It is of course a myth that a musician always writes the best songs when he is completely down. But one that has often turned out to be true in pop history. Take, for example, Adam Granduciel, front man of The war on drugs. “Lost in the Dream”, the album that brought his band to unexpected success in 2014, was written by the American at a time when he had largely isolated himself from the world – and gave himself over to his panic attacks.
The fact that the album was at least a small masterpiece probably has the same origins as Granduciel’s depression: He is an almost obsessive perfectionist. He reconsidered and questioned almost every sound, discarded a lot, rearranged some things, combined most of them anew – until everything was finally put together to create these dreamlike soundscapes. He’s also a control freak, of course: The band actually consists of six members. Granduciel always retained sole control over his vision.
On “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” (Warner Music), the new studio album, it is still similar to the breakthrough: The arrangements are obsessed with detail, the synthesizers continue to shimmer and sparkle from the eighties. The melodic guitar solos groan and moan as if Neil Young personally choked out them, and the hymn-like choruses are reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan also stops by for the text for the title track.
Granduciel built several references to the work of the Nobel Prize winner in it. He also imitates its unmistakable word stresses – and quite well. “Like when we went to see Bob Dylan, we danced to ‘Desolation Row’,” he sings, rattling, nasalizing. In “Old Skin” a harmonica appears, a matter of honor. Just thought out loud: Maybe Dylan would have sounded like this in the early eighties if he had been a little less obsessed with God – and a little more with music?
I never knew where to go – that has changed
Still, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” is more than just an homage. It’s a lovingly curated collection of catchy rock songs that above all: makes you happy. That doesn’t go well with the myth of the suffering artist, but it suits Granduciel well. Just like the new directness of his songs. This time he has reduced his preference for long intros and mostly even longer outros (for his standards). This makes the album more compact, more inviting. When he sings lines like “I’m gonna make it to the place I need to go”, he also sounds almost optimistic. And accessible.
The spontaneity that runs through the record no longer sounds like someone isolated alone in the studio, but rather like a band that finally wants to play in front of people again. The voice of Granduciel is also more clearly in the foreground, so that, unlike in the past, you can mostly understand him when he tells in the song “Rings Around My Father’s Eyes” how the birth of his son changed him: “I’ve never really known which way I’m facing / But I feel like something’s changed “.
By the way, he called his son Bruce.