“I’ve been workin’ on the new Oliver Twist!” is Dan Bejar’s mantra on “Sky’s Grey,” the opening track and lead single from Destroyer’s upcoming album ken. The follow-up to 2015’s Poison Season arrives this October and is produced by Black Mountain’s Josh Wells, who has been the drummer in Destroyer since 2012. A press release specifies that although ken is not a full-band effort, everyone in the band appears on it. Here’s Bejar on the “enigmatic” album title, which is not so enigmatic since he’s explaining it up front:
Sometime last year, I discovered that the original name for “The Wild Ones” (one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so) was “Ken.” I had an epiphany, I was physically struck by this information. In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It’s unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era. Those were the years when music first really came at me like a sickness, I had it bad. Maybe “The Wild Ones” speaks to that feeling, probably why Suede made no sense in America. I think “ken” also means “to know.”
I am too excited for this
strange that Dan Bejar doesn’t seem to change it’s just the listeners who either give up on him or jump back on-board after not listening to him for awhile….almost like a musical stream that keeps moving along