Adam Granduciel couldn’t stop staring at speakers. Working on the follow-up to 2014’s big breakthrough Lost in the Dream for the last year and a half, the War on Drugs’ perfectionist leader had gotten to the point where he was watching the vibrations to check if the levels were right. “Did I go back and forth thinking that the kick drum’s too loud?” he cheerfully admits. “Maybe. Did I not sleep for a week? Maybe.”
In late April, the Philly band shared its first piece of new music in three years, the 11-minute headphone opus “Thinking of a Place.” The group also revealed a batch of new fall tour dates that will take them across the United States and Europe until Thanksgiving. Details are still scarce pending an official album announcement, but Granduciel confirms the new project will be “gooey, punchy, thick, big-sounding”—”a little different than some of the records we've made in the past, but the same general feeling in the music.” He also promises plenty of vibraphone, Mellotron, and a heavier bass presence, all with more of a live-room feel, and a little bit more Wurlitzer and piano. Expect “Thinking of a Place” to be the the longest track on the record, but Granduciel acknowledges the others are typically all around six minutes or more.
Former War on Drugs member Kurt Vile won’t appear on this one, and Granduciel brushes off the notion of other high-profile guests, despite this being the band’s first release with major label Atlantic. But making most of the record in Los Angeles (and a little in New York), the thought of hiring ace session players like Jim Keltner or Jellyfish’s Roger Manning Jr. did cross Granduciel’s mind. “I kept thinking about an L.A. record and what that means,” he says. “To me, it means the second Warren Zevon record, but it could also mean Tonight’s the Night. Then I threw my hands in the air and just wanted to make a record with my friends, wherever that may be.”
Reached by phone earlier this week, Granduciel was walking around north Brooklyn on a sunny spring day, as birds chirped in the background. In a few hours he planned to head back to south Philadelphia to set up the band’s new warehouse space, for rehearsals and eventually recording. He spoke with Pitchfork about how “Thinking of a Place” was almost even longer, transitioning smoothly to a major label, and the increasing prominence of the real-life war on drugs.
Pitchfork: How did “Thinking of a Place” happen?
I ended up renting a studio in L.A. for about 15 months. Starting in January of 2016, some of the guys in the band were coming out once every five to six weeks for like five days a time. About five months into having the place I’d worked up “Thinking of a Place.”
One day Pro Tools crashed, and the guy I rented from had to replace the whole computer. But it was one of those weeks where—since inspiration can be so fleeting— I was excited because I just felt like something was going on and I wanted to keep working. So I had my one-inch [tape] machine there, which is the machine I used for eight years before, and I came up with “Thinking of a Place” very quickly that afternoon. It started with a drum machine and the synths that start the song. Over the next week or two, it took shape. I did a lot of it on Wurlitzers, and there’s some guitars, and then the band came.
In June [of 2016] is when we started working on some kind of record. We worked with my friend Shawn [Everett], who’s a great engineer/producer/mixer in L.A. I had a month with him, we set up at my studio, and the first night we all worked together we recorded “Thinking of a Place.” We spent the next eight months tweaking it a little bit, but for the most part it was—like it always has been—a demo overlaid with a live interpretation of the song.
It’s more than 11 minutes long.
The version we ended up recording was 14 minutes. The middle solo is a little longer. The first time our label representative from Atlantic came to the studio, I thought I was making him happy when I said that I’d edited “Thinking of a Place” down to 12 minutes. He was like, “Ah, man! I like the 14-minute version.” I was like, “All right! We’re with the right guy.”
Is there a certain place that you’re, um, thinking of, lyrically? You mention the Missouri River in the first verse.
That’s definitely the South Dakota area. I came across this super-picturesque riverfront trailer park named Little Bend and I can’t even remember why, but I became fascinated with the site, so I just started there. But I don’t know where I went after that. I was trying to continue a narrative, but it quickly devolved into collecting scraps of paper and putting it all together over six months.
You were talking about Atlantic. Was that a difficult decision to go to a major label?
It wasn’t really. I didn’t have that conversation with myself that maybe others think they should have had. At the end of the day I was just hoping that I’d have the ability to make the record the same way I was able to make it before. As long as that was out in the open, I was cool with it, you know?
Jimmy Iovine said the War on Drugs should be gigantic. What was your reaction when you heard that?
I just kind of chuckle at that stuff. The whole time we’ve been a band we’ve always felt really comfortable playing the size of the room that we might be playing at the time. Whether it’s opening for a band at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in 2006 to playing Radio City Music Hall, that felt normal. We’ve been playing so much for so long, we were kind of prepared for every level that we ended up at.
You covered the Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey” for a Red Hot benefit compilation, and you signed a guitar recently for Planned Parenthood. How important is it for artists to take a more political stance these days?
I feel like it’s important for anyone to take a stance. People, obviously for very good reasons, had their eyes opened. And when someone says, “We want to do something to benefit Planned Parenthood,” I’d love to sign a guitar. Should we have been signing guitars for the last 20 years? Maybe. But then you just have a moment where you’re like, “All right, now we need to buck up and start doing stuff.”
It seems like the actual war on drugs has been in the public eye more, like that book The New Jim Crow, or that Netflix documentary The 13th. How do you feel about the actual war on drugs?
Probably the same as I always have, which is: the name of the band doesn’t really have anything to do with my opinion of the war on drugs. Sometimes when I hear about it, from watching TV or something, I’ll kind of cringe. But obviously I’m not for the war on drugs. Even though it’s the name of my band.