VANITY FAIR: CAN THE WAR ON DRUGS FIND PEACE AT LAST?

"One of the last things Adam Granduciel does before finishing an album is rewrite any lyrics that, as he puts it during a recent Zoom interview, might 'make you gag.'

The singer, guitarist, and songwriter behind the War on Drugs first began working on his upcoming release, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, at the beginning of 2018. He estimates that his band put in roughly 20 multiday studio sessions, and that’s not counting the time he spent alone with producer and engineer Shawn Everett, 'just sitting at Sound City for four weeks with masks on, going crazy, having fun.' Everett, for his part, says he devoted thousands of hours to the album.

But not until the final week before mastering did Granduciel go through all 10 songs in search of bits of lyrics that felt off. Whenever he caught one, he’d have Everett loop that section of the track while Granduciel listened through headphones, racking his brain for something better. 'We’ll do this for an hour for one five-second area,' Granduciel says. 'And he’s probably just going insane, but I feel like every time I end up getting something that’s kind of like the crux of the song.'

Case in point: While obsessing over the album’s third track, 'Change,' Granduciel hit upon the lyric, 'But it’s so damn hard to make the change.' 'Before that it was just some line about raining and nighttime,' he says. Now it’s a prism for understanding the whole album, which, he says, is all about 'growing up, getting older, but also growing out of yourself and into something new. The end of something, the beginning of something else.'”

Read the full article by Michael Hogan HERE.