The War On Drugs have returned with their fifth studio record, and Mac Wilson caught up with frontman Adam Granduciel about the locations he associates with writing the record, getting the band back together after 20 months apart, and how fatherhood has affected his creative process.

Interview Transcript

Edited for clarity and length.

MAC WILSON: Hello, I'm Mac Wilson from The Current and I am privileged to be welcoming Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs. Hello Adam.

ADAM GRANDUCIEL: How's it going?

One of the first things that popped in my mind is you mentioned a moment ago that you're in Austin right now, and on the cover of the new record, "I Don't Live Here Anymore" you're standing in the snow, and it came up in my Facebook memories that one year ago we got to blizzard here in Minnesota. I was literally out standing in the snow, it brought things full circle.

I'm sure that wasn't the only blizzard you had last year, right?

It was not, but it was one of those things where it's like, wow, things finally just took a turn for the fall here, and the wintry image--once you actually take a look closer, you've got your coffee. Is that coffee on the cover of the record?

Yeah, the coffee would probably have been, well, we were basically staying in this Airbnb or like this house 100 feet from the studio. So myself, Dave, and Anthony--we'd wake up, we'd make probably like two french presses and then walk 100 feet over to the studio. So that coffee is was probably a Central American, South American because it's lower acidity, less fruity. More earthy. It's probably what we were cupping in the morning, as they'd say. But now we'd be cupping John's because John, our sax player, now he's roasting his own beans. So he's roasting Ethiopian. He's roasting Peruvian. It's amazing. He's really dialed in.

Can we look forward to a War On Drugs branded coffee anytime soon?

You'll have to talk to Jon Natchez, we've been trying to get him to commit, but he's saying his new rule is "no roasting on the road". But we will try to get him. We'd like to do a coffee. That's all we basically talked about and do is drink coffee and talk about it. So it would make sense for us to do that.

I want to take a look back to the to the live album that you put out last winter as well, because the last time that you and I chatted was at a MicroShow that you did for The Current back in August of 2017, and it was right at the same time--

At the Turf Club!

Yeah, at the Turf Club, exactly.

Legendary show for us within the group, we've never received--that was like, the whole afternoon. It was like 300 people there, whatever it was like, it was amazing. It was like we still talk about that show.

I'm really impressed that you remember, it's one of those things where I'm like, "Well, there's no way that Adam will remember that," it was a wonderful memory for all of us who were there in the audience. So I'm glad that it had an impact for you as well.

Oh, yeah, of course.

And you're coming back to town playing at the Palace Theatre here in St. Paul, for two shows later on in the winter, you've got a lot of shows lined up. So I'm curious, when I listened to "Live Drugs," that was an instance where you basically took the best parts of a whole bunch of live shows and put them together. I don't want to say that it was necessarily influenced by the pandemic going on. But when you listen to "Live Drugs," sort of in your mind like, "Well, in the event that I never get to go to a live show ever again, The War On Drugs gave us the best imaginable live album to remember what live shows were like." When you hit the road in a couple of weeks and months, do you plan on meticulously choreographing things as you would like when you put it together with "Live Drugs"? Or are you going to try to be like, "Hey, we're just lucky to be playing live shows, wherever this takes us."

I think a little bit of both. I think we are like beyond excited to be out doing what we love to do. We basically didn't see each other for almost 20 months, and all the guys came out to LA for the first time in July and we rehearsed for about 10 days. We hadn't played any of the new stuff on the new record in-person at all, and after that week it was really exciting, just the level to which the songs were starting to take shape. And then they were just out again at the end of September for another week of rehearsals. We've never rehearsed this much ever, I think because the record's--it's not more complicated, but we just need more time to figure out how to do some of it, you know? We wanted to change the way we use some of the technology on stage. So I think it's a little bit of both, we're gonna be really prepared and inside the music. "Live Drugs" is a result of three and a half, four years, five years of being in a band together on the road making albums together. It felt like putting that record out in putting like an exclamation point after some of those songs, and some of the ways that we had let those songs evolve, kind of let us open up this cycle and think of a new way to approach our show. So I don't think everything's going to be that significantly different. But I think we're just psyched to get out there and get inside the songs and rip it up, rip it up for two nights in St. Paul.

