THE WAR ON DRUGS
Adam Granduciel’s graduation from Kurt Vile’s Mate to arena star brought angst and anxiety. Now he’s ready to transcend: “I just want to keep this thing going.”
INSIDE ADAM GRANDUCIEL’S HOME RECORDING room in Studio City, Los Angeles, the walls are effectively his personal Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Posters of Tom Petty and ’80s-era Bob Dylan are tacked alongside others advertising R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant and The Waterboys’ A Pagan Place. Today, our host, who could easily be mistaken for a roadie for The War On Drugs rather than their esteemed leader, is sporting a T-shirt bearing the artwork for The Rolling Stones’ Love You Live.
As a fanboy-turned-rock star, Granduciel’s enthusiasms remain close to the surface. Talking about the making of the upcoming fifth War On Drugs album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, he’s clearly delighted to have followed in the footsteps of some of his heroes by working in the same studios. While referring to Studio B at LA’s Sound City as “the After The Gold Rush room”, he is even more thrilled to have made parts of the record at the Hendrix-founded Electric Lady in New York.
“You know it from the minute you’re down in Jimi’s basement, there’s something there,” Granduciel enthuses. “It’s not like a ghost. It’s just the sound of that room.”
Absent today are Granduciel’s actor girlfriend, Krysten Ritter, and their nearly two-year-old son, Bruce, who the singer concedes is in “a way” named after The Boss. Normally, the toddler is running in and out of here and messing around with the gear. “He loves to take patch cables and plug them in and turn dials and walk over to the Wurlitzer,” says his proud dad. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this kid likes exactly the stuff I like.’”
Granduciel, born Adam Granofsky in 1979 and raised just outside of Boston by a father who owned a women’s clothing store and a Montessori teacher mother, has taken a circuitous and sometimes torturous route to his current position as a Grammywinning (for 2017’s A Deeper Understanding) singer, guitarist and bandleader. Emerging from the alternative scene in Philadelphia, his breakthrough album, 2014’s Lost In The Dream, was the product of an all-consuming recording process and mixed heartland rock, Neu!-like grooves and trippy layers while revealing the singer’s often crippling day-to-day anxiety and depression.
I Don’t Live Here Anymore may be The War On Drugs’ slickest and most commercial move yet, but on it Granduciel continues to chart his emotional weather, as in the uplifting moment amid muted acoustic opener Living Proof where he declares, “But I’m rising/And I’m damaged…”
“I had those lyrics basically very quickly,” he offers. “I didn’t think too much about it. I just felt like that.”
If The War On Drugs has often seemed like a band name for what is essentially a solo project, Granduciel is keen to point out that the new long-player is far more of a collective effort involving bassist Dave Hartley, keyboard player Robbie Bennett, drummer Charlie Hall, saxophonist John Natchez and multiinstrumentalist Anthony LaMarca. “This
record was more collaborative,” he states, “in the best way.”
What were the very first records that blew your mind?
When I was very young, the only tapes we had in the house were, like, a Billy Joel tape, and a bunch of classical music that my dad listened to. So, I would actually have to say this Billy Joel tape, the album with Uptown Girl on it [An Innocent Man, 1983]. In my early teens, I got into the Nevermind, Pearl Jam Vs. world. My brother liked Neil Young, so I had Harvest Moon. But then, getting into Pearl Jam, when those two worlds collided with Mirrorball, that blew my mind because then it also led me down the Weld and Arc tracks of Neil. I was like, “Oh, I didn’t realise that this guy was also this ridiculous experimental guitar guy.”
As a teenager, you were apparently the textbook loner. You played guitar but never for anyone else to hear?
Yeah, I was kind of an introvert. I was happy enough to stay home on a weekend, and play guitar in my room, and then watch TV with my dad. I don’t think I had an acoustic until I was maybe 19 or 20. So I just had my Harmony electric and my little amp, and maybe a pedal. I had my Neil Young song book, I had my Floyd song book. I had, y’know, 50 fucking song books.
In high school, your French teacher pointed out that a literal translation of your surname Gran-of-sky would be Gran-du-ciel. Did you immediately prefer that name?
It was kind of a joking way of saying my name and then some people would refer to me that way throughout school. And then when I started doing music, giving CDRs of my ideas to friends, I just wrote that [name] down. At that time, it was just a little bit of anonymity, y’know. And I guess it just kind of stuck.
You studied history and fine arts at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. So your aspiration was to become a visual artist?
