photo credit: Shawn Brackbill

***

Adam Granduciel’s new studio is located in the middle of a nondescript street in Burbank, Calif., about 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Despite being a stone’s throw from some of Hollywood’s biggest studios, the area’s industrial feel could quite easily pass for any number of urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia—the charmingly gritty city where Granduciel first made a name for himself as the creative force behind heartland-approved indie-rockers The War on Drugs. And that’s one of the reasons the space has already started to feel like home.

“I found what I was looking for in Philadelphia,” Granduciel says—thinking back on his early days in the City of Brotherly Love nearly 20 years ago—while touring his new property on a mild Friday evening in December. “By nature, I’m pretty anti-social. I’m kind of an introvert, but I wanted to be a part of something. I wanted to meet people that were into music, who were recording.”

The Boston-bred, 42-year-old War on Drugs frontman has been living full time in LA for a while now, after bouncing between California and Brooklyn, N.Y. A noted songwriter and admitted audiophile, Granduciel is slowly turning the two-story building into his new rec room. A gold record for his Grammy-winning, 2017 major label debut, A Deeper Understanding hangs on one wall and relics from his years on the road hang on another. As expected, he’s put together a veritable gear-head’s shrine, filled with rows of guitars, stacks of amps and pedal boards that feel primed to unleash just the right amount of fuzz.

Since the members of The War on Drugs are currently spread throughout the country, they’ve only been able to use Granduciel’s studio for a few rehearsals so far, but the LA indie act Lo Moon are currently working on material on the ground floor. Granduciel says that the rest of his recording equipment is slated to arrive shortly. And, though he’s not ready to start his next project quite yet, there is no doubt that his current surroundings will play a key role in The War on Drugs’ follow-up to their latest set of high-speed headphone music, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, which was released in late October.

Besides being a creative oasis, Granduciel’s new lair serves a practical purpose, too. The singer/guitarist welcomed his first child, Bruce, in July of 2019, and—as a rock musician with a tendency to tinker with new ideas—it’s useful to have a place to go and make some noise in the work-from-home era.

“For years, I’ve wanted to get back to working like I did on [2011’s acclaimed] Slave Ambient, which is way more trial and error—home recordings that were hypnotic and loop-driven,” he says, while surveying his space. “With the studio, I hope I can start to do that again.”

Sporting a baseball cap and flannel, Granduciel looks ready to walk onstage with his band, save for the white N95 mask he’s currently wearing. And that low-key energy, combined with a knack for a great hook, is part of what has helped turn The War on Drugs into one of the biggest acts to emerge from the DIY indie-underground club circuit during the past 15 years. Though he is a key part of a famously underground scene, Granduciel’s music, even from its earliest days, has also always been warm and inviting—without totally drifting into dad rock. It’s full of the everyman arena-energy so often associated with Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, only filtered through the post[1]jam underground.

“Not that there was ever any specific scene in Philly, but we always did our thing,” he says, before moving some stray wires over to sit down in a chair and continuing to answer questions at a safe social distance. “There was a rock scene with Purling Hiss and Birds of Maya, but we weren’t really part of that. We never really had the opportunity to do basement Shawn Brackbill shows because what we were doing wasn’t [conducive] to a small stage. We had a piano and drum machines, and it was just a wider, more cinematic thing. It would have been awesome to play a house party, but it always felt like it was out of place to play there.”

“There were all these bands propping each other up and inspiring each other,” drummer Charlie Hall says of their early days. “Adam would have me come in to sometimes play drums or maybe organ. There was a fluidity to things.”

Even without the pandemic—which, as expected, pushed things back a bit—I Don’t Live Here Anymore was a herculean journey, recorded at seven studios over the course of three years. While based in Brooklyn, the guitarist started the album during a trip to the Upstate New York recording den Outlier Inn in 2018, with the help of War on Drugs bassist David Hartley—the group’s longest tenured member besides Granduciel—and multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca, who joined in 2014.

“Those guys being writers and producers of their own music, there was a lot of trust and it was just really laid back— there was no expectation,” Granduciel says, the timber of his voice echoing his genial, chill personality. “I wasn’t trying to start the record or anything. It was just like, ‘I’ve got these couple of songs—let’s keep the brain working.’”