It's almost comforting to me, when you say that you're still wrapping your head around how you're going to play the new record, because I'm still wrapping my head around the best way of listening to the new record because The War On Drugs, they're on a very short list for me, where, for one thing, every record has its own place, like a very specific sense of place of where I was in my life, physically and mentally when that album came out. I already know in advance that this is not one that I want to listen to hunched over my laptop at the kitchen table or listen on my phone at 11 o'clock at night. I really have to set myself up in the right place to listen to this record. So do you already have a similar sense of place--like when you're thinking back to the way that you recorded it, do you think of a particular time and place?

Time and place for this record? Well, I do think of a lot of the places that the songs were crafted, like when myself, Dave, and Anthony went up to upstate New York, and we demoed for a week in early 2018. I remember walking around Singapore, and singing the chorus to our song, "I Don't Want To Wait". It's rare that I start with a melody and a lyric, but I just kept singing it over, and I had the whole chorus mapped out and I'd sing it to my phone. I remember when I was living in Brooklyn for most of 2018, walking across McCarren Park from our apartment and renting out Studio G in Brooklyn, which is where I did a lot of demoing and writing for like a whole year. So I remember all these little places, and then a week at Electric Lady with the band when we finally kicked off recording it for real, and working at Sound City with Shawn for three weeks in late 2020, which is like the first time we were back together in person since March of that year. That's kind of when the record took on a whole new form. So yeah, I have like all these little places and anecdotes of the record in places where I feel like things changed, like, when it went into a great direction.

When you said that the record took on a different form in March of 2020, everybody is gonna hear March 2020, and think exactly one thing, but I'm almost gathering at the same time that this is a record that's been in the works for a long time. So we should not necessarily think of this as a pandemic record, more like one that, "Oh, yeah, this happened on Earth at the same times," but War On Drugs albums, these kind of live in their own time, anyway, that's kind of what I'm gathering from this.

Yeah, we started it way before. But yeah, basically, we were working on it, then everything shut down, and then me and Shawn didn't get together for seven months. We were trying to do stuff on email, which isn't really a real way to make music. And then when we were finally in the room together, in October of 2020, it was just like, all those frustrations and anxieties about where the record was headed--and you can finally be in the room with your producer and put your hands on the console together and make big changes and eally get inside stuff and do all the things that you couldn't do on a text chain about mixing or whatever. That's when I think we finally got to dive back into it. But we're just happy to have been able to make it--to continue to make it through everything.

Adam I was reading the the piece in Vanity Fair, where they began with the anecdote where up until the last second, you're working on turns of phrases to record for the record, and for an outside observer that seems like a stressful thing to be observing. That reminds me of the way that U2 make albums, where U2 they'll be given an ultimatum like, "Hey, you have three hours until the masters are due and The Edge will be like okay, that's two hours and 55 minutes for me to overdub guitar tracks." And that's just the way that they work. Is it as stressful for you to do that, or is that just part of your workflow?

I think at this point, it's part of the workflow. I mean, it's stressful, in the sense that I know that day is coming, where like, I'm going to have to tidy up all these little pockets of songs where I know they're not right or real, you know? Whether it's like, a musical passage, or whether it's a lyric that Shawn assumes is probably totally fine, and in my mind, I'm like, "Oh, I'm definitely gonna rethink that entire back half of the song," or something. But it's just part of the process, you know? Also, you do it enough, and it helps you prepare for the next time, so that you're more prepared when you're writing and also it's part of the process to the point where it doesn't stress me out that much, because I know that it's time. You just give it time to simmer, and it'll make sense when it needs to.

