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The War on Drugs: Live Evolution

Band leader Adam Granduciel reflects on his band's humble beginnings as they release their second live album, Live Drugs Again.

by Stephen Smysnuik

Photo by Dominic East

The first time I ever spoke with The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel was at a tiny show at Zulu Records in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. It was a tiny gig, maybe 30 people, many of us watching from a second floor balcony, as the band – then a four-piece – worked its way through a short set made up almost entirely of cuts from its then-current album, 2011’s Slave Ambient. 

Granduciel remembers the gig well. His buddy Nick Bragg (Destroyer) worked at Zulu and set the gig up. He remembers the band didn’t sound their best either, with the nuances of their more ethereal elements lost in a daylit room without adequate acoustics.

And yet, for a notorious perfectionist, the roughness of the gig pales in comparison to its relevance to him now. Those were the scrappy, early days, as the band laid out roots and bonded with fans (myself included). He thinks back on it all with true affection. 

“I’m really proud that that’s how we cut our teeth,” Granduciel says, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “Touring around North America, pouring into a car, and then moving to a minivan, and then moving into a van, and, you know, driving from Vancouver to Saskatoon. We have amazing memories of doing that, and we’re proud that that’s how we came up.”

 

Photo by Charlie Hardy

 

Granduciel’s band today is far removed from that afternoon, 13 years ago. Today, they’re a major-label seven-piece behemoth with mass critical appeal, now co-headlining an arena tour with fellow indie stalwarts the National. 

In the lead-up to that tour, TWOD is releasing its second live album on Sept. 13, simply named Live Drugs Again. Here, the band’s evolution into a face-melting, Heartland-rock-adjacent powerhouse is on full display, featuring tracks from across the band’s career. Highlights from the band’s latest studio album, 2021’s I Don’t Live Here Anymore, serve as the album’s focal point. That album’s two greatest songs, “Harmonia’s Dream” and “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” bookend the album.

But it’s the inclusion of “Come to the City,” the kick-off single from Slave Ambient, that best showcases the band’s evolution, and in some ways, Granduciel’s vision for TWOD as a live act. 

“You know, it’s funny with ‘Come to the City.’ Twelve years [after it was released] in the middle of our last tour somewhere, Dave [Hartley, TWOD’s bassist] had an aha moment on that song,” Granduciel says.

“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 kid. 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.”