Showing posts with label The War on Drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The War on Drugs. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
The War on Drugs Is the Rock Band We Need Right Now
by PATRICK RAPA
https://www.phillymag.com/ticket/2018/07/21/war-on-drugs-adam-granduciel/
July 21, 2018
Adam Granduciel is shuffling around backstage at Late Night with Seth Meyers with a paper cup of coffee in his hands, not sure what to do with himself. He and the rest of his band, the War on Drugs, wrapped up their sound check and rehearsal about an hour ago. It’s another four hours till they play for real. If fellow guest Tiffany Haddish is here, she’s holed up in her green room. Meyers is at the hospital with his wife and their newborn son, who arrived just 24 hours ago in the lobby of their Manhattan apartment building. The host will turn up an hour before airtime and recount the harrowing, hilarious story in the show’s first segment, right after the monologue.
“Wanna see where they do Saturday Night Live?” Granduciel asks. He tucks a lock of his long, stringy hair behind his ear and leads the way. It’s just across a bank of elevators from Meyers’s set, on the eighth floor of 30 Rock. We wander in, past hand trucks loaded with props and furniture, and touch the stage. It’s the same set you’ve seen on TV a thousand times, but smaller than you’d expect and, under harsh overhead lights, a bit less grand. A few suits gathered in the seating area shoot us a look, or seem like they might. Granduciel, the War on Drugs lead singer, lyricist and guitarist, shoves his hands into the front pockets of his logo-less blue hoodie and leads a retreat back to the Meyers side.
I ask if he’d like to play SNL someday.
“Well, yeah,” he says.
Granduciel’s longtime publicist, Jessica Linker, chimes in that by her estimation, the honor is overdue.
It’s a tough point to argue with. After more than a decade in the trenches of the Philly music scene, the War on Drugs are finally in a position to dream bigger. They’ve got the sound, often drawing comparisons to Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Dire Straits. They’ve got the fans. They’ve got a deal with a major record label. And as of January, thanks to their most recent album, A Deeper Understanding, they’ve even got a Grammy.
They are, in other words, kinda sorta rock stars. Which raises the question: What does that even mean in 2018?
THESE DAYS, when you win a Grammy for Best Rock Album, they don’t show it on TV. Your shining moment is relegated to web-stream status, so you don’t feel obligated to show up. Not if you don’t expect to win. And especially not if you’ve got a show booked on the other side of the world that day. The War on Drugs were in New Zealand in January when they learned they beat out Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age et al.
In April, the night before the band’s appearance on the Seth Meyers show, Adam Granduciel got to hold his Grammy for the first time. It was backstage at Brooklyn Steel, a sold-out 1,800-person-capacity rock warehouse the band had booked to warm up for several festival appearances (including Coachella in California, Primavera Sound in Barcelona, and the second night of WXPN’s XPoNential fest at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden this month).
“It was cool to see how excited everyone else was to hold it and see it,” says Granduciel, 39, whose parents were on hand in Brooklyn. He smiles. “I mean, I’m not gonna sit and pretend like I haven’t watched the Grammys every year growing up, regardless of who’s on.”
I wonder aloud whether the Grammys respect rock-and-roll right now, but he doesn’t take the bait. “Obviously, I would’ve loved to have been there,” he says. “There’s always been fluctuations in what is popular, what is commercial, or what is mainstream and what is kind of, like, in the moment.”
Granduciel points out that only nine of the Grammys’ 80-something award presentations were on the TV broadcast. Pop and hip-hop made the cut. Best Comedy Album and Best Country Album made the cut. But no rock.
How times have changed. Back in 1989, rising Philly hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince were nominated for the first-ever Grammy for Best Rap Performance but boycotted the ceremony because the presentation wouldn’t be televised. (They ended up winning.) But that was about an underdog genre fighting for respect from the establishment. The popular opinion these days is that rock’s stock is on the decline and has been for a while. When did music critics start wringing their hands about how a new artist or band would “save rock-and-roll” — at the dawn of disco? The day Kurt Cobain died? It’s an old story.
“Rock has a branding issue. There’s still great rock music, but right now, popular music isn’t about music,” says Bruce Warren, program director at WXPN. “Rock needs a new ambassador. Rock needs a fucking Kendrick Lamar.”
Warren’s not calling Granduciel the savior of the genre, but he says he liked the War on Drugs from day one. “I saw the future of rock-and-roll in the very early days. I’m being very serious. … There was something about Adam — his energy, his guitar-playing, the band as it was coming together.”
Granduciel is sanguine about rock’s current status — or at least the Grammys’ cold-shouldering of the genre. “Maybe we would have [been asked to appear] 30 years ago. Probably not,” he shrugs. “Maybe in a year, we’ll be doing a duet with Bruno Mars or Kacey Musgraves or whoever.”
Would he be into it? “I don’t know. ‘Would they be into it?’ is more the question.”
(Lloyd Bishop/NBC)
GRANDUCIEL — BORN Adam Granofsky — grew up in small-town Massachusetts. After studying fine arts at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he moved first to Oakland and then, in 2003, to Philadelphia. Before long, he’d become a figure in the local music scene; he put in a stint in well-regarded indie band the Capitol Years and collaborated with fellow Philly guitar hero Kurt Vile. He and Vile played in each other’s bands before going their separate ways in a divide-and-conquer maneuver.
Granduciel was living in a narrow South Kensington trinity in the shadow of the Market-Frankford El the last time I interviewed him. It was March of 2014. He had a cat named Bobby Jean and a roommate or two. His living room was his recording studio and home office, full of guitars and amps and boxes of the band’s then-brand-new third record, Lost in the Dream. The place was a bit run-down. The Tom Petty poster on the wall might have been load-bearing.
He was, at that moment, an artist on the verge, as prognosticating rock critics like to say. Despite frequent lineup changes in those early years, the War on Drugs had built a solid reputation for blue-collar live shows. They worked day jobs. They performed at small clubs in Fishtown like Johnny Brenda’s and Kung Fu Necktie. They toured the country by van as often as they could.
Their first two full-length albums, released in 2008 and 2011 on an indie label, had been well received. There was a sense that Lost in the Dream would take the band to new heights. As for Granduciel, he was just on the other side of a dark period in his life back then. The record hadn’t come easy.
Every song had been written and rewritten, recorded and re-recorded. He was struggling to achieve a sound just out of reach, something classic and daring and artful at the same time. His laptop was loaded with dozens, maybe hundreds of versions of songs, each one a tweaked iteration of the one before it. If he’d been a sculptor, he joked back then, “I’d probably end up with, like, a pebble.”
