Interview Clean Living: The War on Drugs

Depending on how sunny your outlook is, you’d imagine that the opening stages of the making of The War on Drugs’ fourth album would have either been imbued with the sort of confidence that genuine success brings or fraught with the knowledge that a particularly challenging mountain needed to be climbed all over again. After all, ‘Lost in the Dream’, the band’s 2014 breakthrough LP, was a resounding critical and commercial triumph, troubling many an end-of-year list and being certified gold here in the UK. As was well-documented, though, the process of making it was a thoroughly turbulent one, a stop-start affair over the course of two years in Adam Granduciel’s adopted hometown of Philadelphia that saw the frontman grapple constantly with depression and anxiety.

By the time he got to work on ‘A Deeper Understanding’, the casual observer would have assumed he was on top of the world; he’d just wrapped up an extensive world tour that largely involved not half-full clubs but packed-out theatres, and he decamped not to Philadelphia but to Los Angeles, in order to live with his famous girlfriend. “It’s easy to look back on the making of a record and say that there’s always ups and downs,” he explains over the phone from a tour stop in Minneapolis. “But nothing about the reception to ‘Lost in the Dream’ meant I felt any more confident in my abilities. You still have all the same questions - have I gone too far? Why am I fucking with this? What am I searching for at the end of this rainbow?”

At the very least, though, what Granduciel was afforded was the ability to rent out his own studio space, which he could kit out to his own needs, and duly avoid the sort of procrastination and delay that drew out the sessions for the last album. Instead, he’d log some serious hours in the proverbial office, both alone in the initial stages and then - later - with his bandmates, who would fly out from Philadelphia for a week at a time. In recalling that time, Granduciel invokes one of his heroes, Neil Young.

“There was a part of me thinking about ‘Tonight’s the Night’,” he laughs, “that thing of the guys alone in the hangout room recording it. We kind of did that in a way, but more in the conceiving of the songs. When the guys came out to LA, it felt significant, because they’d all taken flights and found places to stay, so for six or seven days, we’d be working thirteen or fourteen hours a day. And, you know, having fun too; jamming, listening to demos, listening to records, ordering dinner and drinking beer. But it was all a part of the main goal to work on new songs, and ultimately the record. Living in LA made that kind of working lifestyle possible, because it wasn’t a drag for the guys to come out here; it was excuse for them to enjoy the sun, drive into the mountains, have a great time.”