The War on Drugs

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?

The advantages include being able to take one little idea and watch it expand, [as well as] taking things away and putting things in — constant revising. There's no sound in my head that I'm trying to capture; it's the whole process that excites me, from the first demo to mixing. In mixing you're like, "Mute all the drums," after hearing it all for a year, and then you're like, "Mute everything, except for those synths." All of a sudden there's this "Aha!" moment, but it still has all the elements that we've added to in the past year. Disadvantages to this process would be that without a deadline I'm not sure when I'd get to the point of making those final decisions, because that journey is so exciting to me. Because there is no distinct sound chasing, the song can always become something new.

Did you get to a point where you were thinking, "I don't know what I'm listening to anymore!"

Yeah, definitely. Towards the end, there were a few songs that I knew didn't feel right. There was one song, "An Ocean In Between the Waves" — we'd spent eight months working on a certain version of it. I started it at home and it was really sweet, and then over the course of nine months it started to get out of my hands. We mixed it, and everyone loved it, but it just didn't feel like me. It felt wrong. So we started over and re-recorded it in two and a half days. I kept the drums that we recorded at Echo Mountain Recording [Asheville, NC], as well as a few original guitars from my first recording, but other than that it was all redone. It was really satisfying, and the song ended up being a lot of people's favorite song on the record. I feel good that I made that decision, despite people saying, "You're crazy. This sounds great!"

When you were tracking, was there one particular signal chain or piece of gear that you kept coming back to?

When we were at Echo Mountain, they had a Sony C-37A [microphone] that I used on Slave Ambient [TWOD's previous album], and I remember the chain was a C-37A into an EMI sidecar and into a [Teletronix] LA-2A — it was so thick. I wanted to go back down there for that mic to do vocals. We started to do a shootout. They have a [vintage Telefunken Ela M] 251, and of course Jeff was like, "We have to try it!" So I put it up, and it was kinda bright. No one wants to say that it doesn't sound good. [laughs] "Is there a cable shorting out?" But I was like, "Let's just try that C-37A." We put it up, and all of a sudden it was great. Jeff was using the C- 37A into a [Neve] 1073, into a Manley Vari-Mu, into an SSL. Once we had that chain, we used it for all of the songs. For mixing, Nicolas [ Vernhes , Tape Op #20 ] had a Universal Audio 175 [compressor], and that was great.

After tracking, did you go back to your studio or Jeff's for comping and editing?

Yeah, we'd do a lot of comping at Jeff's, as well as a lot of editing of guitars and keyboards. There were only a few instances where I was taking the hard drive home. I wanted to have those moments were I could sit with a rough mix in my room, play along through my [Fender] Champ, and come up with little leads or work on lyrics. One weekend I got super inspired and I brought all my amps and all of my rack gear up to my bedroom, and I recorded for about four or five days straight. I rented a Royer 121, and my Champ sounded awesome. I did all of these guitars; it was super productive.

In your comping/writing process, how do you determine what's working and what needs to go?

If I did ten takes of guitar, I'd think, "Just let me do one more." Even if the sixth one was better, we'd always keep the last one I did for the rough. Like, "We'll comp them later," and you never end up comping.[laughs] In the moment I feel, "I can do better," but there's something about the sixth one that was cool, and there's something about the tenth one that's cool. It's really just about building it up, adding sweet tones, or using a pedal and getting some cool sounds out of it. I think part of it is always listening to rough mixes. The song is always there, but with different guitar sounds and textures. Lead guitars start to reveal themselves and become hooks. It's trusting your instincts and trusting the people that you choose to work with. We spent four or five months working on a piano part. And then one night at Mitch Easter's [ Tape Op #21 ] it was 2 a.m. and my pianist Robbie [Bennett] was playing the [Yamaha] C3 baby grand. I could tell he was having a good time. I said, "Let's do the piano part for 'Eyes To The Wind' right now." He did a third take and I said, "That's the one." We'd done 20 takes over five months, but that was the one. You can't always have someone playing your song and immediately have them playing what you want.

They're not you.

Yeah, and sometimes you don't even really know what it is. There's no way to explain music, really — it just feels like, "That was the one." It may have been because we'd all had a big dinner and some wine.

One great thing about Lost in the Dream is that there's this tight, punchy rhythm section, and then all of this space for vocals, reverbs, synths, and guitars. Was that something that came up in mixing, or was that something that you kept in mind throughout tracking?

That was something that Nicolas Vernhes did in mixing. He wasn't familiar with the band at all, but he wanted to make the best illusion possible that it was a band playing in a room. Even though we didn't play any of these songs live, and everything was done to a [Roland TR-]707 , he was able to focus the rhythm section into that tight sound of a band for a lot of these songs. It was great. It wasn't something that I had thought about, but you get caught up in the arrangement. "Should I have the drum machine in there and then fade to the real drums?" Nicolas was good at putting those things lower, letting them be subtle, and creating that illusion of bringing the vocals up a little closer, as well as hearing performances in the bass or the drums. I knew it was all there, but in the moment I just didn't know how all of these songs were going to connect together.

Capture that moment where you're the most confident in a song: when the idea is the most pure, and you're really excited about the song you have, or the sound you're working on. That magic comes through if it's a 58 plugged into an Mbox, or a 251 into an EMI channel.

If you were to go back to the outset of this record, or even past records, what's one thing you would tell yourself?

At the end of the day it's really about what comes out of the amp or the piano, instead of what it's going into. I'm going to buy a C-37A, but it doesn't really matter. Capture that moment where you're the most confident in a song: when the idea is the most pure, and you're really excited about the song you have, or the sound you're working on. That magic comes through if it's a [Shure SM]58 plugged into an Mbox, or a 251 into an EMI channel. It's those tiny things that make the song special. Following through on the idea, hearing it, and knowing it's right. You don't have to know what you're going for, but it's helpful to know what you like. Sometimes it's fun to spend an hour on a guitar sound and put a [Shure SM]57 up, just to get the initial idea. I think working quickly is nice, and there's no right or wrong; it's just confidence and believing in the art of recording. Why are you recording? It's to capture sound, but also to capture a moment. And that is just as important as the sound.