The track listing on the back of Lost in the Dream is a window into what he’d been going through: “Under the Pressure.” “Red Eyes.” “Suffering.”
Granduciel’s obsessiveness is always part of the War on Drugs story. Somewhere there’s a picture of him and his bandmates in front of the Late Show with David Letterman marquee in 2014, and everybody’s smiling but him. The reason? He’d hit a “weird note” during their performance. It’s the kind of thing only he would notice, but he beat himself up over it. Today he shakes his head at the memory: “I look at that photo and I’m just like, ‘Man, what an asshole. Just fucking enjoy it.’”
All that early sweat and stress, all those lean years, long van rides and tours that somehow lost money, finally paid off when Lost in the Dream came out. The positive reviews started rolling in. “Red Eyes,” with its catchy beat and memorable guitar hook, became a low-key hit, and the band was soon performing on every talk show that would have them. Granduciel sent Bobby Jean to live with his mom so he and the band could hit the road hard, headlining shows across the country and elsewhere: Iceland, Australia, Luxembourg, you name it.
Lost in the Dream went on to dominate the year-end album lists, and Atlantic Records came calling.
LAST YEAR, after 14 years in Philly, Granduciel moved to Los Angeles to live with his girlfriend, actress/singer/author Krysten Ritter, perhaps best known as the star of Netflix’s Jessica Jones. When it came time to work on a follow-up, he flew his bandmates in from Philadelphia, sometimes for a week or a month at a time, for extended jamming and recording sessions.
“On one hand, I miss having him in Philly. For so many years he lived, like, five blocks from me in Fishtown,” says bassist Dave Hartley, who also records music under the name Nightlands. “But having him so close, I think, led to a recording environment maybe a little too relaxed, where he would just text me and be like, ‘Hey man, I’m working on a new song. Come over and play a bass part?’” He laughs at the memory. “I’d, like, take a pass at bass and then we would go get a beer. Then that bass is what would end up being on the fucking record.”
This time around, there would be a more professional attitude. They got together (mostly in L.A., with additional sessions added in New York) and got to work.
“Those were really special times, actually, as this record was coming together, to kind of go out there and really just focus on music and nothing else,” says drummer Charlie Hall, who also leads a 17-member choir called the Silver Ages. “In a way, there’s no distractions. I mean, of course there’s the distraction of Los Angeles in general, but we were out there for just one singular reason.”
All that jamming led to A Deeper Understanding, which peaked in the 10th spot on Billboard’s album sales chart. With that came more touring (by bus instead of van), more TV appearances, and, eventually, that Grammy.
Compared to most rock-and-roll success stories, the War on Drugs found their audience relatively late. All the band members are in their 30s and 40s, a fact they say has contributed to their level-headedness and lack of entitlement. Granduciel conjures up the famous swimming-pool scene from the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II — Chris Holmes of the metal band W.A.S.P. adrift on an inflatable chair, guzzling vodka and talking about how much he hates himself — and then contrasts it with his own home life.
He used to talk about stress and anxiety. Now he describes a blissful West Coast existence: getting up early to play the piano for hours on end, cooking, doing hot yoga. In short: He’s figured out how to fucking enjoy it.
The War on Drugs are still a Philly band, in a sense. Three of the six members live here. They keep a practice space in the Bok building, the former public school in South Philadelphia with art studios in the classrooms and a fair-weather beer garden on the roof. Whenever the band’s on a break, Hall and Hartley and keyboardist Robbie Bennett like to hang out there, sometimes to jam and sometimes to play pinball. Then they go home to their wives, pets and kids.
“If I’m not rehearsing or working on music, I’ll be trying to just take care of anything that I can while I’m around. House and life stuff,” says Hall. “Trying to earn my keep.”
Hartley echoes the sentiment. “I’m almost embarrassed when my aunt or somebody says, ‘You’re such a rock star.’ I’m like, ‘I’m really not. You have no idea how much I’m not.’”
That’s a tough sell after the War on Drugs show at Brooklyn Steel the night before, what with the cheering and the laughter at band banter and a couple weirdos shouting “I love you!” Craig Finn of the Hold Steady joined them on a Warren Zevon cover. Just about every song had a solo, and all eyes were on Granduciel — center-stage, arched over his guitar, bathed in spotlights and smoke-machine smoke.
At the moment, the War on Drugs is six people strong. Throw in another eight crew members (working lights, tuning guitars, etc.) and what you’ve got is a much larger operation than could fit into Kung Fu Necktie. Does Granduciel feel like a small-business owner? “Yeah, in some way. I feel like one of the guys, but I know there’s probably — I mean, who doesn’t get off on Friday and talk shit about their boss? I did the same thing. That’s part of what it means to have a job. But we’ve definitely curated a pretty great group of people. And at the same time, I enjoy kind of having it be more my thing.”
As for being a rock star, Granduciel, as you might expect, isn’t too comfortable with the term. He rarely gets recognized on the street, he says. He’s turned up in the tabloids, but always in the boyfriend role. And yeah, on this night inside 30 Rock, he’s about to play a Flying V guitar on national television, wearing the same Bob Dylan t-shirt he wore onstage at Brooklyn Steel the night before. But that’s just life for a regular hardworking dude in a band.
Published as “Fortunes of War” in the July 2018 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
Read more at https://www.phillymag.com/ticket/2018/07/21/war-on-drugs-adam-granduciel/#LEiachdfZIRaljAd.99
Monday, May 07, 2018
Tuesday, February 06, 2018
Is the War on Drugs Rock’s Next Torchbearer?
By Amanda Petrusich
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-the-war-on-drugs-rocks-next-torchbearer
From the August 21, 2017 Issue
When rock and roll emerged from Mississippi or Georgia or Tennessee or Illinois sometime in the early nineteen-fifties, it was a lawless mishmash of musical institutions, some ancient, some new. Its unruly roots—the incongruous coupling of the sacred and the profane—came to determine much of the genre’s mythos. By the sixties, its edicts, as set out by early practitioners like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, were decreed in full: rock and roll should be scrappy and instinctive, a wild and unstable expression that appears free of mediation or meddling, even (especially) when it’s not. Thus its most iconic poses: Pete Townshend clobbering the stage with an electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix humping his amplifiers, Janis Joplin, onstage at Woodstock, shaking from heroin and whiskey.