The three friends sat in a circle for five days and ended up coming with a few future tracks, including the lithe, yearning “Change” and the groovier “I Don’t Wanna Wait.” More important, it got Granduciel’s creative juices flowing, laying the blueprint for what would eventually become I Don’t Live Here Anymore.

“I couldn’t imagine doing a session like that without Dave—I’m so comfortable sitting in a room with him and showing him a quick idea,” Granduciel says. “Dave and Anthony love being in the studio, which isn’t for everyone. And Anthony is a really great drummer, even though he doesn’t play drums in our band. We’d work for 12 hours, make some soup, go back.”

Granduciel kept the party going after he drove back to Brooklyn, regularly popping into Williamsburg’s Studio G; he’d invite his buddies up from Philadelphia to jam in different configurations and loop in local players like Michael Bloch, who has also been a constant studio presence on past War on Drugs records. One afternoon, Granduciel wrote album-closer “Occasional Rain” and quickly tracked the tune with his band, which he describes as the record’s most live moment.

The frontman admits that he doesn’t know what happened to “95% of the material they worked on,” but those hangs inspired a number of ideas that he later expounded on when the revered Canadian producer Shawn Everett flew out to New York to “officially” start the project at Electric Lady.

“It was a full band, not necessarily the full band you might see on the stage,” Granduciel says of the more formal sessions, while also highlighting the contributions of the rest of his core combo, keyboardist Robbie Bennett and saxophonist/ keyboardist Jon Natchez. “That band has rarely sat in a room and recorded a song. Everyone in the group plays on the record, but they are also so good at all these different things. One of the reasons this record doesn’t have that much saxophone is that Jon is also a killer keyboard player. And though Charlie doesn’t play a lot of drums on the record, he does a lot of awesome percussion and prepared piano.”

A number of guests joined in the festivities too, including Dr. Dog’s Eric Slick, Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear, Here We Go Magic’s Patrick Berkery, Dawes’ Lee Pardini and the members of Lucius, who were concurrently working with Everett on their next LP.

“The War on Drugs has three main expressions, all centered around Adam,” says Natchez, who originally connected with the ensemble through Sharon Van Etten, before realizing that he had actually grown up with Granduciel. “There is Adam by himself or with Shawn crafting in the studio or at home. That’s how he gets a ton of the material that he shapes. Then, there is this six-piece band that has played a ton together over the last eight years and has that magical alchemy and rapport. And then, The War on Drugs is also such a studio band, which is different than the live band. There is this cast of characters who have been on more records than I have.”

“Adam studied painting and that is how he conceptualizes a record,” Hall adds. “He is going to throw all this paint at the wall, and part of his process is the scratching away of everything.”

In 2019, as he was preparing for Bruce’s birth, Granduciel hunkered down with Everett in LA, working on the LP until COVID shut everything down.

“We ended up taking about five months off,” Granduciel says. “We were trying to do stuff over email and it was like, ‘What are we doing?’ We finally got back together in person in October at Sound City. We were all wearing 20 masks—Bruce was in Toronto with his mom [actress Krysten Ritter], who was working, so I had a three-week period in the studio where I could go deep. I’d wake up in the morning, work at home— demo vocals, come up with better ideas. And then I’d go to Sound City at night with Shawn and work until 3 a.m. And that’s when certain songs started to go to another place. The ‘liveness’ of it—the energy—definitely got turned up a notch just from having the time to sit with it and be like, ‘Why isn’t it lifting off’ and deciding what to return to the bin.”

At the end of the day, Granduciel ended up using New York’s Outlier Inn, Studio G and Electric Lady, and California’s Electro-Vox, Sound City, Sunset Sound and EastWest to complete I Don’t Live Here Anymore. And, while part of the charm of the resulting music is in its free-flowing everyman quality, the tunes were pieced together through years of key changes, lyrical tweaks and gentle, musical massaging.

“It didn’t ever feel like we were starting a new project,” Everett says. “It just felt like an extension of what we were already working on. If you spend too much time with someone in a room, they can start to ware on you, but the opposite is true of Adam. The more time I spent with him, the more I understood and wanted to be around him.”

