Granduciel’s disbelief in his own achievements is an endearing trait in the face of the near universal acclaim that ‘Lost In A Dream’ has generated. “I couldn’t rely on an income from music until maybe two years ago, so I guess it still feels like kind of a surprise,” he says. “Before then I had a bunch of jobs, but my favourite was in a carpet store, where they manufactured, imported and sold rugs. I worked in wholesale and I think I was pretty good at it, I was just this kid who chained smoked and sat on the phone all day; it was me and these two women who’d worked there for fifteen years and were always bickering.”
Granduciel talks highly of his past employer and his commitment, not only to the sale of rugs, but to the high quality of the product. It’s clear that it’s the kind of integrity to the creative process – be it making a rug or making an album – that he admires. “Oh no, I’m never going back,” he laughs when I ask if he liked the job enough to return to it one day.
Born Adam Granofsky, Granduciel grew up in Dover, a small town 40 minutes southwest of Boston; a place where by his own reckoning there was “literally nothing going on.” The middle child of three, he found his own way into music rather than through his parents or siblings. “My dad is 20 years older than my mom,” he says, “so he was into classical music, and big band Jazz. Frank Sinatra was probably too renegade for him and free jazz was just hippy shit.
“My mom was a child of the ’60s, so she listened to Roy Orbison and George Harrison. I remember when I was a teenager I uncovered her record collection at my grandmother’s house and was like, ‘Ooooh shit, this is where all the good stuff is!’ And for a while, I felt weird, cause I would always meet other musicians who’d had this musical inheritance ingrained in them from their family and I’d think, maybe there was something wrong with me, maybe I’m not supposed to do this because it doesn’t come naturally or it’s not in my blood or something. But I’ve learned that it doesn’t have to be that way.” He pauses for a beat. “I mean, maybe my Mom and dad had it too, but they just never tapped into it, right?”
Granduciel didn’t go straight into music after leaving home and instead took the path to college, he says, at request of his father – a man who was big on education. He studied art history and fine art, with a love for painting but without the patience for it. “I wanted to step straight into the role of the tortured artist,” he says, “but y’know, you can’t just start weird, you have to have technique and form before you can get weird. It’s like music too – there’s still a lot of techniques I could get better at but I don’t mind the journey, unlike painting where I lacked the discipline. It all worked out, because what I was studying has influenced the way I work now, and I try to approach music the way some of my favourite Modernist painters did, by throwing a bunch of paint on a canvas to get a really big wash of colour, then scraping away at it until they had something that worked.”
After graduating, Granduciel went to California and started to actively pursue a career in music in between waiting tables. A restless couple of years followed, before he was ready to move on again, this time to Philadelphia, the place that – a decade on – he still calls home. And while this move wasn’t prompted by education or adventure (it was for a girl), it saw him fall in with Philly’s burgeoning music scene. “I hadn’t grown up in a place where music was a career option. I mean, aside from listening to music and going to shows, no-one I knew was doing it. Even kids at high school who were super serious about music ended up going to college and getting real jobs; it was never something they would pursue for a living. But in Philly I’d go to local pubs like The Kyber and see my friend’s band playing and they’d sold out the hundred capacity venue, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I would think, these guys are going to be huge, and of course they weren’t, but on a Friday night, in that bar, in that town, everyone thought they were fucking awesome. And later I’d see them around town and be sort of intimidated by these guys in these tiny rock bands, because there’s wasn’t a world I’d come from”.
It may not have been a place that felt natural to Granduciel but, after a chance meeting with Kurt Vile, the pair began what was to become a long time collaborative friendship, and the genesis of The War On Drugs. The pair formed the group’s first incarnation in 2005, when they self-released a debut EP.
‘Lost In A Dream’ is a stunning album by any normal standards; swirling guitars and densely packed layers of synth jammed into ten of the most cinematic, straight-up guitar songs you’ll hear all year. It feels like the next evolution for The War On Drugs; if ‘Wagonwheel Blues’ – written in collaboration with Vile – set up their humble beginnings, and ‘Slave Ambient’ – Granduciel’s first album working alone – applied its focus on crafting dense soundscapes, then this is the first LP in his catalogue to feel like it has a genuine authorial stamp. It’s something Granduciel intended.
“At the time, ‘Slave Ambient’ was the most experimental record I could conceive, just because how it was done and the amount of time it took, but you can only do something that way once. So for ‘Lost In A Dream’ I wanted to step out as a writer instead of just a front man of an indie rock band and make a record that might change and evolve over time. I wanted to see if I could write songs that could stand alone and didn’t need to be locked into sounds and samples.