The War on Drugs, a Philadelphia-born outfit fronted by the thirty-eight-year-old guitarist and vocalist Adam Granduciel, does not subscribe to this ethos. Instead, it makes the old clichés seem tired. The band’s songs are performed and recorded in such a way that it’s impossible not to be cognizant of their polish—of labor invested. Though other contemporary bands have made ambitious and exacting music, few are quite so painstaking. Yet the War on Drugs is, to my ears, the best American “rock” band of this decade; it is certainly the one that makes the genre feel most alive.
The group’s fourth album, “A Deeper Understanding,” which comes out on August 25th, is a big and purposeful record that shares some genetic material with late-career releases by Rod Stewart, Dire Straits, Tom Petty, and Don Henley—the songwriting lacks the wholeness and negligence of youth, but hasn’t yet been softened by the capitulations of adulthood. Spiritually, Granduciel is still looking; nothing is secured or presumed.
Philadelphia in the mid-aughts was a very good place and time to be a guitar player. The War on Drugs began, in 2005, as a collaboration between Granduciel and Kurt Vile; later, as the leader of the Violators, Vile perfected a guitar style and tone that married the disaffection of Sonic Youth with the stoned, flickering warmth of the Grateful Dead. Another Philadelphia native (and former Violator), the guitarist Steve Gunn, relocated to Brooklyn and made several albums of warm but terrifically complex music. The War on Drugs made its début with “Wagonwheel Blues,” in 2008, and, following Vile’s departure and several more lineup changes, released its second record, “Slave Ambient,” in 2011. Both were favorably received, but it took “Lost in the Dream,” from 2014, to realistically suggest Granduciel as rock’s next torchbearer. He even looked the part: long and wavy brown hair, Wayfarers, a seemingly infinite collection of vintage denim jackets.
“Lost in the Dream” was conceived mostly at Granduciel’s three-story row house in Philadelphia’s South Kensington neighborhood. He has since recounted the way panic attacks and bouts of listlessness led him to a near-obsessive immersion in his work. Compulsive tinkering in the studio has sunk lesser writers; too much fussing can make a record claustrophobic and overwrought. Somehow, for Granduciel, sealing himself inside allowed for an opening. Music became a viable proxy for actual living—a scout dispatched over the hillside, a manner of exploring the world without directly engaging it. Despite the intensity behind the album’s production, there are plenty of joyful moments—like “Red Eyes,” a song so plainly exultant that, even after a hundred listens, its chorus still feels like cresting a mountain.
Granduciel relocated to Los Angeles after the release of “Lost in the Dream” (he is in a relationship with the actress Krysten Ritter, who stars in the Marvel television series “Jessica Jones”), and his new songs are indebted, in ways both subtle and overt, to his present landscape. It’s hard to say precisely what would comprise a Los Angeles canon—I imagine Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction,” though others might choose N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton,” Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” or Frank Ocean’s “Channel Orange.” It is even more difficult to specify how the city impresses itself on the records made there. I tend to think of L.A.’s influence not so much as a relentless sunniness but as a wide-eyed searching of the horizon. Granduciel has always written dynamic, propulsive melodies that beg for long stretches of good road. But “A Deeper Understanding” has more scope than anything he has done before. When each constituent bit locks into place, the massive scale and deep texture of the work is thrilling. It contains all the expansiveness of the West, and some of its optimism, too.
Lyrically, “A Deeper Understanding” is a record about self-interrogation. Most of Granduciel’s earlier songs address a near-constant process of revision and reinvention. Here, though, Granduciel is more assured than ever. One of the new album’s best tracks, “Holding On,” acts as a spiritual continuation of “An Ocean Between the Waves,” another cut from “Lost in the Dream,” and though the new song never quite resolves the older song’s visceral fears (“Can I be more than just a fool?” Granduciel worried), it does render them smaller. Granduciel seems more cognizant of what’s at stake (“Once I was alive and I could feel, I was holding on to you,” he sings), yet he approaches heartache with ambivalence, a cool acceptance of life’s unpredictable flow. “I keep moving on the path, holding on to mine.” He sounds nearly serene—or at least like someone who has recently seen an ocean.
Throughout “A Deeper Understanding,” Granduciel’s vocals are soft, steady, and almost without origin. Though he occasionally moves into a more discordant, nasally voice—borrowing, for a moment, the sourness of Bob Dylan—it’s often hard to distinguish his singing from any number of gauzy, fading synthesizers. The War on Drugs remains chiefly a guitar band—this is especially true when it performs live—but there are an awful lot of keyboards on the new record, including Wurlitzer, Mellotron, Hammond organ, and several vintage analog synthesizers (or reissues of vintage analog synthesizers), like the Arp Odyssey and the Oberheim Xpander. The synthesizers, especially, give “A Deeper Understanding” a dreamy, almost illusory quality.
That sensibility is augmented by the running length of most of the album’s songs—six or seven minutes (“Thinking of a Place,” which was released as a twelve-inch single for Record Store Day, clocks in at more than eleven minutes)—and how they snake to curious places. Halfway through “Up All Night,” a song about managing the nocturnal willies, the melody—a gentle electric-piano riff that recalls Bruce Hornsby—is displaced by Granduciel’s crackling guitar. The shift should be disorienting, but because of the song’s dream logic it takes a moment to realize you’ve been jolted awake.
“A Deeper Understanding” is the band’s first album for a major label; it left the Indiana-based indie Secretly Canadian and signed a two-record deal with Atlantic Records shortly after “Lost in the Dream” was released. “They should be gigantic,” Jimmy Iovine, a co-founder of Interscope Records who has produced albums by Bruce Springsteen, U2, and Meat Loaf, told Billboard in a 2015 interview. So far, however, the War on Drugs is not making any concessions to the mainstream market, where shorter, sparser songs now dominate.
Perhaps no concessions are necessary. The intricacy of Granduciel’s songwriting and production—the way his urgent, interior searching yields strange tapestries—isn’t immediate in the way, say, a punk-rock song can be. Rather than knock you over, it slowly fills a room, and lingers. Yet his work seems to communicate something vital about the internalization of modern life, the ways in which we now manage, negotiate, and curate expression before uploading it to one platform or another. That these machinations are laid plain—that this music does not aspire to spontaneity—makes it feel more true.
