears its head at its beginning "I was conscious of finding a way to create threads in the album epilogues and groovy rock bass in the middle - they help anchor it I don't necessarily think of "Times Square" as a linchpin song but the fact that there are different versions and that I was really torn about how to present those versions is kind of indicative of me and my relationship to the record as a whole." I mention it's rare to come across an artist who seems so conflicted about the merits of their brand new record quite so soon after finishing it to the extent of sounding even a little perplexed about how exactly it ended up the way it did "I'm conscious of the fact that I'm never supposed to say anything negative about the record in exactly this situation I like records where the person singing sounds lost in it It doesn't always have to be Born In The U.S.A but it doesn't have to be a crystallized vision where it shows up intact and the moments when you get it are good moments." The album's superb lead single "Dream Lover" - with its blaring saxophone hammering rhythm and general anthemic three chord barroom rock shtick - that has been the reason those Bruce Springsteen comparisons have been more regular of late but having people compare his work to that of folk he's never actually taken any influence from is now like water off a duck's back "I was happy with my singing for the first time I thought that was a good sign - usually I'm shitting my pants People only listen to what the production sounds like - for example the production on Kaputt couldn't be more opposite to that on a classic jazz record but the music inside of it is - it's devastated I do think that with the band stuff on Poison Season the early '70s bar bands that Bowie probably really liked when he first started thinking about doing Young Americans I don't listen to American music aside from Bob Dylan and Lou Reed But there's this American urban street rock vibe to "Dream Lover" or "Times Square" which I think this version of Destroyer does pretty good maybe aside from the singer - he's the weak link." Where Kaputt made a feature of him singing in a semi-whisper very close to the microphone a la Leonard Cohen circa I'm Your Man Poison Season is easily the most confident his vocals have sounded on any Destroyer record "Michael Jackson's vocal coach before Thriller told him the secret was to convey the maximum amount of intensity as quietly as possible Apparently he was a really quiet singer in the studio because my usual way of working would be to down a fistful of whisky and bark poetry at the microphone I wanted to keep the vocals that I sang with the band I feel like this is the most emotional singing that I've done Kaputt had a lot to do with me removing myself from the singing process this was a lot to do with re-injecting myself in to it Poison Season as a whole is meant to sound like the work of actual human musicians rather than electronics trying to sound as much like musicians as possible "Kaputt created this misty world that was more of a producer's world And with this record I didn't want that - there were a lot more frequencies that I wanted involved With Rubies or Streethawk the idea was to make it sound like 'us' In my head I thought it sounded like a band trying to sound like a band but I think that music just became insane over the last couple of years I think the cult of the producer musician is out of control." "I don't know. It's not really my war. To me it's like a war between D'Angelo and Kanye. They'll fight it out. I'm on D'Angelo's side, 100%. To me that record (The Black Messiah) is very inspiring I'm not saying Kanye is bad or good - actually he is good - but that bag of ProTools tricks It shouldn't be something that rules the lives of adults." because Dan Bejar - as he points out on numerous occasions across our chat - is a 42 year old man But while the music on Destroyer records has long been treated with the utmost reverence there's always been a sardonic playfulness to the lyrics that's largely absent on this outing I tell him I laughed out loud less this time (other than at the record's opening lyric which I think is one of indie rock's funniest and literally years later it turns into a record I just have a version of myself that I like to put in to the world characters - and I don't believe in any of those things Words are the things I react to first in the world For me if the words are good it's an added bonus it needs to hit you on that level or else it'll fail it's nice to hear something cool come out." and his lyrics remain a delight to read as well as to hear Bejar thinks nothing of a good line if it's not set to good music "The days of Destroyer being a literary project are over That probably ended with Trouble in Dreams I had this set of writing that I really felt excited about and was really proud of - maybe the pride is what did me in - but I don't feel like I got it You can be at the top of your game with the words Having called Poison Season "difficult" and Trouble in Dreams "my biggest failure" it's perhaps no surprise to hear that he describes his relationship with the rest of his older material as "strange" "I put on Your Blues a while back and it sounded like someone who was clinically insane I don't listen to too much else - I like This Night a lot that's closest to the rock music that I listen to in my daily existence Rubies I like because it was so