LOS ANGELES — For many musicians, a live album is an afterthought: a way to quickly satisfy insatiable fans or make easy money.
But when Adam Granduciel, the frontman of anthemic rock band The War on Drugs, announced their latest live album Wednesday, it was a labor of love that is anything but quick or easy.
For “Live Drugs Again,” out September 13, Granduciel wanted to do justice to the way the band has grown, both literally (they’ve added a member since their first live album dropped in 2020) and figuratively as musicians. who have honed their sound. So he combed through about 100 hours of recordings of their shows, even piecing together different parts of the same songs.
The album coincides with the start of their co-headlining tour with The National, which kicks off September 12 in New Hampshire. Granduciel spoke to The Associated Press about how performing a song live changes it, whether the band has new music in the pipeline and how he came to play guitar on Beyoncé’s “II Most Wanted.”
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
GRANDUCIEL: I think we used about 50 shows in total. There are a few songs where it’s four shows spliced together, and part of that is just having fun with the process. You know, you go into it and you remember specific nights, like there’s a few songs from a show in Bentonville, Arkansas, a town we’d never been to in our 20 years as a band. And we kind of rolled into this city and it was a really nice little student community for young artists. It was incredible. We had a great day and the show in the evening was outside, and it was just one of those memorable evenings.
You kind of start there, and then you get so deep into the process of mixing versions and maybe a little bit of post-production, like all great live records. I wanted to put as much work into it as me and the band put into our live show, you know, the amount of time it takes to hone a set, it’s basically years. And we wanted to put that on the record a little bit.
GRANDUCIEL: Well, unlike our first live record, we used a lot of the actual ambient microphones that we recorded. Sometimes it can be tricky with phase and all these things. But for this one we used a lot of the actual ambient microphones so that the buzz at that moment is real. I think most live records these days are just put into digital spaces. You just have more control over everything. But on this one we had, I think, twelve different ambient microphones on stage and in the venues.
GRANDUCIEL: Certainly after that. I think things just evolve naturally. And they end up in a whole new place once the audience is part of the equation, you know? I mean, if we went back and re-recorded ‘Under the Pressure’ the way we play it, it probably wouldn’t be the same on a record. But when you come out of a touring cycle and things dynamically reach the next level of the band, it always informs what your next step is.
GRANDUCIEL: In theory, new music exists.
It’s nice to be home for a while and get into the flow of everything a bit when you start making a new one. We’re always busy, whether it’s mixing live material or recording a new song or whatever.
GRANDUCIEL: I worked on my last two records with Shawn Everett. And he’s producing Miley’s new album. And he called me one day, and I took my kid and his friend to an indoor playground in North Hollywood. And he said, “Would you like to come over tonight and play this Miley song?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And on the way he said, ‘I think it could be a Beyoncé thing too. I’m not really sure.”
But it went very quickly and I played on two songs. But I actually thought it would be submitted as a song, and then they would redo my parts or whatever, you know? And then, literally five weeks later, I saw that it sounded like a Beyoncé-Miley song. And I was in the studio on Saturday night in the parking lot on Hollywood Boulevard, and it was really loud. And it was like listening to my phone. I thought, “Is that the song?” And I was like, “Wait, that’s the song I was playing on.” And I texted Shawn and I was like, “Did they remake my guitar?” He says, “No, that’s your guitar.” And I was listening to it on the way home in my car and I thought, “This is great.” I couldn’t believe it.
