Les Nuits #2014: The War on Drugs

His pal Kurt Vile did something similar last year: push the bounderies of indierock and create a modern rock classic. On Lost in the Dream, the truly beautiful third album from his band The War on Drugs, Adam Granduciel fights confusion, alienation, and panic attacks with delicate guitars, wispy synths, and motorik grooves. “I wanted to touch people in a greater way.”

Adam Granduciel shows me his camera, an old Holga 120, held together by red tape. The rocker from Philadelphia always has a few cameras with him, with which he documents his life on the road. “That Holga is a bit decrepit, but that’s actually fun. Light gets in everywhere, which distorts the colours when they’re being developed. You never know what you’re going to get. I shot the cover for Slave Ambient, my last album, with it. It’s not easy to get films for it. I order them online and always take six or so with me. Sometimes I put them on my rider. [Laughs] In college I had a Polaroid, an SX-70 Land Camera. I worked a lot of different jobs and spent all my money on taking photographs. I have around 5,000 Polaroids, made during a five-, six-year period. I hope one day to scan them and print the best ones large.”

Granduciel – a nickname a French teacher in high school once gave him, a translation of his real name, Granofsky – studied painting; he names Richard Diebenkorn and Cézanne as sources of inspiration, as well as Pollock, Andy Warhol, and the sculptor and video artist Richard Serra. “For the same reason that I like Dylan, I love modernists, the idea that the artist is the one. Post-modernism is all about making fun of high art. But I like high art, I like Pollock going on this emotional journey, being a mess, but also being this great American painter. And I like the idea of the artist as a creator. When I was painting – don’t call me a painter, though, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here [laughs] – I loved scraping the canvas with a knife. I’d layer on thick blocks of colour and then I’d be creating textures. The motion, the act was very important. At that time I got into listening to Miles Davis for the first time, and Sgt. Pepper’s. That music became more and more important and eventually painting became an excuse to be able to put on records.”

Lost in the Dream is Granduciel’s third record with The War on Drugs: an album on which he paints splendid landscapes in sound with metronomic drum patterns, delicate guitars, and rootless ambient sounds. Out of which emerge Bruce Springsteen-style, epic rock songs with a dash of Dylan, Petty, Young... and the krautrock of Neu! “Roy Orbison was the first to make an impression on me. I didn’t get into Dylan until I was in my early twenties, when I went through my first break-up. That’s when I finally understood Blood on the Tracks. I didn’t listen to a lot of music last year, but John Lennon’s Mind Games was definitely there. And I got into Bill Fay; his Time of the Last Persecution is very intense. I like the basic arrangements of that record – piano, drums, bass, and guitar.”

There is a more spatial dimension to Granduciel’s own music now too. “I still play with textures, but I no longer wanted to fill every little nook and cranny with sound. People often refer to krautrock, but actually I don’t have any special interest in it. I just don’t like too much variation within a single song, like big fills in choruses; I don’t like heavy drum dynamics. It has to stay tight.” That thundering tightness invites you to race along endless American highways. “I drive around in a big van. I listen to demos and mixes when I drive in it. Usually just around Philadelphia, often during the night. The Velvet Underground or Spacemen 3, the second 13^th Floor Elevators record, Sticky Fingers – those are pretty wild records for driving. I enjoy including my album in that sequence.” [Smiles]

Amid the epic songs, “Eyes to the Wind” sticks out. “I still remember exactly when I wrote that number: 7 February 2013. It was a week before my birthday, which is on the 15^th, and on the 16^th I had my first panic attack, that lasted the rest of the year. I can’t believe I wrote that song. I woke up in the morning and wrote the music in one sitting, picked up my guitar, and started playing it. I’d been playing that E minor-F-G chorus thing for years, and now it finally made sense.”

What caused those panic attacks? “I don’t know. There were a lot of changes in my life. After two and a half years of touring, it felt strange to be all alone at home. I had broken up with my girlfriend; there was no stability. I didn’t have to go to work every morning. I became very enclosed; my world started to get very small. I wouldn’t leave my house, I wasn’t going out. The good thing was that I quit drinking, because I wasn’t in the mood to party. [Laughs] I was thinking too much. Every little headache I’d have was spiralling into paranoia and hypochondria. That’s why it took me so long to finish the record. The mixing was the worst part, that’s when I really lost it. I was a wreck. The weird thing was, I was anxious to cross the street, to take a plane, but not to perform in front of 10,000 people.”

Granduciel decided to use his personal vicissitudes to his advantage. “I was trying to figure out how I wanted to connect with people on a bigger level. This is my most personal record, and that is what I wanted it to be. We toured around the world with the last record, but still I felt people didn’t really connect with the songs. I was always obsessed with artists who brought their lives out on tape. I didn’t want to be just some trippy rock band: I wanted to touch people in a greater way.”

The War on Drugs • 25/5, 19.30, SOLD OUT!, Rotonde, www.botanique.be