easy and we were all just really comfortable it was the apex of me successfully jamming a shit tonne of words in to a song I'd be intimidated by doing one of those songs live but the band itself when we played them it was a bunch of guys in our early 30s sitting around jamming." The 2015 Dan Bejar is clearly revelling in being the leader of a band of guys now in their early 40s sitting around jamming but the prospect of recording solo once more does occasionally play on his mind I feel like every 20 years I should try to make a solo record I did We'll Build Them A Golden Bridge 20 years ago so I'm due for one where I play everything myself and they seldom agree on what they should be I don't want to have to fake it with a song that's asking for a 40-piece orchestra It's probably not going to be another round of late night U.S "I don't think I made an accessible record so I don't see what the point is of trying to ram it home on people." "When you make pop music it makes sense to play it in pop music places and if you don't make pop music to put it in pop music places feels a) destined for failure and b) really wrong when you get there TV sucks' or 'these giants festivals suck' I don't think I come off well in those situations I don't think I made an accessible record so I don't see what the point is of trying to ram it home on people who are used to a theme of 'access' say I'm not going to do something and then I do it or say I'm going to do something and then I don't do it You can hear all of that in Destroyer's music I think Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More A former Facebook engineer turned whistleblower testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill that he warned people at the highest ranks of the social media giant about the dangers its platforms can have on adolescents but that his concerns were ignored Arturo Béjar described to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Privacy Technology and the Law Subcommittee the seismic shift he witnessed in attitudes toward protecting young people on the platforms after he returned to the company following a four-year absence From 2009-15, Béjar served as director of engineering on Facebook’s protect and care team which was tasked with reducing online threats to both children and adults CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives were supportive and engaged “very practically.” But Béjar said after he returned as a consultant in 2019 he found a company disinterested in tackling those issues He said an email he sent to Zuckerberg and others on Oct presenting research he conducted detailing harm to adolescents received no reply or follow-up meeting But Béjar said his findings turned out not to be enlightening within the company whose parent company changed its name to Meta in 2021 had already conducted internal research exposing those problems only addressed them based on a very narrow of definition of “harm," Béjar said an internal survey in 2021 found that one in eight Instagram users ages 13 to 15 said they experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform within the previous seven days Eleven percent of 13- to 15-year-olds reported being either threatened disrespected or excluded on Instagram within the previous week And one in five said they had seen a post in the week before that made them feel worse about themselves and her friends became victims of unwanted sexual advancements and harassment on Instagram Upon his return, Béjar discovered that most of the tools protecting kids that were adopted during his earlier tenure had been discarded “I observed new features being developed in response to public outcry a safety feature in name only to placate the press and regulators,” he said Béjar said Meta’s research into issues facing adolescents was not followed by adequate action and he accused the company of presenting “profoundly misleading” data who left Facebook for the second time in 2021 called social media “one of the most urgent threats to our children today.” “Social media companies must be required to become more transparent so that parents and the public can hold them accountable,” he said “Many have come to accept the false proposition that sexualized content “We don’t tolerate unwanted sexual advances against children in any other public context Instagram and other social media products.” Meta insisted in a statement to Spectrum News that it takes protecting its young users seriously and does not prioritize profits over safety “Every day countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online,” a spokesperson said “The issues raised here regarding user perception surveys highlight one part of this effort and surveys like these have led us to create features like anonymous notifications of potentially hurtful content and comment warnings we have also introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families in having safe There is bipartisan support on the Judiciary Committee for improving child safety online Several members of the subcommittee complained Tuesday that six related bills they passed have yet to receive floor votes Among the bills is the Kids Online Safety Act which would establish a series of new requirements including that social media platforms must provide settings that better protect children and enable the strongest settings by default The legislation also would mandate independent audits to ensure