Sessions took place with different assortments of the band’s six-piece line-up intermittently, on such hallowed ground as Electric Lady in New York, Electro-Vox in LA and the famed Sound City in Van Nuys. Everything works! We can fit everybody in the room! We can take as long as we need!” It was the opposite – you come to appreciate the little things. “And this time – it wasn’t that we’d gotten used to it, or were taking it for granted. “So, first time around, there was definitely that feeling of being somewhere like EastWest in LA, and going, “Oh, man, we’re in the Chili Peppers room! We’re in the Sea Change room! It felt like a privilege. “The last record was the first time we went to some of the big, iconic studios,” he says. Adam Granduciel performs with The War on Drugs at The O2 Arena (Photo: Gus Stewart/Redferns) Typically, they were on the road, not at the ceremony, when A Deeper Understanding scooped the Grammy they broke ground on I Don’t Live Here Anymore soon after. For somebody so unassuming, Granduciel seems to have a habit of working against dramatic backdrops.
I Don’t Live Here Anymore’s gestation was similarly eventful -hatched out of the glory of a Grammy win, recorded at historic studios across America, and completed in the shadow of a pandemic. The second War on Drugs album, 2011’s Slave Ambient, was fuelled by his struggles with anxiety, while at the core of Lost in the Dream’s thematic maelstrom was the collapse of a long-term relationship. But untouched by it, I think.”įor Granduciel, those themes are well-worn: wistfulness at the melancholic past, and nervousness at the uncertain future. “I’m still trying to write about the things I’ve always found emotionally powerful, and those things are… not untainted by success, that’d be the wrong word. “I’ve heard people say you end up writing about the same thing your whole life – that there are maybe a handful of moments in your life, and that is where you get most of your muse,” he says. Granduciel’s life bears few signs of rock-star prosperity, other than, a while ago now, having swapped the Philadelphia neighbourhood of South Kensington – his home for more than a decade, and considerably less salubrious than its London counterpart – for Los Angeles, where he lives with his partner, the actress Krysten Ritter, and their two-year-old son. Today, they are preparing to release their second major-label album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, with mainstream rock’s biggest honour under their arm and a global arena tour in the diary for 2022.
The War on Drugs (Photo: Shawn Brackbill) It caught the attention of not just critics the world over – topping end-of-year lists – but also industry moguls, such as Jimmy Iovine, who said the band should be “gigantic”. It was a sequence set in motion in 2014 by the band’s third album, Lost in the Dream, a sweeping epic that served as both a panoramic paean to the titans of heartland rock – Dylan, Petty, Springsteen – and an anthemic exorcism of Granduciel’s inner demons. But he is always in the foreground, even if he would rather not be.Ī Deeper Understanding won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in January 2018, putting the cap on a remarkable four-year rise from Philadelphia obscurity to a place among the guitar greats that Granduciel had long idolised. A zealous adherent to his classic rock influences, Granduciel would always rather bathe the music in light and cast himself in shadow. And, sure enough, the eye is drawn, too, to the tools of the rock’n’roll trade that sit at the feet of a lamp off in the corner. Granduciel looks nonplussed, as if he is wondering why anybody would want to photograph him when the rest of the room is more interesting. It is hardly radical.īut A Deeper Understanding’s artwork captures the rockers’ essence perfectly. It is simple, at first glance the band’s mastermind Adam Granduciel sits front and centre, alone in front of a small organ, surrounded by the standard trappings of any group’s studio – a Fender Stratocaster, a stack of amps. The cover of The War on Drugs’ 2017 album A Deeper Understanding – their first for major label Atlantic – is illuminating.
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