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Reviews: 'A Deeper Understanding' by The War on Drugs
On ‘A Deeper Understanding,’ a deeper dive from The War on Drugs
By Terence Cawley
August 24, 2017
Adam Granduciel is a master of balancing past and present. The Philadelphia-based, Dover-raised singer-songwriter who fronts The War on Drugs has earned indie-darling status by filtering classic rock influences through an ambient dream-pop haze, a formula whose appeal proved near universal on 2014’s critically hailed breakthrough “Lost in the Dream.” Three years later, Granduciel returns with “A Deeper Understanding,” an album that finds the band honing its unique sound.
The brisk opening track “Up All Night” lays out the instrumental palette the band draws from for most of “A Deeper Understanding”: ’80s-style electronic drums, warm keyboards, a blown-out guitar solo. As the drums keep a steady, unchanging pulse, the keyboards induce zoning out and reflection; it’s this combination of propulsion and drift that makes The War on Drugs such emotionally gratifying music. Granduciel’s airy vocals pierce through the fog despite his soft, relaxed delivery, and his lyrics address broad themes of disorientation and romantic malaise in vague, impressionistic language. If you enjoy this song, you will probably appreciate the rest of the album.
Throughout “A Deeper Understanding,” the band doubles down on its idiosyncrasies. Long songs? Six- to seven-minute run times are the norm, with the gorgeously slow-burning “Thinking of a Place” marking the first time in recent memory that a successful artist has chosen an 11-minute song as an album’s first single. Hints of Springsteen? The nostalgic, yearning lyrics and triumphant central guitar lick on “Strangest Thing” are textbook Boss, while “Holding On,” the catchiest, most anthemic song Granduciel has penned since “Red Eyes,” borrows a few glockenspiel notes from “Born to Run.” Anyone who thought signing to a major label would force The War on Drugs to compromise its stubbornly trend-blind aesthetic should find “A Deeper Understanding” a reassuringly familiar listening experience.
The cover photo of Granduciel holed up in the recording studio is an appropriate one for “A Deeper Understanding.” This is the work of a dedicated craftsman, one who labors over every detail until it sounds exactly how he imagined it in his head. From the lush soundscapes to the lyrics, which complement the mood without ever calling attention to themselves, the effect is one of immersion in a wistful waking dream. Put some headphones on, find a good window to stare out of, and let time stretch to the horizon; “A Deeper Understanding” will reward your patience.
Terence Cawley can be reached at terence.cawley@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @terence_cawley
The War on Drugs Bliss Out, Go Big on 'A Deeper Understanding'
By Will Hermes
August 24, 2017
The War on Drugs and Adam Granduciel, third from right
Philadelphia has always been known for lush music – from the richly orchestrated proto-disco Philly Sound to the kaleidoscopic psych scene that spawned the War on Drugs. Steadily widening the canvas since co-founder Kurt Vile's departure, leader Adam Granduciel achieves full-on sonic rapture with his band's latest LP, an abstract-expressionist mural of synth-pop and heartland rock colored by bruised optimism and some of his most generous, incandescent guitar ever.
Which is hardly to say the War on Drugs have become a boogie-till-you-puke jam band. Granduciel is still more about layered textures and tight-woven phrases than he is about noodling, and anxiety still lurks under heady aural comforts, laid out in his nasal, Dylanesque vocal tones. On "Up All Night," literal or metaphoric gunshots ghost the narrative, and hot-forged guitar lines push through confetti-cannon electronics. The restrained builds make even subtle peaks feel ecstatic, like the spine-tingling slide-guitar ascent midway through "Holding On," or the squirming feedback, played by Granduciel like a hooked trout, preceding his solo on "Strangest Thing." There and elsewhere, his leads burn magnesium-bright, the sound of a modern, low-key guitar hero who knows just when to lay back, and when to let rip.
The War on Drugs’ New Album Doesn’t Reinvent the Wheel
Instead, it nearly perfects it.
By Jack Hamilton
August 24, 2017
Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs performs at Grande Halle de La Villette on Oct. 30, 2014 in Paris. (Burak Cingi/Redferns via Getty Images)
A Deeper Understanding, the new LP from the mischievously titled Philadelphia outfit the War on Drugs, is an album that has long felt predestined for end-of-year lists and essays claiming, lo and behold, rock isn’t dead after all. Now it’s finally here, and the fact that it almost entirely lives up to this destiny is just one of its many achievements. A Deeper Understanding is the War on Drugs’ first release since Lost in the Dream, an indie smash that topped more Album of the Year lists than any other in 2014 and won the band a contract with Atlantic. Songwriter–frontman–multi-instrumentalist Adam Granduciel has put his major-label budget to good use. A Deeper Understanding is the most exquisitely well-produced rock album you’ll hear this year, a headphones experience so intoxicating it threatens to obscure the most quietly remarkable thing about it: In 2017, Granduciel and co. have made a rock album that you can (and should) dance to.
The story behind the making of Lost in the Dream is now semi-legendary. The album was recorded over a two-year period, with Granduciel battling intense anxiety and depression, dueling perfectionism and self-doubt. What emerged was a sprawling, spacey work that dwelt in the airier reaches of psychedelia. It was gorgeous, but at times almost deliberately distant. What’s remarkable about A Deeper Understanding, then, is its full-throated vitality, a roaring ebullience and joy that never feels forced or telegraphed. The album opens with “Up All Night,” a pulsing midtempo dazzler that nestles its simple, plaintive melody against a lush array of hooks and warm, throbbing chords. “Holding On” weaves shimmering keyboard, guitar, and vocal melodies into a syncopated backdrop of bubbling drums, bass, and synthesizer lines. And “Nothing to Find,” with its wheezing harmonica playing perfect counterpoint to Granduciel’s half-whispered vocal, is so infectiously effervescent it wouldn’t be out of place on a 1970s Paul McCartney record.
The War on Drugs is one of those strange phenomena that unmistakably sound like the sum of their influences, yet I enjoy their music more than that of any of those influences. The band has strong traces of Springsteen but with none of the parodic overstatement of the E Street Band rhythm section. It sounds a bit like U2, but Granduciel’s wry and weary voice dispenses with the humorless theatricality of Bono. It bears a glancing resemblance to early Arcade Fire, but it doesn’t conflate maximalism with sincerity. Its music is sometimes described as “heartland rock,” an odd characterization since the band is from the East Coast, but Lost in the Dream was a killer road-trip record, full of sprawling soundscapes and vast open spaces. It sounded like a horizon breaking over the Great Plains, or at least what a bunch of guys from Philly imagine that sounds like.
