“Songs are like a continually changing sort of thing. You might play it for 10 years, but it’s tonight where you’re like, ‘Oh, I finally just realized what it should do.’ It’s a constantly evolving thing, where songs start in the studio as a sketch, like a finely tuned demo, and then you spend the rest of your life performing it and letting it take on a new identity. If you’re open to that being the case, the songs are always going to be different.”

That’s some Grateful Dead shit, I say.

“Exactly! If you’re open to that being the case, the songs are always going to be different,” Granduciel confirms.

But one area where his vision for the band strays from the Dead is how to present the live material. There will likely never be an archival dump of soundboard recordings, and Granduciel’s perfectionism isn’t limited to the band’s studio work. On Live Drugs Again, the live cuts are cleaned up, tightened and tweaked, often spliced together from other recordings. “Under the Pressure,” a highlight from 2014’s breakthrough album Lost in the Dream, is stitched together from six different live recordings of the song.

“Let’s be honest – the way this record sounds, that’s not what it sounds coming off the soundboard,” he says. “We definitely made this to represent, like, the ultimate live version of this band.” 

Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

The album drops on the heels of the release of the band’s cover of Tom Petty’s “You Wreck Me,” which Granduciel says was “basically my favourite fucking song when I was a kid,” for the Bad Monkey soundtrack. To parallel the song’s lyrics, he was the boy in the corduroy pants all through high school, he says – he never wore a pair of jeans until he was in his twenties. It makes sense that the song would serve as a theme song to Granduciel’s origin story, with TWOD being soaked in Petty’s influence. A more perfect pairing of source material to cover artist may not actually exist in the year 2024.

Despite this, it might also be the only studio recording we’ll see from the band for the foreseeable future. When asked how progress is going on a new album, Granduciel says he’s still figuring out where it’s going to go. He has a warehouse in LA where he plans to record it all himself, as a “hybrid home recording slash polished hi-fi” kind of thing. 

“I’m trying to hone in, I think, on something that feels real in a way that makes sense to me,” he says. “I’m interested in doing something a little different than the last two [I Don’t Live Here Anymore and 2017’s A Deeper Understanding]. I didn’t necessarily enjoy making those two for some reason. It was fine, but the next one I want to make in a different way. I just want to be a little different.”

These days, while not on tour, he says he’s happiest at home with his kids. Whatever comes next, patience may be required. “I’ll get there, because I love doing it, but I don’t want to force anything,” Granduciel says. “That’s when you start playing catch up and maybe making stuff you don’t like. And I don’t want to do that.”