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, where he currently lives, 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. As we make our way through the city, 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. “For me, 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. “If that comes through in Destroyer, then that’s good, and I don’t mind complaining about this city for 30 years straight.”

Bejar hasn’t always lived here. 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. Bejar, his parents, and his older sister clocked time in Southern California, Spain, Calgary; between kindergarten and 12th grade, he was enrolled into 10 different schools. Bejar says his father, a physicist and engineer who grew up under the oppressive authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco, “was just trying to find a place to live, 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.

When Bejar was 13, his father passed away. He was 46 years old. “It’s like the last thing that made me,” Bejar says. “I was always an inward person, maybe I got more so.” He adds, with a chuckle, “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. By 15, he was back in the Vancouver area, in a suburb called Richmond, itching to move into the city proper. He got closer while attending the nearby University of British Columbia, where he majored in English and minored in Philosophy. Around this time, 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, he only got two good grades, for courses in creative writing, and existentialism and phenomenology.

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, Smog, and Silver Jews. Thinking back to those days, he says, “I definitely was judgmental of people who had any involvement in the mainstream, which was part of ’90s culture. 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, shitty bohemia,” Bejar says.

A priceless document of this era is the 1996 video for a song called “Behind the Beehive,” by Newman’s early band, Zumpano. 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. Then there’s Bejar, who plays death himself, covered in a black sheet and mask, 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.

In 2001, it looked like Bejar’s years of toiling in Vancouver’s indie scene were about to pay off in a big way. The New Pornographers’ debut album, Mass Romantic, was blowing up beyond the city’s borders, and Bejar was putting together Destroyer’s ambitious, meta-glam opus Streethawk. Right at that moment, Bejar took off, first to Madrid, then Montreal. “I wanted to make a drastic change, and I thought the best thing for me to do would be to dissolve the version of Destroyer that existed, bail on the New Pornographers, 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.

Throughout his life, Bejar has never really had a 9-to-5 job, and for the decade after he dropped out of school, he says he was likely living below the poverty line. In the 2000s, 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, Case, and Collins, 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, adding, “But if they passed through town, there’s no way I wouldn’t get on stage and do a song.”