A Deeper Understanding expands upon rather than departing from these aesthetics, but its embrace of an unconventional and distinctly synthetic sonic palette breathes new life into a subgenre often fettered by its own luddite fantasies of authenticity. For starters, A Deeper Understanding really isn’t much of a guitar record. There are still requisite solos here and there (on “Pain” and “Thinking of a Place,” to name just two), but as its cover art indicates, A Deeper Understanding is a keyboard album through and through. There are acoustic and electric pianos, organs, and synthesizers galore: ARPs, Prophets, Junos, Yamahas. None of these sounds are new, and in fact most are decidedly vintage. But they’re put to beautiful use here: They’re expansive and freeing, a fantasy of a future filtered through the past that emerges as something that sounds timeless.
Album Review: The War on Drugs’ ‘A Deeper Understanding’
By Jem Aswad
August 25, 2017
Photo by Kyle Gustafson /Getty Images
“Atmospheric rock band with six-minute-plus-long songs and extended guitar solos” is just about the worst possible template for chart success in 2017. Yet here comes the War on Drugs, a long-running Philadelphia band masterminded by husky-voiced singer/virtuoso guitarist Adam Granduciel, with a long string of sold-out gigs behind them and years of support from an unlikely source: the Pitchfork set. Indeed, the group’s template is a vintage one — flashes of “Love Over Gold”-era Dire Straits, Springsteen’s more epic moments and Wilco’s whispier episodes abound — but Granduciel’s sweeping melodies and cinematic sonics are unexpectedly welcoming, beckoning to the listener like the irresistible intro to a Wim Wenders film or a binge-able TV series. Rather than pairing the group with a proven hitmaker, for “A Deeper Understanding,” the group’s major-label debut and their fourth album overall, Atlantic has allowed them to do their own thing, keeping close to the formula of their 2014 breakthrough album “Lost in the Dream,” except for the occasional jaunty keyboard line.
The album also finds the group getting closer than ever before to the transcendent moments they can reach in a live setting; previous albums found Granduciel burying his guitars in layers of effects, obscuring his formidable shredding skills. Suffice it to say that’s not a problem here, as his crystalline solos are among the album’s highlights. And while he’s surrounded himself with a gang of top-notch musicians, there’s never a shred of doubt about who’s in charge: War on Drugs is Granduciel’s E Street Band, with virtually every note providing a frame or a backdrop or an embellishment for his vocals or guitar, and the songs go on for as long as he wants: This album’s lead track is the 11-minute-long “Thinking of a Place.” (At a WoD gig several years back, we can remember watching the drummer’s face gradually contort into a grimace as Granduciel’s solo went on and on for nearly 10 minutes; he massaged his battered hands miserably when the song finally ended.)
Yet for all the grandstanding, the intensity here comes gradually and in measured steps, and while “next-generation Dad rock” is an overly reductive catch-phrase for this masterful band, broadly speaking, the shoe fits.
Friday, August 25, 2017
The Classic-Rock Ecstasy of The War on Drugs
The band’s fourth album, A Deeper Understanding, offers a powerful and steady high.
Spencer Kornhaber
August 23, 2017
The War on Drugs has one of those band names that isn’t supposed to mean anything. But listen to the Philadelphia band’s wonderful fourth album, A Deeper Understanding, and, you may, in fact, think about drugs—and more specifically, clichés surrounding drugs and rock-and-roll history.
Bandleader Adam Granduciel is a student of that history, and his music often poses questions few rock fans may have thought to ask. Like, “What if Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’ was 10 minutes long?” or “Why can’t we live inside the fourth minute of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’ forever?” But he taps the past with a sensibility that’s new. The sounds of ’60s psychedelia are here, yet not the questing, form-free sensibility associated with psychedelics. Signifiers of ’70s and ’80s excess also abound, but the twitchy bravado or desperate intensity that critics might have described as “coked out” doesn’t. Rather, these songs pulse steadily and patiently, doling out climaxes of euphoria at carefully considered intervals. With apologies for using one of the iffiest tropes of record reviewing: This is classic rock on MDMA.
Granduciel and a shifting cast of band members have been recording under the War on Drugs name since 2005, with their greatest commercial and critical breakthrough arriving via 2014’s Lost in the Dream. That album’s standouts “Red Eyes” and “Under the Pressure” perfected a formula for immersing listeners: Over a chugging and unfailing rhythm, the band tunefully layered guitar heroics, vintage keyboards, and Dylanesque vocals—all cloaked in dreamy reverb. The songs infiltrated streaming-service playlists, publications’ year-end lists, and the consciousness of the rock mogul Jimmy Iovine, who proclaimed the band’s impending hugeness. Granduciel signed to a major label, Atlantic Records, and has now delivered an album of spectacular scale and ambition.
Granduciel and a shifting cast of band members have been recording under the War on Drugs name since 2005, with their greatest commercial and critical breakthrough arriving via 2014’s Lost in the Dream. That album’s standouts “Red Eyes” and “Under the Pressure” perfected a formula for immersing listeners: Over a chugging and unfailing rhythm, the band tunefully layered guitar heroics, vintage keyboards, and Dylanesque vocals—all cloaked in dreamy reverb. The songs infiltrated streaming-service playlists, publications’ year-end lists, and the consciousness of the rock mogul Jimmy Iovine, who proclaimed the band’s impending hugeness. Granduciel signed to a major label, Atlantic Records, and has now delivered an album of spectacular scale and ambition.
It’s the rhythm that first defines most of the songs on A Deeper Understanding, with drum and bass interlocking for, say, a Creedence Clearwater Revival shamble, or a Tom Petty toe-tap. Once established, the groove is almost never interrupted—even as the song mutates for five, six, or 12 minutes. This is a technique most reminiscent of ’70s German rockers like Neu!, but also, structurally, of techno and house music. For Granduciel, it’s a way to achieve something novel and, perhaps counterintuitively, unpredictable. He told Vice, “I don’t like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.”
The reliable hum lends itself to easy listening—and easy criticism. You can clean your house or host a dinner party to A Deeper Understanding, absolutely, and as it filters in you might find yourself thinking, “I like this song, the one with the pretty piano part,” or “this one, which reminds me of ‘Free Bird,’” only to eventually realize there are a number of tracks that fit those descriptions. Drive-by absorption might also make certain listeners write off the band as it transgresses common ideas of coolness and taste. The singer Mark Kozelek, for example, infamously once heard The War on Drugs playing on a distant festival stage and sneered at their “beer commercial lead-guitar shit.” That wasn’t an inaccurate description, to be fair—but it sold short the full scope of the music.
