I still remember where I was when I first heard the “Woo!” that would change everything for the War On Drugs. In the waning days of 2013, I was spending part of the Christmas season out in Las Vegas. My girlfriend was driving us from the suburban sprawl of apartment complexes and outdoor malls to the Strip, down highways dusted with desert. I put on “Red Eyes,” the new War On Drugs song I couldn’t wait to hear. In some paradoxical way its grainy rush and ghostly atmospherics sounded beautiful against the perverse glitter of the casinos at sunset, but I figured it would also sound beautiful on a sun-dappled LA afternoon, and while barreling through the mountains in the Northwest. I was very far away from the Pennsylvanian home in which I’d first fallen in love with Adam Granduciel’s music, where I’d first heard something kindred in this weirdo Philly rock band. Granduciel was far away too, as if he’d emerged from festering clouds of Slave Ambient and located a whole new road to travel. He almost didn’t make it there.
Granduciel would soon spend an album cycle detailing a harrowing phase of upheaval in the years since Slave Ambient. Battling an early thirties onset of chronic anxiety and panic attacks, he made severe changes to his life: cutting out alcohol and weed, eating aggressively clean, ending a four-year relationship. He described time spent poring over new material and basically living as a recluse. Part of it was an identity crisis, Granduciel beset by questions of what he was doing with his life. Part of it was a sort of madman obsession with the new work he was trying to bring into the world. Ultimately, he made it out on the other side with the third War On Drugs album. It was called Lost In The Dream, and it arrived 10 years ago today.
Granduciel had a funny road through his early years. Raised in Massachusetts, he moved around for a minute before, somewhat accidentally, landing in Philly and realizing he vibed with people there. This was a place he could see himself hunkering down and making music. He teamed with his friend Kurt Vile to form the War On Drugs; Vile left after the band’s 2008 debut Wagonwheel Blues, and for a time he and Granduciel still played on each record from their respective projects. Granduciel also temporarily toured in Vile’s backing band the Violators. By 2011, Granduciel had expanded the Drugs project’s scope for Slave Ambient, a vivid and miasmic vision of classic rock filtered through a host of more alternative traditions. The early years had built some buzz around the Drugs now, even if they then still lived in the shadow of Vile’s acclaimed solo career. For those of us working as music journalists at the time, it seemed Granduciel was poised for a level-up after completing the Slave Ambient cycle. Yet nobody expected exactly what was going to happen with Lost In The Dream.
In the early days of 2014, I took the short drive down from my hometown to Philadelphia. There, over the course of a few days, I wandered around an ice-covered Fishtown with Granduciel, hearing of the fixations and travails that fueled Lost In The Dream. “It’s hard having this obsession with songs,” he told me then. “Their potential is always going to be more than you can get in the moment. I always want to know far it can go.” This was Granduciel’s way of explaining the long, arduous process of demoing these new Drugs songs, then building them up and up, and often times tearing them back down, sometimes reconstructing them from scratch. “Suffering” went through a bunch of iterations before he eventually returned to some version of the demo; the raw emotional payoff of “Eyes To The Wind” had to be carved from a block of reverb; minute decisions like removing a drum machine from the first few minutes of “In Reverse” changed the whole shape of certain tracks; “An Ocean In Between The Waves” had been a yearlong saga, only for Granduciel to abandon it and totally remake it in the final days of the album’s gestation.
Even in the Drugs’ earliest days, Granduciel had established himself as a sonic wizard prone to digging deep, deep into this material before presenting it to the public; for Slave Ambient, he used to walk the streets of Philadelphia with the album’s various loops and drones on repeat until the songs revealed themselves to him. By the time I was talking to him in 2014, he was already fending off the “perfectionist” label. But it was also already clear then that he had a vision beyond what we’d known thus far. That he had to go through this process of creation and destruction in order to get to a new sound for the War On Drugs, something that would go somewhere else, say something bigger. Here was another thing he told me during that visit: “I didn’t feel like I was contributing to the canon in the way I wanted to. I stumbled upon finishing Slave Ambient. I wasn’t really saying anything.”
Much was made of exactly how Granduciel seemed to be interacting with music history once people heard Lost In The Dream. While there had already been an entrancing fusion afoot on prior Drugs released — Dylan sneers and Springsteen melodies carried upon motorik pulses and hissing atmospherics and phantasmagoric guitars — Lost In The Dream conjured stranger reference points. By 2014, we had been through enough retro revival cycles that much of the mainstream pop narratives seemed to have been mined over and over. But in Lost In The Dream, people heard Dire Straits, and Don Henley, and Bruce Hornsby. It was the sound of classic rock’s dying breaths, a transitional time in the ’80s where counterculture figures and aging boomers tried to adapt to the new technologies and ethos of the era. This is, historically, not considered many of these artists’ peaks, and Granduciel often seemed to chafe at the comparisons. When I spoke to him, he was much more interested in nerding out over the Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues.