Growing up, I loved visual arts, I loved painting. And when I finally was old enough to be taking painting classes in oil, I realised pretty quickly that I didn’t have the thing that everyone else in the class had. Oil painting was just a little bit out of my wheelhouse. But I was really inspired by painting, and it was almost like a vehicle to just get lost in music. Because I would paint for hours and hours and listen to all these cassettes I’d made for painting. The painting was an excuse to just listen to tapes for fucking 12 hours. Anything from getting into Miles Davis to my early Beatles phase to Velvet Underground bootlegs. Then I had a moment where I realised that music was the thing that I’d been doing for so long that I should just learn how to do more with it.
In your early twenties, you moved to Oakland, California and were doing a lot of painting and writing, and apparently trying to compile a dictionary?
I moved there because I had a friend who was there. I’d never been to California and at the time I’d been working in restaurants for so long that I knew that I could just go and get a job and make enough to pay the rent. But I was very focused on music. That’s when I got into recording myself. It was like, go to work from three to midnight and work from midnight to eight on music, and then sleep for four hours and go back to work. The dictionary was my oldest friend Julian and I just trying to freeform and free associate with words. At the time, it was post-9/11, but pre-Iraq war. There was like a heavy political edge to our day-to-day and so we were just writing prose, y’know.
This is when you chose the name The War On Drugs. Why was it so appealing?
I just thought it could be a great name for a band. You’re thinking of this hypothetical band in your mind for these songs that don’t exist yet. It just appealed because it seemed to have everything. It had a feeling to it that seemed to encapsulate rock’n’roll: like, “war” and “drugs”. It felt like it was like every band wrapped up in one or something.
It was around this time you were turned on to Dylan. How much effect did that have on your songwriting?
I knew Dylan obviously. I knew all the hits. What I hadn’t heard was The Bootleg Series [Volumes 1-3], with the early stuff on it, like Farewell, Angelina, and then obviously, the Blood On The Tracks acoustic versions. Dylan, I just got into very, very deep, very quickly. Like the Tangled Up… New York session stuff, I started learning that tuning and writing more songs. Yeah, I mean, the Dylan thing has never really ended either.
You’re moving around a lot in this period between the west and east coasts. Did you feel rootless?
Yeah, in the best way. I wanted that, y’know. Not the troubadour thing… I just wanted that restlessness. We were in Oakland for only 11 months, but it felt like years. And then we were like, “Let’s go east.” Myself and my friend Julian hopped on a train. Four or five months later he was in Philly, and I followed him there a couple months after that. But also, around that same time I went by myself to watch that Wilco movie [I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, 2002] at the Somerville Theatre in Boston, and I was like, “That is exactly what I want. I want to just be in a room with people being creative.” That was a really inspiring moment, too.
After moving to Philadelphia, you met Kurt Vile, and he became a kindred soul. You’d play in his band The Violators and he’d play in The War On Drugs. You developed together musically?
One hundred per cent. I mean, if I had not met
Kurt, I probably would not have learned how to express myself in a way that felt real. We were both into the same era of Dylan – the Eat The Document, Live 1966 stuff. The frazzled, acoustic, droning low E string stuff, y’know. Every day, he was at my house in the basement, jamming, or we were at his house, in his little music room, playing acoustics and recording. Then I moved to this other house a year later that I would end up living in for 13 years. That became the headquarters for the music I was starting to make. Definitely, between 2004 and 2010 was the most inspiring time of my life.
Together you and Vile made the first War On Drugs album, Wagonwheel Blues, in 2008, and then he had a lesser role in its successor, Slave Ambient [2011], before drifting away. In your mind there was still a huge divide between the music you were making and the music that you actually liked and wanted to make?
Yeah. In those early days, it was just all very confusing and felt a little forced, maybe. And I knew that Kurt was on his own path anyway. Like, regardless of even if we had somehow put together the greatest band of all time in that moment for those songs, Kurt was still going to do what he wanted to do. I kept experimenting at home and ended up with Slave Ambient. We were on different paths. But we were still walking them together in a way.
Did you go into 2014’s Lost In The Dream with a different mindset?
I think my mindset was I had done those two records, which were based more in sound. Like experimenting with my recordings at home and then turning them into songs somehow. And Lost In The Dream, I was interested in a little bit of that too. But I was like, “Yeah, it’s cool that people seem to like these albums, but I don’t feel like I can sit down and play any of these songs with a guitar.” So, I think I just wanted to become better at that. I was like, “I need to have a record where I do it a different way, rather than it’s just all trial and error all the time and you’re just pulling puzzle pieces out and putting another one in, hoping it sounds cool.”
The recording of Lost In The Dream was an intense time for you, involving virtually endless and obsessional recording. You nearly pushed yourself over the edge. How do you view that time now?