It’s the close listen that reveals Granduciel’s real talent. In interviews, he’s talked about obsessively fussing over every sound in the mix, and the payoff from that attention is serious: Each instrumental element is crisp and fully rendered, familiar yet fresh. Synthetic strings, for example, may not have been this capable of producing actual emotion, since, well, the early-’80s that Granduciel so often references. Some of the album’s most powerful guitar-shredding passages, played full blast, will make it seem as if an amp is plugged in in your living room.
But the point is not only the feel of these sounds. Granduciel writes generous, poppy hooks and deploys them at the moment of maximum possible impact. The guitar line that defines “Strangest Thing”—one of the best songs of the year—doesn’t arrive until 2 minutes and 40 seconds in, transforming what had been a wistful comedown tune into something massive, like “Purple Rain” played on cathedral bells. On that song and elsewhere, it becomes clear Granduciel’s arrangements aren’t nearly as repetitive as they may initially seem. Melodies emerge, move among instruments, and then seem to die. Rebirth, minutes later, is always possible.
In the rare occasions that Granduciel varies the rhythm of a song, the effect on the listener is like that of a seismic event. I jumped a few times listening to the awesome new-age-y workout of “In Chains”: first when a drum fill did, for once, announce a chorus, and later when the song’s heartbeat hiccuped into the classic “Be My Baby” pattern. Contrastingly, the 11-minute single “Thinking of a Place” unwinds into a lush, long portion without drums. When the song’s main groove snaps back in, it’s like a magician pulling off a reveal—scarily sudden, but also smooth. Such moments show that through the ever-pretty, ever-nostalgic haze of his arrangements, Granduciel wants to keep the senses and the mind awake.
Does music this visceral need to mean anything? Granduciel sings in a pleasing but unvarying rasp, and he likes obvious rhymes: “All my waiting was in vain / I walked alone in pain / Through an early morning rain,” etc. Generally the songs tell of striving, endlessly, for bliss—in another person, in a place, or in one’s self. So if it seems on-the-nose for him to sing of a sky “painted in a wash of indigo” or of “somewhere they can make it rain diamonds,” it’s worth remembering that music, across eras, has often been about envisioning paradise through sound. He’s executing that mission with extreme care, finesse, and—most remarkably—consistency. The best passages of A Deeper Understanding are shot through with sadness simply because they eventually have to end, but with this high, you can expect another wave soon.
Monday, June 05, 2017
The War On Drugs Are Still Masters Of Road-Trip Rock On ‘Holding On’
June 1, 2017
The War On Drugs have found a sound they like and they’re sticking to it. At least that seems to be the case with “Holding On,” the first single from their just announced upcoming album A Deeper Understanding. It’s not the first new track we’ve heard from the group since 2014’s Lost In The Dream, but it is more of the excellent same. “Holding On” continues their tradition of crafting keyboard-obsessed Springsteen outtakes that replace The Boss’ gravelly belting with Adam Granduciel’s lighter touch.
The band is locked in to a groove for the duration of the five-and-a-half minute track, calling to mind that uniquely American form of meditation: the multi-hour drive. And Graduciel complements that implied imagery with some explicit nods to crooked highways and crashing. Keep it steady and give the new track a listen up top.
In addition to the new song, the band have shared a tracklist for Understanding. Take a look at that below.
1. “Up All Night”
2. “Pain”
3. “Holding On”
4. “Strangest Thing”
5. “Knocked Down”
6. “Nothing To Find”
7. “Thinking of a Place”
8. “In Chains”
9. “Clean Living”
10. “You Don’t Have To Go”
2. “Pain”
3. “Holding On”
4. “Strangest Thing”
5. “Knocked Down”
6. “Nothing To Find”
7. “Thinking of a Place”
8. “In Chains”
9. “Clean Living”
10. “You Don’t Have To Go”
The new album drops August 25 via Atlantic. Head back and run through the 11-minute epic “Thinking Of A Place” until then.
Sunday, May 07, 2017
Saturday, July 09, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Today's Tune: The War on Drugs - Live at the Best Kept Secret Festival (2014)
An Ocean in Between the Waves
Baby Missiles
Eyes to the Wind
Under the Pressure
Burning
Red Eyes
Your Love Is Calling My Name
The Animator
Come to the City
Lost in the Dream
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
The Album of the Year: The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
December 2, 2014 | 3:42pm
Adam Granduciel was in a rut. It was mid-2013, and the mastermind behind Americana psych-rock outfit The War on Drugs had come to a standstill with the album he’d been crafting for more than a year. He wasn’t want of ideas—he had plenty of those—but something had changed. He didn’t feel like himself. Coming off the breakthrough success of 2011’s Slave Ambient and extensive touring, he’d started asking questions: Was the band going anywhere? Were they connecting with anybody? Was this what he should be doing with his life? Was he contributing anything of note to the canon? Months earlier, on the morning of Feb. 17, Granduciel awoke “feeling like a totally different person.” He started experiencing heavy bouts of anxiety, suffering from debilitating panic attacks. He couldn’t focus, and he felt his world getting smaller. He worried about his age, about his impact. He worried about death, about the future. Everything was suddenly up in the air, on hold—including the then-unfinished Lost in the Dream LP, the band’s career-crowning third full-length and Paste’s number one album of 2014.
A creature of habit, Granduciel tried taking matters in his own hands. Having lived in the same three-story house in Philadelphia for a decade where he had cultivated his own musical style, he began changing his routine and life choices to help curb his anxieties. He quit drinking and smoking. He quit eating meat. He broke up with his girlfriend of four years. But some of the issues he just couldn’t shake. “It was a lot of different things just infiltrating my ability to live comfortably inside of myself,” he says.
Then something happened: the mixing of the record. With the songs all tracked and demoed, Granduciel and sound engineer Nicolas Vernhes went to work in the studio. Soon they were altering songs, moving things around, deconstructing certain elements and rebuilding others from the ground up. There wasn’t a riff or chord or beat on the album that wasn’t carefully calculated and mapped out. And while there are some phenomenal moments of mayhem on the record, each was deeply embedded in method and motive. Creatively, it was the push that Granduciel needed, but emotionally, it was a different story. “I had a really hard time,” he says. “Over the course of the day, I felt very shattered—just kind of shaking all the time. It was being afraid that you’ll have another panic blowout or something, and not really being able to manage your anxieties and your fear. I think some of it too is second-guessing whether or not you’re moving in the right direction, [musically and personally].”
