The Earliest Live Destroyer Recording Known to Man (on the Internet)

Dan Bejar: he’s a controversial subject here at the CMG Castle. Most nights, Conrad pounds on Dave’s wall yelling through the thick marble (yes) for him to turn down that “phonetic gibberish”; Dave refuses, turning up the volume and muttering to himself, “You’ll miss me when I move to the Pacific Northwest, la-dah-dah, ah-dee-dah-doh-dah.” Elsewhere, Alan mashes grapes in the auxiliary vineyard, while Kaputt’s saxophone drifts in over the treillage. Throughout, Corey sits on the fainting couch, bathrobe falling open, replaying the guitar solo from “European Oils” again and again, and he doesn’t even like the rest of the song that much.

Point being, we treat any unheard Destroyer tunes as big news, and our crack research team has uncovered what appears to be Bejar’s second earliest available recording (after a demo tape that he sent to CBC’s Brave New Waves in ’95), a live performance in the University of British Columbia’s CiTR radio station on January 25, 1996. The session, recorded five months before Destroyer’s first official release, We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, features songs from that album, as well as his ’95 demo tape, Ideas for Songs (1997), City of Daughters (1998), and several unreleased tracks new to our ears. The set also offers an endearing look at a very young-sounding Bejar, a singer-songwriter then at the beginning of his career, still searching for his voice.

Have a listen here, with thanks to UBC and CiTR.

Tracklist:

1. Saddestroyer
2. Unreleased?
3. Song About a Girl Up to a Point
4. Mending Song
5. I, As McCarthy
6. The Pornographers
7. Something Inside of Me (Jad Fair cover)
8. You Were So Cruel
9. Breakin’ the Law
10. Streets of Fire
11. Revolution
12. Karen Is in Rome
13. Unreleased? (“An appendage to ‘Mending Song’”)
14. State of the Union