Nevertheless, Granduciel was tapping into something from that canon. Once the Drugs settled on more of an established sound with Lost In The Dream and onwards, there’s been a tendency to reduce them to classic rock revivalists. But rather, what was going on here was an alchemical collapse of various strains and histories, remade from a modern viewpoint that could only be reached by rifling through the more shadowy corners of our ever-present past. Occasionally, that meant Granduciel wrote something that sounded like a long-lost classic, his now-infamous “Woo!”-fueled burner “Red Eyes” or the timeless ballad of “Eyes To The Wind.” Elsewhere, he invited you to wade through memory with him, as on the otherworldly epics “Under The Pressure” and “An Ocean In Between The Waves.”
The end result was an album hazier and looser than its predecessor — incredibly, Granduciel’s painstaking solo process somehow allowed Lost In The Dream a lived-in quality that convincingly misdirected one into believing it was the product of a band playing together in a room. This was still essentially the work of one man, isolated and insular, but whether in the album’s stylistic pivots or perceived reference points, Lost In The Dream sounded like a band conversing on well-worn American mythologies of wanderlust and frontiers as mechanisms for reinvention.
I’m still not sure that Granduciel was “saying” anything bigger than on Wagonwheel Blues or Slave Ambient — at least not in any macro narrative way, or in any sort of theoretical analysis of the simultaneous nostalgia triggers and implosions driving his music. When I Don’t Live Here Anymore came out in 2021, Granduciel remarked on how he’d really spent more time on the lyrics, and you could hear a more distinct touch than the placeholders he’d often favored before. But returning to Lost In The Dream now, and understanding it as the fulcrum in the middle of the Drugs’ arc, there is a poignance to much of Granduciel’s writing. What he’d made here was a bigger personal statement.
Granduciel’s battle with anxiety didn’t erupt out of nowhere. On the other side of heavy touring behind Slave Ambient, and on the other side of 30, he found himself beset by questions. When I was reporting that feature in 2014, he and I sat and ate a late-night dinner in a bar after a day spent in the studio. He wondered aloud what he wanted from his life, whether he wanted a family, whether he wanted to stand still more, whether he wanted to keep making music or whether he could be of more service to the world in some other way. He fantasized about leaving the rock ‘n’ roll life behind to run a soup kitchen.
In the interim, he had responded to those questions by throwing himself into the making of Lost In The Dream, adding a melancholic tinge to the title. The man I met then seemed a little relieved, a little worn out, and was seemingly just learning how to embrace life a bit. But what happened next, one would imagine, upended many of the questions Granduciel once asked himself.
Lost In The Dream arrived to acclaim across the board. This band that had once been a Philly curio suddenly ascended to a far broader notoriety. They topped 2014’s end-of-year lists, their songs appeared in an array of TV shows and movies, and they even somehow became the subject of Mark Kozelek’s ire, who decided to follow his own moment of runaway critical goodwill by kicking off a long self-immolation by lashing out at the War On Drugs. But if any snide naysayers might’ve agreed with Kozelek’s “beer commercial” dig, it didn’t matter. Lost In The Dream led to further conquests. The Drugs signed to a major label, who gave them the budget to make the blown-out marvel A Deeper Understanding; that album in turn won the Drugs a Grammy. By the time Granduciel returned with I Don’t Live Here Anymore, he had been partnered with an actress for years. He had indeed become a father. And the Drugs had played to sprawling fields of fans, far beyond the tiny clubs you could still find them in during the spring of 2014. No longer manipulators of bygone arena rock aesthetics, the band were themselves now some other kind of contemporary breed of arena rock.
None of this seemed at plausible back then. We were excited for Lost In The Dream, but nobody thought the War On Drugs were poised to become one of the only big new rock bands of their generation. It’s hard to rank an album like Lost In The Dream against what came before or after for those very reasons. For those of us who were along for the whole ride, it will always be a sentimental moment, watching this band transform into something entirely new. For my money, I Don’t Live Here Anymore might be Granduciel’s best work front to back, the one where he dialed in everything he’s about just right. But there will always be a way in which Lost In The Dream is closer to my heart, as a fan who spent a lot of listless twentysomething years driving around America listening to Granduciel’s music. We watch artists evolve all the time. But it’s another thing when you see an artist go to the brink, break down, and come into their own. It’s another thing when you see an artist enter the canon.