Then, as the months wore on, after much back and forth between studio time and home retooling, Granduciel, despite his panic-stricken haze, finally completed the album with the help of his newly assembled band. He knew what he had—and he knew he had to share it, to get people to hear it, no matter what. “I knew I would finish it,” he says. “I just needed that last bit, that last push to get over Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon or something.”
It was the first step in a long, ongoing healing process—helping to quell some of those large, looming questions—but it wouldn’t be the last.
Despite its recent expansion into a six-piece, The War on Drugs has always been more of a solo project than a big collaborative effort. The band got its start with its 2008 debut, Wagonwheel Blues, which Granduciel wrote and recorded alongside creative counterpart, friendly rival and War of Drugs cofounder Kurt Vile (who left after Wagonwheel Blues to pursue a solo career). Three years later, Granduciel found his place in indie greatness with Slave Ambient, exposing him to a wider, more receptive audience.
Lost in the Dream, however, reaches an entirely new level. Front to back, it’s hard to find a flaw on the album. From the catchy lead-in piano hook on “Under the Pressure” to the show-stopping chorus on “In Reverse,” the record is an emotional, ethereal experience. Each song is structured on the band’s already strong foundation—rich guitar layers, deep synth textures, wall-of-sound atmospherics, soaring guitar solos, catchy vocal melodies, poignant and cutting lyrics, uptempo beats and wailing organs—but builds upon it ceremoniously. It finds Granduciel growing more comfortable in his own skin.
“I had a little bit of a better idea of what I wanted to do,” he says when comparing it to Slave Ambient. “I had a little bit more money to spend in the studios, and I could spend a little more time on it, to really hack away at songs.” It also meant being more receptive to other members’ contributions while not relying so much on experimentalism. “I became a lot more inclusive of [keyboardist] Robbie [Bennet] and [bassist] Dave [Hartley] in the fold. I knew that I wanted there to be more piano, and I knew that I wanted it to be more classic-sounding.”
Initially, the album was met with acclaim and buzz. But while buzz fades, the splendor of Lost in the Dream never did. As 2014 wore on, the songs did the opposite—they festered, intensified, grew stronger. For me, each track seemed to expand in size and scope. Soundscapes I hadn’t noticed before began to appear. Little details and nuances popped up—a synth change here, a drum variation there, a heartsick lyric I hadn’t deciphered the first few times around—and all the while, lead riffs chugged and burned and faded into a wildly sonorous collage that bled all over the place like sonic warfare. There’s a universality to the record, a familiarity ingrained in the music and lyrics themselves that strike a nerve. “I feel like I got over a certain hump that I had while writing,” Granduciel says. Deep down, he knew he had something special.
A native of Dover, Massachusetts, Granduciel moved to Philadelphia “on a whim” about a decade ago after bouncing around from New England to Oakland and back again, figuring out what he wanted to do. He’d started to get serious about writing music, but he wasn’t sharing any of it. Then he saw a film that would impact him forever: the 2002 Wilco documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which depicts the circumstances surrounding the band’s creation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “I wanted to be like that,” Granduciel says. “I wanted to be in the studio, I wanted free-flowing ideas, I wanted a roomful of gear. An opportunity came to move to Philly, and that’s what I wanted—to be a little more outward making music and taking it more seriously and thinking about it.”
While in Philadelphia, he worked as a property manager to help pay the bills before devoting himself fully to music, holing up in his house and accumulating gear and recording equipment. Throughout The War on Drugs’ existence, the home has always served as a safe haven and creative think tank for the writing and tracking process. It played such an integral part of Lost in the Dream, in fact, that it was enshrined within the album art, mirroring the music’s feeling of familiarity and comfort.
But something else about the album rings with familiarity: Granduciel’s influences. Each War on Drugs album has, to some degree, shown shades of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Neil Young and plenty more, but perhaps none more overtly than on Lost in the Dream. The album takes the tried-and-true tactics of classic Americana and folk-rock and infuses it with layers and textures, fissures and peaks, tensions and releases. Granduciel marries modernity with tradition, taking what works and adjusting it slightly so as to add another dimension to the music. “Burning” could be straight out of a Springsteen songbook, but Granduciel has filled it with drum loops and synth samples; “In Reverse” could be something composed by Dylan, but its first three minutes are shrouded in swooning atmospherics; even the folksy title track, probably the least experimental track on the album, is anchored by ghostly tremolo guitars and a harmonica cloaked in reverb. Lost in the Dream makes the classics feel not only new but more relevant than ever.
In doing so, Granduciel makes the sound his own. “I wasn’t so much interested in trying to write something more modern [while] using these influences as much as I was just trying to like follow the method that I always have—and also trying to make my songwriting better,” he says. “I felt like we made enough decisions that propelled the record into something of our own.”
Like those influences, there’s a working-class element to the album. But while Granduciel’s muses might’ve anchored their dissent in economic oppression and social struggle, Granduciel grounds his in personal misgivings and emotional paralysis. These are internal, personalized battles, not external commentaries. It’s not the socially conscious Dylan but the inward-looking one that comes out on Lost in the Dream. (It should be no surprise, then, that earlier this year The War on Drugs covered “Tangled Up in Blue,” the first cut from Blood on the Tracks, probably Dylan’s most personal album. Like Dylan, Granduciel also uses a stage name; his real name is Adam Granofsky.) So, while Granduciel isn’t singing about getting a job for the Johnstown Company or working on Maggie’s farm, Lost in the Dream still channels those desolate feelings of isolation. The context is just more personalized. It evokes the problems plaguing the modern individual.
On “Eyes to the Wind,” for instance, when Granduciel sings, “There’s just a stranger living in me,” or, “I’m all alone here / Living in darkness,” the strife is all-enveloping, but what’s noticeable isn’t the anxiousness itself but the acceptance. “Just a bit rundown here at the moment,” he admits. Lost in the Dream is an album of the times, illustrating a period when people are learning to cope—when they’re beginning to realize things don’t always pan out as planned, or that settling is sometimes the only option left. For Granduciel, these fears are palpable. They’re real enough to reach out and touch, even if they’re difficult to grasp sometimes. Granduciel has gone beyond mere homage to his predecessors—he’s slipped into the role himself, taking up their me-against-the-world burden. Lost in the Dream is not mere shades or hints or echoes; it’s the real thing.
