For the War on Drugs' new LA album, fewer guitar solos, more golf
LOS ANGELES — For years, Adam Granduciel resisted moving to Los Angeles because he didn't want to be seen as the villain in a Bruce Springsteen song.
"You know that part in 'Racing in the Street' where he's talking about blowing the dude from L.A. off the track?" asks the frontman and creative mastermind of the War on Drugs, referring to Springsteen's drag-racing epic from "Darkness on the Edge of Town." "There's this live version I love where he does that line and everyone in Giants Stadium cheers — like, 'Yeah, f— that guy!'"
A proud East Coast native whose band came up in Philadelphia's scrappy, close-knit indie-rock scene, Granduciel, 42, feared that going west would signal a careerist rearrangement of his priorities — "a detachment from something that I wasn't ready to appear detached from," as he puts it.
Yet family beckoned: In 2019, his son with actress Krysten Ritter was born, so after a long stretch of shuttling between Philly and L.A. — not to mention a Grammy win that had already