companies are addressing risks to kids “We can no longer rely on social media’s mantra ‘trust us,’” said Sen chairman of the subcommittee and co-author of the bill Some senators pointed the finger at the technology industry’s lobbyists for the inaction in Congress said he plans to return campaign donations from social media companies and called on other lawmakers to do the same “Their leverage here is just power over the political system,” Graham said “So I’m calling on every member of Congress today: Don’t take their money until they change.” Graham also said he thinks it’s important to end Section 230 the provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act that gives online platforms legal immunity from liability for content posted on the internet you’ll be amazed how many good ideas they knew about they didn’t tell us.” Béjar is not the first former Meta employee to emerge as a whistleblower. In 2021, Frances Haugen, who worked in the company’s civic integrity unit, leaked to the media internal research showing the harm its platforms can have on young users and later testified before a different Senate subcommittee She claimed Facebook and Instagram “put their astronomical profits before people.” Dan Bejar talks to Alex Wisgard about exploring music from the turn of the millennium 'the sound of old people singing' and why Grace Jones makes his producer wild in the studio Have We Met is Bejar’s latest album under the name Destroyer and it removes the nods to the humdrum melancholy of ‘80s British indie of its predecessor Ken his alluring non-sequiturs are backed by atmospheric soundscapes that don’t sound like they come from anywhere you can easily find on a map “I think people will hear a synthesiser sound or drum machine and still call that '80s but to me it doesn’t sound like an '80s record partly because I know the software involved I really think it just sounds like the available air out there.” much of the charm of Have We Met came from exposing its songs to the world early “It’s a weird pattern I’ve fallen into between records taking a break from touring with the giant band and hopping in a car or getting on a train with my acoustic guitar playing really old Destroyer songs which we never touch but I feel when it comes to the time to sing new material into a microphone I have a better idea of the phrasing of the music and how it can go even though I have no idea how the music itself is going to be.” Despite an obsession with the great American songbook, which began around 2015’s Poison Season Bejar wound up tracking some of the vocals on Have We Met without even trying The finished album features some first or second vocal takes done before any arrangements had been fleshed out which were recorded “sitting around my living room table at one o’clock in the morning quietly singing into my computer so I don’t wake anyone up.” He adds “I always thought that once I knew what the music would be They seem to anchor the record in a way that I like and it’s probably the most true to how my voice sounds that I think I’ve ever gotten.” The nine songs Bejar has chosen seem to get to the core of what makes his intoxicating new album - and the man responsible for it - so unique Have We Met somehow sounds simultaneously more and less like the band you know and love than any of his other work It opens with a song whose lyrics he’d abandoned as “not singable or not melodious-looking” and ends with a “waltz-time lullaby” written a decade ago which nearly made the cut for Kaputt until it was deemed “too hard to sway to.” as a songwriter approaching fifty and about to release his thirteenth solo album it stands to reason that Bejar’s nine songs which he insists were picked “as quickly and intuitively as I could” Have We Met is a bold addition to a rich catalogue of work and the sound of an artist using the newfound limitations of aging as an excuse for reinvention It’s a conundrum that fascinates Bejar and provides a curious throughline to our conversation “As a middle-aged person,” he puts it to me “It’s like a topic amongst us who are still kickin’ We challenge ourselves in the world of rock or pop music to hear old singers that are good.” a kind of spark for what I thought the new record could sound like Cohen’s record is too generic and too geriatric to really spark John [Collins As someone who’s very material-oriented when it comes to sound he likes to dive into mixes and create soundscapes that are catchy but still interesting The production on “A Thousand Kisses Deep” is almost a flatline “For some reason it really captured my imagination Partly because I was thinking about music from that era which is probably the hugest blind spot for me of the last hundred years even though I was in the most accelerated stage of music-making of my entire life “I was in my mid-to-late twenties and all I did was think about music write all day long and play guitar all day long I was the most deeply invested in music that I’ve ever been Yet so much of the music of that time I completely ignored including the Leonard Cohen records of that era “So when I heard this song fifteen years after the fact it stuck with me in a way that made me confused about why I found it so potent now even though twenty years ago it would have just sounded like the demo function on a synthesiser or an early version of Pro Tools which is the main thing that makes me think I’m not a writer best thought’ and