ADAM GRANDUCIEL THE WAR ON DRUGS
THE Guitar INTERVIEW
Adam Granduciel had to start somewhere, so he started in Singapore. It was January 2018, and The War On Drugs were powering across the globe on their A Deeper Understanding tour, having won the Grammy for Best Rock Album with the most complete and electrifying record of their career. As he wandered the streets of an unfamiliar city, fresh ideas whirled around Granduciel’s mind, a melody slowly crystallising. The song that emerged, I Don’t Wanna Wait, sounds unlike anything his band have produced before. “I’ve been trying to write a song like that forever,” he says.
From those unfamiliar beginnings, the band’s fifth album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, took three years to complete, its gestation spread across seven studios in Los Angeles and New York. The War On Drugs’ most collaborative and uplifting record to date is also their most accessible, Granduciel’s guitar heroics coexisting with a multitude of analogue synths and exultant choruses draped in stonewashed denim. “I never really had a vision for it per se,” says Granduciel, relaxed and genial on a late-summer morning in LA. “We started with the idea of having no rules and it being playful, and that was something I tried to incorporate into all the sessions.”
It’s been four years full of milestones for Granduciel since . In early 2019 he turned 40 and, a few months later, he and his partner, and actor Krysten Ritter, welcomed their first child, Bruce – named partially after Springsteen. Perhaps these milestones gave him a different perspective. But as he contemplated the enormity of following up his faultless major-label debut, the pressure that has suffocated him in the past never materialised.