I was a little lost. I had all my recording gear set up on the first floor of my house. And I just, like, couldn’t even go down there. I was basically living on the third floor of my house. Yeah, it was a very strange time. Very uncomfortable in my own body for a long time, and in my own head. The only respite I was getting from whatever was really fucking me up were these recording sessions that I was booking once every six or seven weeks. Myself and Dave [Hartley], and Jeff Zeigler, my engineer, we would drive down to North Carolina. I’d be like, “OK, once we get in the van, and I’m with my friends, and we’re working on music, then I’ll feel good.” But then, when I was not working on it, I had zero purpose. I didn’t really have a clear vision for that record other than just trying to follow my instincts.
But Lost In The Dream was where The War On Drugs’ sound truly emerged: classic ‘drivetime’ rock lent motorik beats and hypnotic dreaminess. It was quite a leap, wasn’t it?
Oh, a hundred per cent. I think part of that leap was when I went to mix it. Myself and Jeff, we were working on Lost In The Dream and it was sounding like everything else we had worked on. I just knew, “Man, if I keep working with Jeff on this, we’re never gonna finish it. We’re just too close. I’m too in my own head.” So for the first time I was like, “I want to find someone else to help me finish this thing.” And Nicolas Vernhes [Deerhunter, Animal Collective] came up. We talked on the phone for about two hours about [classic Roland synths] Juno-60s and drum beats and Suicide and Can and Dylan.
But there was a moment during the mixing in Brooklyn where you felt you had a “total fucking nervous breakdown?”
“Taking painting
classes I realised
pretty quickly that I didn’t have the thing everyone else had.”
Basically, yeah.
Were you overwhelmed by what you were creating?
I don’t really know. I mean, when we were working on it, it was a heightened level of nervous anxiety, tension, depression. I was excited that I was liking the sound of my music. But I think I was just very confused about what I was supposed to be doing with my life. At that point, I’d been working on that record forever, and my life at the time was kind of in a shambles. And how much of this is just to, like, satisfy your ego? Or how much of it really
matters? It still felt open-ended, and it felt confusing. And I felt like I wasn’t sure if I was good at this thing.
It didn’t become clear to me as a record until a couple of weeks later. Ben [Swanson] at Secretly Canadian came down to Philly from Indiana to hear the mixes. We were driving around in his rental car because I was too fucked up to drive. Not like on drugs… I was so anxious all the time, I couldn’t even, like, catch my breath. I was sweating like crazy and playing him the mixes in the car. He was so excited. And I couldn’t even process what that meant.
Under The Pressure became your breakthrough song, detailing your own anxiety. Why do you think it connected so strongly? It seemed to speak to a lot of people who were equally overworked, overstimulated, frazzled…
Yeah, I still don’t know why. It’s like a spirit in the music that just felt very real to me and raw. I think things connect with people when it just feels like the guy making it, or the girl making it, is fully invested in that thing. The only thing
I really had going for me was this set of songs. As much pain at the time as it had brought me, I don’t think the music was bringing me pain. I think it was everything else. But it was the only thing that I really truly cared about. So, maybe that’s the thing. People want to hear something that feels inspired in the most real way.
Did the success of Lost In The Dream take you by surprise? It doesn’t seem to have been your plan to become a big band?
Yeah, I was not shooting to become successful in music. I couldn’t have expected how quickly people were responding to it. I was very surprised that it was becoming popular. We ended up with the six-piece band that we are now. And very quickly, the shows were getting moved to bigger rooms and at the festivals in Europe we were playing on the bigger stages.
But The War On Drugs’ sound always seemed destined for big spaces. Bono has said that U2’s music “never had a roof over its head”. Can you relate?
Yeah, I can. I do like that quote. I feel like it’s something people were expecting from us from Wagonwheel Blues in 2008… this kind of bigger sound that I don’t think we could really deliver on. Lost In The Dream was the first time the songs felt and sounded big. Once we hit our stride, after a couple of months, we were really very quickly growing as a six-piece unit. It just all lined up perfectly.
Making A Deeper Understanding [2017], you had signed to Atlantic Records and were working in Los Angeles in top flight studios. But the intensity and attention to minute detail carried over. You apparently mixed the track Pain 30 times? What were you looking for that you weren’t achieving in your mind?
I just want it to sound natural. I don’t want it to sound like it’s trying to be something else. For A Deeper Understanding, I hired Shaun [Everett, Alabama Shakes/Grizzly Bear]. We would spend months and years getting a song through all these different phases where we’ve replaced the drums four different times, and I’ve recut the vocals and I changed the arrangement. And at the end of all of that work, we would both look at each other and be like, “Oh yeah,
“I just want my music to sound natural. I don’t want it to sound like it’s trying to be something else.”
sounds like a casual recording of the band.” And that’s really the essence of what we’re trying to get at: the illusion of a casual recording of a band playing as good a song as they can play.
