Adam Granduciel’s parents didn’t understand why he did what he did. They’d never cared about rock music. They watched their son pass up a perfectly good job in carpentry to move to Philadelphia, and reach his mid-30s without any sign he’d made the right choice. But it’s amazing what a hit record can do.
In 2014, the War on Drugs released Lost in the Dream. The early reviews were good, the shows were full, and then the album started to fly. Granduciel’s band would return to cities they’d already played, but now at bigger venues for multiple nights. They moved up festival bills. And the record just kept on selling, eventually going gold in the UK.
Granduciel Sr noticed and finally understood what his son was doing. “That’s been a shift in dynamics,” Granduciel Jr observes. Now, with the fourth War on Drugs album out, he says: “They’re excited. My dad’s 85, just had quadruple bypass heart surgery and he’s coming on tour. He’s been reborn by it, he’s learning about rock music. It’s been a blessing, because for so long we didn’t really have a thing.
“He went out, maybe a year ago, and bought all these records that people compare us to: Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Tom Petty. He likes Dire Straits, he sees why we sound like them; he thinks we’re better than Tom Petty; he doesn’t like Bruce, doesn’t like The River. But he has no frame of reference – to him, The River might be the only record Bruce had made. That’s been a beautiful thing to have: a career that makes its way into your personal life.”
It’s hard not to give a little cheer. I interviewed Granduciel just before the release of Lost in the Dream, and he wasn’t a happy man. He had been dealing with anxiety and having panic attacks. A Deeper Understanding, the new album, doesn’t deal with any of this directly, though. “I don’t think that, in the moment, I’m ever trying to write about anything specific,” he says. “I was just thinking about getting older and accepting the past, accepting the decisions you make.” But it’s hard not to read the title as referring, at least in part, to Granduciel confronting the problem that has haunted him for most of his life.
The people who bought Lost in the Dream need not fear. A Deeper Understanding is recognisably from the same pen as its predecessor, but refined and clarified, with the same sweet spots where psychedelia and heartland rock intersect. Even now, Granduciel doesn’t really know what people responded to in Lost in the Dream, making a direct recreation of its appeal pointless.
“There’s a level of dust on that record,” he says. “Certain things aren’t defined. There are moments I’m not even sure what the lyrics are. I’ve seen people who like a certain song write on their Instagram what they think the lyrics are – which they aren’t. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting – you can create your own adventure with some of these songs.’ Which is really cool.”
If it sounds as if Lost in the Dream was healing for Granduciel, it wasn’t. After the album came out, the War on Drugs played Koko in London. Then, less than a year later, they returned for two nights at the cavernous Brixton Academy. Granduciel had played to big crowds at festivals, but he was just one attraction among many.
“Once it was our show, I started having a whole new set of anxieties. I was overcome with fear that I was going to say something very fucked up without being able to control myself. I never had that ever happen, ever. And the first night at Brixton is the first time it started happening. Halfway through, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was in a trance, then it pretty much continued. I’d come off the stage like, ‘Whoof, that was a crazy ride.’ And the band would say, ‘What do you mean?’ I was like, ‘You have no idea!’”
Touring was, on the whole, good for him. It took his mind off his anxiety, as did recording A Deeper Understanding. He calls music “a huge distraction for myself”. His anxiety used to take the form of panic attacks. “Now it’s manifesting itself in anger,” he says. “So you have to be on top of that. You think, ‘Oh, I’m fine. I’m not having panic attacks.’ But then you’re lashing out at everybody.”
For years, Granduciel was the model of the east coast rock’n’roller. On the cover of Lost in the Dream, he was pictured in the ramshackle house in Philadelphia that was his home, his studio, and a place for fellow musicians to crash. A year after Lost in the Dream came out, having barely been home because of his touring schedule, he packed up and moved in with his girlfriend in Los Angeles for a year, eventually going to New York to work on A Deeper Understanding. “I needed to put some east coast into it,” he says, but it has left him feeling like a chunk of his past has been cut adrift.
Recently, the band reconvened in Philadelphia for rehearsals. But Granduciel doesn’t have a home there any more, and couldn’t remember the old songs, either. “So I was living in a hotel in my old home town, walking around listening to my record to remember the fucking lyrics. I was like, ‘What is this weird existence where I’m a tourist in Philly, listening to my own music?’”
At the heart of much of what Granduciel talks about is an underlying desire for normality. But when you’re a full-time musician, and have been for most of your adult life, there’s barely such a thing. So he finds it in the routines of touring, or by ensconcing himself in the studio for 12 hours at a time. Though he’s not a natural seeker of the spotlight – he wishes he could “Bono it up a little bit” on stage – he’s come to be at home fronting a band, despite having had a moment of defiance when decided he wanted to stand stage left, out of the focus. “The rest of them were like, ‘No, you’re going to be in the middle.’”
Even when he goes back to his family, in Massachusetts, he wishes things could be a little different. It’s great that his dad is enthusiastic now, but sometimes he would like to be just Adam, rather than Adam the Rock Musician. “You want there to be a little separation at the dinner table or at family gatherings. I still want to bullshit about what my siblings are doing, what the grandkids are up to, you know?”
Still, at least he knows his dad isn’t going to be telling him about vacancies at the local carpet-fitters ever again.
- A Deeper Understanding is out now on Atlantic. The War on Drugs play Glasgow Barrowland, 9 and 10 November, then tour.
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