“With making these records that we’ve been making—the ‘rock-band illusion’ records—you have to think, ‘How do you make it sound like it feels when you’re on the stage?’ And that’s kind of a tough thing to do,” Granduciel admits. “We like having that live band thing, without compromising any of the timing or the sonics or the essence of what we like to do.”

***

The War On Drugs has been through several different incarnations since Granduciel started recording under the handle in 2005. He says that a friend actually came up with the band’s moniker a couple of years before the project truly came to life and that he ended up working with a mix of musicians within his extended social circle. “I wasn’t interested in being a solo artist,” he says. “I was always very band oriented—there was a communal vibe.”

One of the first musicians Granduciel connected with was fellow DIY songwriter Kurt Vile, who recorded an early demo with future Joe Russo’s Almost Dead guitarist Tom Hamilton at the house he shared with his band at the time, Brothers Past.

“Kurt was the first guy that I’d bounce songs off,” he says. “He would react to them and play on them.”

Vile served as an early member of The War on Drugs and Granduciel contributed to his solo projects, before they naturally ended up focusing more on their own endeavors. Another early contributor was Hartley, a grunge fan who worked with Granduciel at a real estate office for a time.

“[Dave] was always coming over and hanging out with my roommate and he was playing in bands with Robbie,” Granduciel says. “We were downstairs recording, making crazy sounds with synths and guitars. He is the silent killer. He elevates the song—but he always wants to prove to me that he can do something better.”

“There are certain currents that run through time—certain sonic threads” Hall says. “And maybe it was a confluence of my age—we were all in our late 20s and starting to find who we were. And certainly Adam found his voice. But there were all these bands around, like The Capitol Years [who Granduciel also played with] and Dr. Dog.”

At the time that The War on Drugs was coalescing, the modern indie-rock scene was in the midst of a cultural boom, thanks to the explosion of the blogosphere and a new class of highly educated acts that favored restrained artfulness over simple, stylized guitar[1]rock. As both a result and a reaction to a once alternative movement’s increasingly mainstream presence, a web of underground, punky clubs started popping up in cities like New York and Philadelphia—creating an oasis for a generation of bands who were looking for the communal energy of the ‘60s acid tests, the simplistic aesthetic of CBGB and the improvisational freedom of Wetlands.

In Philadelphia, Vile was the first member of their inner social circle to gain some national exposure, simultaneously appealing to fans weaned on alt-rock, freak-folk and jambands. Vile’s newfound notoriety quickly helped shed some light on The War on Drugs. But, even back in the ‘00s, Granduciel combined those fringe styles with broader classic-rock elements and synthetic flourishes—which is fitting for a musician who cites seeing Animal Collective at New York’s Webster Hall on their tour in support of Feels and Bob Dylan at Philadelphia’s Trocadero as two defining live-music experiences. The War on Drugs founder even makes a strong case that Bruce Springsteen may actually be one of the world’s most successful bedroom recording artists.

“I always knew Bruce, but I hadn’t really gone deep until I got the Tracks box set,” he says. “Kurt was the same way. He was kind of into Bruce. But then he borrowed the Tracks box set from me. And then he went really deep. And so from spending all this time together, it just percolated. [Springsteen’s] work ethic is really well documented on Tracks. It was a big inspiration—that scraping away in the studio, trying to get at something. I think that has fueled a lot of our process.”

(Granduciel is also particularly proud of his next-level Dylan fandom, admitting to wearing a “Tangled Up in Blue” T-shirt and waiting around to try to meet him after a 2013 Camden, N.J. show that he attended on his own and even name-checking The Bard on his new record’s title track. “That song is about me thinking about my experiences seeing him—who I was with at the time and these very singular moments in my life,” he says.)

Before moving to Philly, Granduciel had been living in Oakland, Calif.—working at a restaurant and then recording until the wee hours of the morning—and, after a friend relocated to the city, he decided to try his luck as well in January 2003.

“I had been recording and writing, and I wanted to be part of a scene of people that were also doing that,” he says. “After I moved to Philly, very quickly from going to shows and living on South Street, I met all these guys in bands and that become my social network. We’d go to a BBQ and jam.”

