I thought at first it was a throwaway, but, like that line about Chicago, it’s a really real thing. “Actually, it was only six times, but each one was with someone special, a very significant person in my life. “I was sitting there, zoning out, free-associating, thinking about all the people I’d seen Bob Dylan with,” he recalls. While the War on Drugs’ songs lyrically can get “Lost in the Dream,” there are moments of specificity on the new album – the reference to being alone in Chicago pining for connection in “Living Proof,” or the nod to dancing with a loved on to Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” in the title track - that ground the record in the here and now. It’s about accepting your own faults, realizing you’re never going to be perfect, and just continuing to learn and improve every step of the way, sticking to a moral code, an ethic, maintaining your principles.” “It’s also about the idea of commitment and understanding, knowing where you don’t want to end up,” he explains. The title track is the album’s centerpiece, as Granduciel confronts his own evolution and maturation as a human being, as well as his own shortcomings. Being a dad grounds you… It’s all a blur, but it’s the best kind of blur.” Just seeing my kid growing up, I knew I wanted to sing about being a dad, having a son, understanding what it feels like. Sometimes that’s all you need in that moment when you’re not thinking, the lines just fall out of you. I free-associated the lyrics on tape to guide everyone. I just started strumming and everybody fell in. “We were at Electric Lady with the band, sitting around in a big circle. “I had that title for a few years,” says Adam. “Rings Around My Father’s Eyes” finds Granduciel confronting parenthood from the perspective of being both a dad and a son. There are also songs about parenthood, including “Old Skin,” a very Bruce Springsteen-like meditation on aging that features a cathartic Charlie Hall drum beat, Daniel Clarke’s Hammond organ, a Granduciel harp solo and a riff coaxed by Adam from the late Walter Becker’s Pelham blue Gibson Melody Maker bass, which he bought in an auction after the Steely Dan member’s death. It doesn’t come naturally all the time, figuring out where those parts should go.”
Granduciel says, “It’s almost like I build up the songs with all these different sounds, so that I can react to it with a guitar solo. “I’m in a rolling wave / That moves across the line / Am I losing my faith? / We’re gonna lose it in time / Sometimes forward is the only way back / To reach the hill in time.” “Harmonia’s Dream” returns to several Granduciel obsessions, including the tyranny of memories, and the power of water in the guise of the ocean to grant or take away life, with an existential longing for a higher power. When Shawn and I were finally in one room, with our hands on the faders, making decisions and committing to an idea, the songs really started to take shape.” “The inability to get in the same room together, the fear and confusion everyone was feeling.
“So much came out of those six months,” he says. Granduciel re-worked several of the tracks at legendary studios like Electric Lady in New York, as well as Sound City in Van Nuys (recording in Studio B, where Neil Young laid down “After the Gold Rush”) and the recently shuttered Electro Vox Recording Studios on Melrose Avenue across from Paramount Studios.
Stylistically, pianos and synths take a prominence over his traditional emotive guitar solos, which are now more ingrained into the individual song’s melodies, as the rest of the band fills in the tapestry. “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” marks several changes for the now 42-year-old Granduciel, with a two-and-a-half-year-old son and a solid domestic partnership. “Banging on a drum / You turned me loose / Maybe I’m the living proof / What have I been running from?” wonders Granduciel, opening with a primal beat and closing with the admission, “I’m always changing / Love overflowing / But I’m rising / And I’m damaged.” The opening “Living Proof” sets the template with acoustic strumming and piano, leaving until the end a wrenching, electric Granduciel guitar solo.
He’s explaining how the band tried unsuccessfully to communicate via email, forcing him to “work alone in my house, trying to make sense of these songs, getting frustrated with a few of the ones we worked on before the pandemic.” “So much of this album came from working during that time, both lyrically and with Shawn ,” says Granduciel, talking over Zoom in a parked car somewhere in his adopted home of Los Angeles. Even though much of the material for the new “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” was written and recorded before COVID-19, it’s hard not to hear the album through the prism of the pandemic, with its themes of moving forward, embracing and dreading change, and the importance of friends, family and co-workers.
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