With 2014's Lost in the Dream, The War on Drugs have made it onto most people's playlists. Frontman and producer extraordinaire Adam Granduciel was kind enough to take a break from touring to discuss the unique making of the record, as well as some of his production philosophies.
Talk about your roots as an engineer/ producer. Was there a particular point where you thought, "Hey, this is really cool. I want to do this."
Probably around 2000. I got a BOSS BR-8 digital recorder that ran off of Zip disks and mixed out on a MiniDisc. Before that I was playing a song into a tape recorder and then playing it back and recording to that, but not overdubbing. But when I started to get into multitracking, that's when I started to see my writing get exponentially better. The obsession grew. Instead of just using a drum machine, I was starting to get into situations like, "I can only use one track for drums, so where am I going to put the [Shure SM]58? Put it right between the snare and kick?" [laughs] Through the BR-8 I was learning about compression and at first I really didn't know what it meant, so I just turned it all the way up; everything would get louder and blown out. I was like, "This is fucking great!" [laughs] Slowly I learned what it was doing. I had that BR-8 for about seven years. Around 2007, when [the record label] Secretly Canadian committed to my first record, I bought a [Tascam] MS-16 1-inch [tape deck] and a Tascam 24-channel board. That was a new kind of way of engineering for me. Learning about aux sends and feeding shit back through them, slowing the tape down, sampling off tape. It was a place where I had my own little zone, with a few Memory Man pedals and pieces of gear. By doing that all the time I started getting better at recording guitars, and I started reading about engineering and rock mythology. Like, "Oh, on 'Born to Run' they threw a 12-string guitar into a dbx [compressor]. Let's do that!"
Given the '80s rock influences in your writing — Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty — did you find yourself learning about the making of all of those records?
Not really. Before I started this record, I was in a guitar store outside of Philly called the Guitar Barn, and they had this MXR Pitch Transposer. You can see pictures of Phil Collins in the studio with a whole rack of these things, but I never knew what they were. It came with the meter display, which is pretty rare. I would usually start everything at home on the 1-inch: drum machine, guitars — usually through my [Fender] Champ or my Traynor amps — and synths or Rhodes. Really anything I could do that would set the mood of whatever idea I was working on. Jeff Zeigler, my engineer, had the same 1-inch machine, so I'd give him all of the tapes to transfer into Pro Tools. But I had this piano riff for this one song, and I was like, "Let's hook up that Pitch Transposer." We had its mono output into a stereo [Vox] Time Machine delay, and all of a sudden that became — in some way — the sound of the record.
I gathered that this record wasn't made in the traditional sense of "band goes into a studio and knocks out ten songs over a handful of weeks." It was more of a long-term personal project. What was it like making a record that way?