Through his Philadelphia network, Granduciel met a number of Rutgers alums, who introduced him to acts like Guided By Voices. And, while he is careful to clarify that the numerous bands The War on Drugs were classified with early on were less of a collective than the media made them out to be, the budding songwriter received a boost of confidence from his new friends.

“It was some affirmation—they thought I was a good player,” he says. “So I just kept developing a little bit of confidence— or a bit of an identity—when it came to having some autonomy as a musician and sharing what I had.”

In 2008, indie tastemakers Secretly Canadian released The War on Drugs’ debut LP, Wagonwheel Blues, which featured heavy contributions from Vile and drummer Kyle Lloyd, as well as Hartley on some selections. During the next few years, as Granduciel slowly crafted his 2011 sophomore set, Slave Ambient and its standout track “Best Night,” The War on Drugs’ lineup continued to shift and evolve—gradually building from a slim trio to the seven[1]person E Street Band-like ensemble he’ll bring out on the road in 2022.

Things really started picking up steam with 2014’s Lost in the Dream, which was packed with shoe-gazey, psychedelic anthems like “Red Eyes, “Eyes to the Wind” and “Under the Pressure” that doubled as confident, introspective outsider manifestos.

“Adam has been making music as War on Drugs forever, but the concept of War on Drugs the band had always been fluid,” Natchez says. “But that moment, when we were getting ready for the Lost in the Dream cycle, really crystallized what the band became. From that first rehearsal, it felt like this was a pretty special group of musicians.”

Oddly enough, though Granduciel describes himself as an introvert, his music has always been open and inviting.

“It’s that extra bit to leave the house,” he says. “I was never the kind of guy who was passing my first recordings out to everyone or waiting around to give Neil Young a copy of my record after a show. It made me very uncomfortable to be a part of that, and it still does with social media. It’s just not my thing—not because I feel very uncomfortable promoting, but because I was just happy to play the guitar. I didn’t have any sort of identity as a musician; I didn’t consider myself indie. So I was able to kind of just exist without any sort of preconceived idea of what I already was or what I wanted to be.”

“It always felt big, even when we were playing in a mausoleum—there was this breathe,” Hall says. “I know Kurt and Adam get compared a lot, but, to me, they sound wildly different.”

After Lost in the Dream cracked the Top 40, Granduciel also connected with Everett, who quickly grew into his closest studio confident—and one of his deepest creative partners.

Granduciel says that he was first turned on to Everett after hearing his work on the Alabama Shakes’ 2015 sophomore album, Sound & Color. He read an interview in Mix magazine that described the producer’s often “extreme recording techniques” and emailed him through his website.

“Like with the introvert thing, it would have been easy to just be like, ‘Maybe do Lost in the Dream again—demo, change everything in the studio,’” he says.

Everett took about a month to respond—“he didn’t check his email, which I now get,” The War on Drugs leader quips—but quickly agreed to hang.

“He’s really smart and has no agenda or ego,” Granduciel says of Everett. “He is just a guy who loves recording.”

“We both love these ‘classic recordings,’” Everett says. “And while we use Pro Tools and more modern recording techniques, sometimes—to get things right, tonally— you have to do it the hard way. I like using as many sources as I can when I am recording so I have a lot of information to work with—that could involve 15 inputs from one electric guitar. And we both enjoy cooking dishes like this.”

Everett worked with The War on Drugs on A Deeper Understanding, developing a natural shorthand with Granduciel and helping shepherd their sound to the masses. (Granduciel goes so far as to call Everett his “second in command” for his current recording endeavors.) The LP— released on Atlantic, which still feels like a milestone moment for the outfit’s scene— cracked the Top 10 and earned a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. Perhaps more important, it cemented the group’s reputation as a powerhouse act, capable of turning out neoclassic tunes and packing large-scale rooms around the globe.

“I just wanted to have a big sound,” Granduciel says. “I didn’t even care if the record flopped—Anthony was playing rhythm guitar and some keyboards and Jon was on sax. It was like, ‘I just want to have this sound.’ Obviously, it took off in a way where, when we were starting to play bigger places, we were armed with this band. But it’s possible that we could not have gone for that.”