Seeing the band at the Hideout Block Party in Chicago earlier this year, I wasn’t shocked at how well the songs translated live—given how much time and effort they’ve put into creating a full band experience—but I was pleasantly surprised. My wife and I were farther back in the audience, about 100 yards from the stage, but we could easily see Granduciel’s denim-jacket-clad frame hunched over his guitar as he went to town. Like ghosts, he and the band would appear and vanish behind waves of white smoke and red haze that were busy shifting in the wind. As a six-piece, the band’s sound filled out the festival, engulfing the crowd in gradients of guitar, swaths of keyboard and pulsations of drums and bass, as well as overtones of saxophone for some of the record’s more peaking moments.
Playing shows is more than a means for Granduciel to support his art; it gives him a firsthand glimpse of the fans connecting with his music. For a person who, months earlier, felt so closed off and desperate, playing shows offers a chance at validation. It gives Granduciel the chance to witness the receptiveness to his hard work. In a way, touring has become a road to recovery for Granduciel’s initial doubts about direction. It has allowed him to take others’ reactions and reevaluate what the album has meant to not only them but himself. “I think the response to songs has been helpful,” he says. “It feels like a warm group of people coming to our shows. Seeing what the record became and how it’s resonated with people—it’s been a real blessing to have the record kind of change the way I see myself.”
That’s not to say it’s been smooth sailing. The band’s soaring live sound, after all, is what led to the infamous—albeit one-sided—feud with Mark Kozelek. The trouble started when Kozelek (of Sun Kil Moon) took exception to The War on Drugs’ sound bleeding over to Sun Kil Moon’s stage at Ottawa Folk Fest. But what started as an off-color joke (i.e., Kozelek calling their sound “beer commercial lead-guitar,” writing a song called “War on Drugs Suck My Cock,” and publicly challenging the band to let him join them onstage to play it) soon evolved into a pitiful one-sided spar where Kozelek came across as more out-of-touch and bitter than anything (having actually recorded said song and later mocking Granduciel’s comments about Kozelek’s ill-mannered antics in another trolling song titled “Adam Granofsky Blues”).
Granduciel, though, doesn’t give it much thought these days. “It’s definitely been a lot more blown out of proportion on paper than it really is in my head,” he says. “Anytime I say anything, it becomes a headline and is taken out of context. At the end of the day, I have a good sense of humor about everything; I’m not sulking in the corner. I don’t know. It is what is.”
Years from now, when the feud is forgotten, what will be left standing is a stellar album. What will be left will be the healing effects that creating the album afforded, not just the anxieties that they once personified or were teased out by a jaded, alienating songwriter. Because Lost in the Dream has an uncanny ability to transcend—be it decade, genre, audience, you name it. Its sound is enormous, all-encompassing. For all of the turmoil impinged upon Granduciel’s psyche in the year leading up to Lost in the Dream, the album sounds anything but strained. It sounds as if it were always waiting to be written—that it just took Granduciel to finally put a pen to the page, his fingers to the fretboard. The record may have been a document of crippling anxiety, but now it more so serves as the revelation, the remedy.
For all the grandiosity and self-assuredness that Lost in the Dream oozes, Granduciel is anything but. On the phone in LA, he’s unassuming and humble as he tells me his band’s plans to play a show in Portland before heading to Australia in a few days. There’s no ego to stroke or sense of entitlement to placate. And while separating the music from the man may take away from Lost in the Dream’s genius, it highlights its malleability—how it lets you place your own angst and grievances within the music’s ebb and flow. People relate to it. It’s an organic, honest account of playing the cards you’re dealt and making the most of them.
It’s hard to stay grounded when talking about the album, but the significance of Lost in the Dream cannot be overstated. To make the year’s best record, Granduciel had to take a step back and reevaluate his relationship with his own craft. It forced the perfectionist in him to strive for flawlessness and then deliver upon that promise. And while the record didn’t magically heal Granduciel’s anxiety, it has helped open him up to new experiences and opportunities so that healing might be a possibility. “Making the record was not an easy thing. It was not cathartic to make it or anything. It wasn’t like when I was making it that all of these problems disappeared,” he says. “But I think looking back on it in retrospect has helped me to become a more open person.”
And that’s the true majesty of the record: from all the muck and malaise that midlife produces, something beautiful and permanent has been revealed—an enduring contribution to the canon. “I don’t mind you disappearing / Because I know you can be found”—Granduciel may as well have been singing about himself on “In Reverse”; by immersing himself in his music, he has unearthed something valuable and has emerged all the better for it. His missteps and doubts have led to something timeless, profound—suggesting Granduciel is anything but lost.
Granduciel’s own future is uncertain—he might or might not be moving out of his house in Philadelphia and heading for LA or New York, and he’s unsure if the next War on Drugs record will be more siloed or more collaborative or “maybe a mixture”—but for the moment he isn’t concerned, and that’s certainly an improvement from where he was a year ago. In fact, he speaks like someone whose best years are ahead. When asked where the band goes from here, he replies, “I really don’t know. If you look at rock history, for instance, I don’t know; I’m not comparing us to Led Zeppelin—by any means—but they made Houses of the Holy after Zeppelin IV.” He also points out that Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde came after Bringing It All Back Home, and Springsteen’s The River succeeded Darkness on the Edge of Town. Granduciel isn’t equating his work with such legendary benchmarks; he’s merely implying that the sky’s the limit—and for the first time in a long time, he’s able to admit that to himself.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” he says. “This record has done great things for us as a band, and at the end of the year, people are still talking about. And that’s a really special thing. I just want to keep trying to deliver on that promise and keep following my instinct as a songwriter and do what feels right. And hopefully, when it’s time to mix the next record, I’ll be looking at a bunch of songs that are blowing my mind.”
To that end, Granduciel says he hasn’t “frozen up” thinking about recording the next album, and as of right now is excited to make another one. But for now, reflecting on the past year, he’s content to enjoy the moment that he’s earned. “It’s been busy and it’s been exciting and it’s been rewarding,” he says. “It’s been all the things that life should be, I think.”
Related:
Interview: Adam Granduciel
Band of the Year: The War on Drugs
Album of the Year: Lost in the Dream
Albums of the Year (No. 2): Lost in the Dream
Concert Review: The War on Drugs in New Zealand
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