Adam, one of the big life changes that you've had over the last few years is that you became a father, and if there's one thing that we know about parenthood is that you only have so much control about what's going on in your life because your kids…things kind of happen on their schedule. So I'm curious what the relationship is then between your personal life and professional, in that when you're back in the studio now, do you have the sense like, "Well, back in the real world, I know that I can't control this, I should loosen up a bit." Or are you like, "Okay, this is the one place on earth where I can get things exactly right the way that I want them," how would you say then that that has influenced the way that you work?

That's interesting. Yeah, I feel like I don't think about it like that. I think it's more like when I am in the studio, there is that focus, because you know that when you go home, you're not gonna be able to go home, and tinker with the idea. Like, if I have a couple synth ideas or something, or a mix idea, when I'm with Shawn, that's the time to do it. Because when I go home, I'm not really going to have a million hours to sit in my studio and keep fidgeting. So there's definitely a heightened focus, and Shawn was also a new dad so we both kind of had that thing. I think when we were working we just tried to make the most out of the time. But also, yeah, when I'm home with my kid, I mean, he loves hanging out in my little music room, and playing synths and patching stuff in. So when I'm with Sean, it's almost like...it's not a chore, obviously, it's like I'm experiencing the curiosity of music at home with him. Then I go to the studio, and it reminds me to also be curious, and also have fun. It's not just work, you know what I mean?

I have one more question before I let you go, Adam—appearing on the new record is Lucius.

Yeah!

We've been longtime fans of Lucius at The Current since they started releasing music. We've had them play at various shows. We've collaborated with them a lot, and yet, when you go to their page, and you read about the sheer number of artists that they have worked with, you're like, "Oh, wow, I actually never knew that they performed on that song," for example, and it's just one example of that after the other. So how far back does your relationship with Lucius go, and how did you get them to be exactly the perfect fit for the title track on the new record?

Yeah, they make their records with Shawn as well. So I think it was on the last record, I knew them just from being in touch with modern music, like, I was aware of them. But on the last album, Shawn had recommended that they come over to put some background vocals on something. On that record, I wasn't so interested in backing vocals yet, but anyway, they came over and they sang on that song "Pain". And it was really amazing to watch them because they just like have this thing between the two of them where they just look at each other. And they both know exactly what the first pass is. And then what they're going to do to on top of that, and so this time around, and we became friends from the last record and we stayed in touch obviously, and this time, I had an idea for some backing vocals. It wasn't necessarily what we ended up doing, but we had them come over and on I don't live here anymore. They were just laying down like some pads first. Really beautiful like, they sound like synthesizers and then They did those, like the, like the big Ooh, who's kind of in the choruses. And then towards the end, I think we were gonna pack it up. And I was like, You know what, because I hadn't done my vocal yet there was no vocals on there was just music. And I was like, You know what I was like, I haven't done my vocal. But I do feel like these two lines of the lyrics I'm gonna sing. I was like, so why don't you sing it like this, like, not like this, but like, here's like my phrasing. And then, if I have to, if I change the lyrics, it'll be it will recut it, but it might, this is what I think I might sing. They sang those two lines in the chorus, and it sounded so huge. And like a month later, when I went to sing my, my part in the studio, and I think those lines, and they came up behind me and their vocals were in there. It was like, an amazing feeling. Because it's like you're singing with them in the room. I mean, it's like, they are just really special. And it's like, watching them work together is really amazing. And then obviously, just, I mean, how it's crazy how good they are. And they just have so much musicality, it's really fun. I'm really happy that they, you know, and it's not something that anybody could sing. It's not just the presence of a female vocal on that. That's really, really amazing singing so yeah, we were really, really happy about it. I wish there was a couple more we could have done that on. Yeah.

Thank you for taking the time out of your schedule today to chat with us about the new record, and congratulations to you and The War On Drugs.

Thank you Mac.