I really still distrust my third or fourth thought which seems really juvenile for someone pushing fifty and who’s written a lot of songs and I don’t really see it reflected back in the writers who I really admire and love.” “There’s a different version of this song that’s more ambient I think I was listening to that a lot back when we were doing Kaputt shrill beats of a certain era – were always going to be a big part of this album the more I think he’s been really integral to so many different records that I’ve made I also like the idea of people like him or Mark Hollis or Scott Walker people who come from a pop music background who then completely turn their back on that to embrace artmaking I stumbled on a cassette of Brilliant Trees maybe after reading some write-up in Smash Hits He still looked really new wave-ish or teeny-bopperish but he was wearing a blazer The music really reminded me of Nick Drake in some superficial ways who was someone else I’d stumbled upon back then “There were parts of that David Sylvian album that I found really hard to get into all the jazz fusion elements - which now I’m completely obsessed with and love about those records - but as a younger person I liked the songs,but found those parts kind of alienating I probably listen to Ryuichi Sakamoto more than David Sylvian but it’s weird how much music I got introduced to unknowingly just by listening to those solo records whether that’s Robert Fripp or Ryuichi Sakamoto or Holger Czukay or even Kenny Wheeler It’s probably how I first heard Fennesz or Derek Bailey “He’d always go out of his way to get these really interesting collaborations that would blow his songs wide open I also found out that when he comes up with songs he just sings it right away and everyone plays around that I feel like this record was kind of a first step towards that.” “Was I making a direct homage to this track when I dropped coins on my kitchen table and held a mic up to it for the intro to “University Hill” “When we started off talking about the record We dropped the ball on the sound effects a little bit there’s some smashed glass and ripped paper because all of my friends stopped listening to rock music and started listening to Aphex Twin and Wu-Tang Clan I don’t think that rock’s really bounced back since then vitality-wise I’d hear that stuff and think it was really cool but A lot of bands were just pulling the singer “Now that I think about it I think it’s a great move because when most people sing it’s really uninteresting But at the time it felt like if you were really into Mott The Hoople it was really a personal attack on everything people hold dear “My wife put this song on a mixtape for me during our early courtship so I’ve always thought it was really romantic When I delved into the discography after that I was pleasantly shocked to discover how much of it I simply could not listen to!” “For this album I had all these ideas for making a stark, Musique concrète record with beats and bass and poetry which John would produce “I started getting really worried and rocking myself back and forth because I knew that John was going to be like ‘I’m going to make a “Moments Of Love” record.’ If he’s given absolute freedom that’s the kind of song he’s going to make he thinks of really exposed samples and he thinks of Art Of Noise “We had this idea - ‘What was music like in the late ‘90s?’ - and in the end It was an aesthetic concept that we abandoned but John’s primal instincts are so much in that earlier time period of Trevor Horn’s early productions So I included this song because there’s a chunk of the list that has to be owed to what John Collins likes and this is definitely up there.” “I remember John blaring this song out of his computer speakers She’s always been kind of a touchstone whenever I work with him “There was a lot of Grace Jones that I listened to when we made Kaputt but there’s a rawer version of that which we wanted to get into on this one as opposed to that slick “Slave to the Rhythm” sound which I think her version of “Love Is the Drug” has there’s always a point where I go ‘You just go wild make it so that you like the way that it sounds’ because it always has to be that way with him anyway He has a very distinct way of working and you can talk about all sorts of shit partially because it had a really famous video that takes place in a bathhouse or something But I think at some point we had yet another idea for this record which we threw out the window where we wanted to use vocal samples from other places "We might have even talked about things like opera samples and John said that this was like ground zero for that but it’s definitely a song that makes me think of his aesthetic a lot “I can’t say that Malcolm McLaren is someone I give too much thought to Though I think I first heard this around the same time as I was becoming aware of the Sex Pistols “I was around twelve when I heard this song The aesthetic was really weird and I actually found it really creepy and really unnerving - the video and the song It was definitely not something I could put together with the Sex Pistols though somehow I could feel a connection to Adam And The Ants or Bow Wow Wow and obviously McLaren had a hand in that shit but it didn’t make too much sense with my understanding of punk rock which was still pretty basic at that point the ridiculous opera bits and the downtempo that song speaks to a lot of