Dan Bejar

Biography

Daniel Bejar ( BAY-har; born October 4, 1972) is a Canadian singer and musician from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the frontman of Destroyer, and was a member of indie rock band the New Pornographers.

Overview

In 2006, Bejar joined Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes and Spencer Krug of Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade as part of indie supergroup Swan Lake. He has also collaborated with his wife, Sydney Hermant, as the duo Hello, Blue Roses, whose debut album was released in 2008.

Personal life

Bejar was born in 1972 to a Spanish father and an American mother at Vancouver General Hospital. Bejar's father was a physicist who grew up Catholic in Spain during the Francoist dictatorship, and his mother was a Jewish teacher who taught the Spanish language. Bejar was raised without religion. His father died when he was 13 years old. Growing up, Bejar moved frequently; in adulthood, he has resided in Southern California, Canada and Spain. Bejar attended University of British Columbia for three years: "To my credit, I eventually dropped out; to my discredit, I waited three years to do it. I was taking mostly English and philosophy classes, fooling myself into thinking I might be an academic."
Bejar has a daughter and lives in Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood.
In the late 1990s, Bejar had an acting role in his future New Pornographers bandmate Blaine Thurier's microbudget film Low Self-Esteem Girl.
Bejar has occasionally been mistaken for American visual artist Daniel Bejar. In March 2010, an article in The New Yorker detailed the visual artist Bejar's project "The Googlegänger", which detailed his efforts to impersonate the singer of the same name, and the past confusion by the media between the two.