Can you relate to other sonic obsessives like Lindsey Buckingham, or Brian Wilson?
Oh, for sure. You’re looking for something that if someone asks you what you’re looking for, you can’t necessarily explain. But I know when whatever we’re working on is not there yet.
You’ve emerged from the Philly alternative scene as the arena-filling band. Yet you’ve never been accused by your contemporaries of selling out. Why do you think that is?
I think we just kicked around for years, and we just tried to do our thing. We played so many awful shows. I’m not gonna say we embarrassed ourselves, but we definitely tried it on in front of a lot of people for a lot of years. And y’know, we remained supportive and complimentary of the scene in Philly that we were a part of, and we were social. When Lost In The Dream came out and it started to take us around the world, I think people were excited that we had had some recognition, because we’d been kicking around for a while.
So you’d paid your dues?
Yeah, y’know, me and Dave last night were talking about that first tour we did with my Volvo. Twenty miles outside Philly, going out to Chicago and back, the muffler fell off. It was just me, Dave and Kurt. If you had all the windows up, you would die from the fumes because the catalytic converter had also fallen off. But if you put the windows down, it was so fucking loud. So, we had this 15-hour drive, and it was, y’know, “Do you keep the windows up, or do you put ‘em down? Do we die from fumes or do we lose our hearing from the sound of this car in the wind?” That’s where we started, man.
How do you view the lower-key successes of some of your friends such as Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn? Do you sometimes envy their less-pressure career paths?
Not really, because those guys do what they do from the heart, and they do it really well. And that’s their thing. So as long as people are doing what they want to be doing for those reasons, then, everyone should be psyched
Is there something inherent in your make-up that drives you to make the biggest music possible, both commercially and sonically?
Definitely. I mean, I’m a strangely ambitious person when it comes to all this stuff… this whole world that surrounds us, with the songs, but also with the band and our crew. We built a really great family with these songs and the albums. And so how can we take the family to the next level?
Last year you remixed the unreleased Rolling Stones track Scarlet [which featured Jimmy Page] for the Goats Head Soup reissue. Bit of a dream job?
It was surreal. They sent me the multitracks and for the first three days, I was sitting in my studio soloing Jimmy Page’s guitar or listening to Mick. I was like, “You’ve got to be fucking shitting me.” This whole thing blew my mind for, like, a week. So I kind of fucked around with it. Within a day or two, I had taken elements of their recording, and I was running Jimmy Page’s guitar through my flanger and Keith’s guitar through some amps and Mick through some delay, or whatever. Just kind of stuff I would do to my own music.
Then [management] were like, “They love it. Mick will call you tomorrow.” I was like, “Wait wait wait, back it up, back it up…” (laughs). It was just myself and Mick, not on FaceTime, thank God, but just the regular phone. He said he loved the vibe, loved the approach and he was so committed to it. He was like, “I got a whole new melody idea for the middle section. I’m gonna fly to France. I’m gonna do this melody.” I’m like, “Oh my God, he’s hearing it evolve.” It was so inspiring because it was like, this guy’s still tapped in. The guy’s been tapped in his whole fucking life.
Have you met any of your other heroes? Springsteen?
I met Bruce. I went to see his Broadway show. I knew for a couple of years that he was a fan of our band. We went backstage and Bruce just turns to me and gives me a big hug. I mean, fucking A, y’know. It was pretty incredible. We’ve stayed in touch since. It’s inspiring. Just these guys… they’re always tweaking, you know what I mean? Tweaking the songs, tweaking the next record, tweaking the show.
There’s a sense of greater equilibrium in the songs on I Don’t Live Here Anymore. Not least in the opening lines of Rings Around My Father’s Eyes: “I’ve never really known which way I’m facing/But I feel like something’s changed.” Can you define what’s changed?
I think maybe just a sense of purpose or a sense of acceptance. All you can do is live with a sense of grace and a sense of knowing. Be true to yourself. Be true to your ideals. Be true to the things that you know are inherently important to you. And sometimes, you only learn that by maybe not living it. Maybe you only learn that by kind of abandoning those things at times and realising that you’re not living, y’know. But at least you know that now it’s time to live it for real.
It sounds like some of your old anxieties have faded away?
I think in the way that they had reared their head before… yeah, for sure.
So, ultimately, what drives you on?
I think at this point, with music and really with life – because they’re intertwined – just to keep this thing going. I have a responsibility to just keep making the kind of music that I want to be making. To push what I thought was just a dream for myself, which is doing any sort of music for a living. To push it as far as I can. M