things I like in music whereas a song like Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” is one of my favourite songs of all time Can you put a little asterisk to say that?” “I’d never heard this song until recently and I only got around to listening to Republic “I never made it past the ‘80s with that group even though they’re one of my favourite bands of all time but I was dabbling in the reality of what we were doing and what its destiny was you know how we’re like really old and we always like to listen to New Order when we’re making records What does really old New Order sound like?” He had a better idea than I did “I wanted to see what they sounded like when they were truly middle-aged This song might have had a star next to it on Apple Music - something really basic like that - and it was the title track It wasn’t deflating in the way I thought it was going to be there were elements to it which still have some kind of essence of what makes them singular and kind of classic but their version of corny isn’t quite as cool here as it was on the early records There’s kind of a flatness to the production again but there’s something coming through that I still like “This sounds defeatist and I don’t mean it to sound that way but these days I’m less interested in finding obscure stuff to herald fashionable thing to do and I spent a good chunk of my young adult life obsessing over that Now I’m more into following people whose work I loved down the rabbit hole into dark to see if there’s some kind of kernel of light in there “I don’t know if I do that out of some kind of self-preservation instinct as I push fifty but I think we dismiss these acts too easily And I just love the sound of old people singing Tempest by Bob Dylan is probably my favourite Dylan record I think a lot about new Van Morrison records “I know that record, but I never think about it and I don’t care about it. I don’t care about Peter Gabriel. I don’t care about Genesis, but what I do care about is the five-hour version of Until The End Of The World by Wim Wenders “It got butchered into a two hour and twenty-minute version It’s a global road movie that’s supposed to take place in 1999 and it has a soundtrack that I remember quite well; it probably had more traction than the movie itself Nick Cave had a song on it called “Until The End Of The World” there’s definitely an Achtung Baby!-sounding U2 song called that What I don’t remember being on the soundtrack is the song “Carpet Crawlers” which is used really effectively in the movie “I was thinking about end of the millennium movies a lot. I think about films a lot more than music these days and I mostly take my inspiration from films now. I was thinking about this Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien so I’m not sure if it’s set in the near future or the near past but I really like the way they used techno music in those movies in that era “I love the way "Carpet Crawlers" is used in that film I thought about it a little bit when we were making the song “The Television Music Supervisor” arpeggiating synths in the background which the vocals float over I liked it as an almost ambient pop song from almost fifty years ago and it definitely feels like the kind of shit I like which “Friends of mine really rep for those first Peter Gabriel records too I remember when we finished Kaputt and John was comparing it on a stereo to a new crazy 5.1 surround sound quadrophonic remix of So that had just come out What does this have to do with what we’re…’ And he kept telling me ‘No “The only real link I’ve ever found is the fact that someone whose music was really influential to me when I first started writing songs back in 1994 was Guided By Voices I think Robert Pollard might be the biggest early Genesis fan who walks the earth; there’s a real link there that hasn’t been discussed enough but you should find any excuse to steer clear of it “You know how you listen to language tapes to learn a language I listen to Billie Holiday in the hope that it’ll teach me how to sing but at least when I’m hunched over a microphone by myself and not onstage in front of people “I don’t really listen to her earlier more swinging music where her vocals are incredibly adept or elastic broken-down sounding records from the mid to late ‘50s are probably the thing I’ve been most obsessed with in the last ten years there’s a gravitas in those albums which I don’t hear anywhere else Before then I knew her voice because it’s so iconic but I never gave it a second thought; she wasn’t a popular singer in the underground I feel like people’s renewed interest in Sinatra - if that’s actually happened - will maybe lead to people discussing her in a different light I know those records I’m talking about are traditionally super scoffed at and legitimate jazz people like to talk trash about them because they’re considered easy listening music with a broken-down singer “That description should make you want to hear it but for decades they’ve kind of been frowned-upon records ground zero for that was when I became obsessed with Scott Walker in the mid-‘90s then finding out that Frank Sinatra’s favourite singer was Billie Holiday “It’s definitely what sparked me getting into caring about singing more than writing but when I made Poison Season I was probably cresting that idea The de facto Destroyer mode is to always take on a fight you’re not going to win and go down swinging.”