***

It’s a surprisingly brisk late-fall morning, and Granduciel is strolling around his neighborhood with Bruce after picking up a mobile order that consists of coffee and a croissant. Inside the coffee shop, a song by Tame Impala—a band who trafficked in similar circles for a number of years—is helping to set the mood. At some point, during the past decade, the indie[1]psych scene became a vibe.

Even though it’s breakfast time, Granduciel has already been up taking care of his son for hours, and the “culturally Northeast” musician, who had an early hit with the late-night tale “Red Eyes,” clearly finds humor in the fact that he’s conducting an interview at 8:00 a.m. “In Los Angeles…,” he says with a chuckle before trailing off.

He relishes being an attentive, hands[1]on dad and is still figuring out how to reconcile his new life with the pressure and release of being a touring musician. In a series of recent interviews, he’s discussed how his own father was always home for dinner and the wonders of childhood are clearly not lost on him. While his dad is talking about Springsteen, Bruce’s ears perk up, but Granduciel gently reminds his son: “Not you, another Bruce.” At another moment, when he mentions that he and Hartley have grown from playing in a basement to bus tours together, he intones “a big bus” to the delight of his son. When a fire-station ambulance catches his son’s eye, he wistful notes, “It blew his mind.”

Those themes of newfound fatherhood and growing into a middle aged, psychedelic-approved rocker clearly informed I Don’t Live Here Anymore. But they are also part of a larger conversation the singer has always had in his music.

“If we had ended up finishing the record in March of 2020, I don’t know if I would have been able to verbalize what it was that I was writing about,” Granduciel says, blending in with the area’s dad contingent as he walks along the sidewalk. “I had an idea when I started the record about trying to live a fulfilled life. I’m not sure if I was there yet. We’re just scratching the surface. But, during that extra year, thematically things came into focus—some of the pressures of the pandemic affected me in a way that was not so much about this one moment, but more about things starting to break down. They became easier to sing about.”

“Adam undersells himself as a lyricist,” Natchez says. “He always just says, ‘I’m a guitar player,’ but I always end up really connecting to his lyrics. One of the reasons we connect as a band is that we are all at similar places in our lives and have had similar experiences.”

Granduciel says that his newfound time limitations caused him to “worry whether or not you’re going deep enough on your music.

“You have a different schedule—I’m used to sleeping late and working at Shawn’s house all night, and now I am getting up at 6:30 a.m. and trying to use a 10 a.m. nap to work on a demo or write a song,” he continues. “But Shawn just had a baby too, so we were both navigating these hours together. And that kind of gave us a structure.”

“Having kids around the same time bonds you—you have these shared milestones,” Everett adds. “Adam would have to go home for bath time during a session and I’d be like, ‘Hell yeah, you do.’ I have a lot of respect for that.”

“It is just a beautiful thing to watch Adam grow into the dad that he has become,” Hall, the first member of the band to have kids, gushes. “Adam was the first person my wife and I left our son with so we could go out together for a night 15 years ago, and now things are coming full-circle. And, of course, Bruce is this playful, curious kid.”

While on a walk with Bruce, Granduciel makes a point to reference seeing Phish’s December 31, 1996 show at the Boston Garden and to shout out his high-school pal Jeff Aldridge. “He’s in the scene,” he says with a chuckle. “A ‘Bill Walton’ type character.”

Growing up in the “jamband hotbed” of Boston, Granduciel says that he was exposed to the nascent jamband world in high school, though he never went as deep into it as many of his peers would when they got to college. He did eventually fall into the Dead wormhole, with a particular fondness for their mid-‘70s period. (The War on Drugs’ ‘80s hit “Touch of Grey” was a live favorite for years and appears on the Day of the Dead compilation.) He also notes that Phish’s role as musical curators with their Halloween “specials” and other covers helped open up his friends’ minds to a range of other music.

“Phish covered Remain in Light and ‘Gold Soundz’ and, all of the sudden, everyone’s into Talking Heads and Pavement, which is cool,” he says with a laugh. “It is also cool how things come full-circle—20 years ago all my friends were learning to play guitar to Phish, and now Trey [Anastasio] and I are both using Bob Bradshaw to make our pedal boards, and Mike [Gordon] and I are both working with Shawn.”

