One of my favourite things about Dan Bejar's lyrics not just on Have We Met album but all of the albums he's released as Destroyer is the unexpected way that he places things together in his lyrics. I often don't understand what he's talking about, but this one references Crimson Tide, which may be a reference to blood or a massive lifeforce or the University of Alabama sports teams. It references a zone that is brimstone and wire, a circus mongrel searching for clues, vicious stampedes, a child cooing sweet nothings to a box of fuzz, a funeral that goes completely insane when lightning strikes twice. I don't know exactly what it means but, like many Destroyer songs and albums over the years ("3000 Flowers", "Bay of Pigs", "Kaput", "Hydroplaning Off the Edge of The World", "Chinatown", "Tintoretto, It's for You", "Foam Hands", "It's in Your Heart Now", "A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point"), it's wonderful.
That's all a long way of saying I don't know why there are wire strippers in the drawing above, other than I love them, too. They remind me of my father and a small amount of specialised fun (I enjoy modest electrical work) (it's "modest" because my dad was an electrician and my expertise is nowhere near his was). When my son was young he loved to carry a whisk with him. We'd take him on walks in his buggy and he'd hold onto the whisk. There was a time we visited the Houses of Parliament and as a pair of teenage tourists, I assume, passed us, one of them said to the other, "That baby is holding a whisk!"
That's all a long way of saying I enjoyed carrying around a pair of wire strippers with me for a stretch of time in late 2019 and 2020, at about the same time this album was released.