Hall admits that he probably has the deepest ties to the late-‘90s and early-‘00s jamband circuits, mentioning that his Miles Davis-inspired Bitches Brews project was profiled in Relix’s On the Verge section around the turn of the millennium. “Phil Lesh was on the cover—I still have the issue,” he says, noting that Dead scribe Steve Silberman is a mentor. “I also played in Dead cover bands when I was a kid and bonded with Steve over the ECM label.”

He gives props to Granduciel— who flirts with that universe— for “being into everything” but says that his comrades represent a wide variety of scenes.

“Let’s be honest: I’ve been to more Phish shows than all of these guys,” Hall says with a hearty chuckle. “I was in the right place at the right time—it was 1990, prep school, and I heard a tape of Junta on the way to soccer. There was humor—it was a little subversive and kind of groovy and noodly.”

His recent appearances have also included a sit in with The Slip during their reunion run and an Osiris Media event that featured Phish lyricist Tom Marshall, the Disco Biscuits’ Marc Brownstein and Aron Magner, and former Spin Doctors guitarist Anthony Krizan. “My sister used to babysit Brad and Andrew Barr when we were kids, and she would always tell me: ‘They are just like you—they jam,’” Hall says. “They were the sweetest, most soulful dudes, and we would play ‘Wipeout’ and Doors songs. We kept in touch and even bumped into each other on a bill in Japan when I was on tour with Tommy Guerrero.”

The War on Drugs more recently brought The Barr Brothers on tour, and Granduciel says that Hall pointed out that they used to be The Slip. “I remember them from Boston,” the singer/guitarist notes, before connecting the dots between another New England band, Apollo Sunshine, their guitarist Sam Cohen and Kevin Morby.

Those latent roots and The War on Drugs’ psychy, classic-rock undertones have helped them cross over onto the modern, jamband-leaning festival circuit. The group also hopes to continue making their shows as dynamic as possible going forward.

Looking ahead, Granduciel says that he plans to mix up his setlists a bit this run, slotting in all the album’s tracks as well as some B-sides, including a choice cut that has “a Zevon vibe.”

“Five years ago, if you had said there’s a night where we didn’t play ‘Eyes to the Wind,’ I’d say, ‘You’re crazy,’” Granduciel says. “But, we’ve only rehearsed it once.”

He describes his band’s first concert LP, Live Drugs, as an exclamation point on that period of his group’s career.

“Lost in the Dream came out and I added these people into the band, and we became more of a band with a live presence,” he says. “And then we made another record. That same band basically helped make that record and then we all went on the road. And then we honed the interpretation of these sets of songs.”

He’s also pumped to announce that Eliza Hardy Jones—an old friend who has played with Grace Potter, Strand of Oaks and Nightlands—has joined on keyboards and vocals.

“When we were trying to translate the record [to the live show], it was like, ‘What’s important here— what are the key elements?’” Hall says, while also referencing the new Get Back documentary. “You think, ‘What are the sonic things that make this song a song, and how do we represent that?’ Sometimes I will listen back to a song we have played live 400 times and say, ‘Oh, wow, there was acoustic guitar on that song on the record.’”

On Jan. 29, The War on Drugs will headline New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time, making them one of a handful of bands from the “Glasslands generation” to rise to The World’s Most Famous Arena. The moment is not lost on Granduciel, though he says that making it to stadiums was never his goal when he started writing songs. (Several band members cite theater runs as a sweet spot.)

“The War on Drugs is Adam—without him it is not the band—though I always joke that in 20 years Adam will be going on to better things and the rest of us will be touring state fairs with a substitute singer,” Natchez says.

As the father of a young child, Granduciel is also cautious about their upcoming run—and able to put playing music in its proper place.

“It’s like, ‘Fuck it, if it is not working, I’d be happy being home with Bruce,’” he says, before noting the importance of live music after the lockdown. “Going to a show now is almost even more emotional because you feel like you really are doing something. Now, we are seven people, and there’s a female in the band. I want the band to grow.”