For the War on Drugs Adam Granduciel, a return to a place he once called home – The Boston Globe

I wasnt running around making zines or anything like that, says Granduciel, who graduated in 1997 from the Roxbury Latin School and then headed off to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. I was basically maybe some kind of social introvert. I had friends from school, obviously, but my life outside of that wasnt very big.

Its gotten a lot bigger since then. I Dont Live Here Anymore is the bands fifth full-length album since the War on Drugs formed in Philadelphia in 2005. (Kurt Vile was an early member of the group, but left after their first album, 2008s Wagonwheel Blues, to focus on his solo career.) Along the way, the band has grown, moving from the independent label Secretly Canadian to the venerable Atlantic Records, while album sales and concert crowds have expanded.

Even as the group has become bigger and more successful, Granduciel still seems content to hide himself away and work on songs, most recently in a warehouse space in Burbank, Calif., and before that in what he describes as a tiny room under his house in Los Angeles. He pays close attention to detail as a songwriter, and he can talk with great specificity about why he changed the key of a certain song, or how he wrote and rewrote a particular section of a song until he felt he had nailed it.

I Dont Live Here Anymore took shape gradually. Granduciel started writing songs for the album fairly soon after the band released 2017s A Deeper Understanding, which won a Grammy for best rock album. The singer spent several years honing the new material, often in conjunction with bassist David Hartley and multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca.

I really trust their musical opinion, Granduciel says. If youre around people long enough, your trust and your friendship grows, and so where we were collaboratively in 2016 and 17, we were significantly past that a couple years later.

The groups albums have become grander and more spacious over the years. I Dont Live Here Anymore has a big, warm sound that straddles the line between indie cool and arena-ready heartland rock, full of guitars, keyboard textures, and hooky melodies, augmented on the title track by vocals from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of Lucius.

They create such amazing sonic landscapes, says Wolfe, who recalls first meeting the War on Drugs in 2014 when both bands were playing a music festival in Vermont. I just remember sitting on the side of the stage and watching in awe.

Even at the time, Granduciel had a distinctive lyrical sensibility that has since become more defined. The narrators in his songs are often on a quest for meaning or belonging as they wrestle with uncertainty. Though the pandemic has probably amplified a general sense of restlessness, Granduciel says, those feelings didnt originate in March 2020.

Everyone feels a little lost, right? I mean, no one really knows what theyre doing, he says.

He traces those themes in his lyrics back to his own nomadic existence when Granduciel was in his 20s and his music career was just starting to take shape.

You try to write from this place that makes a lot of sense to you, he says. The period when he first got serious about music coincided with a time where I was without roots, you know what I mean? I was living in California. I was traveling around all the time. I wasnt homeless or anything, but I was kind of just moving around. I had no real sense of purpose or direction, which was fine with me at the time.

Granduciel has become more settled in recent years. He lives in Los Angeles full time now, and he became a father in 2019. Yet that sense of looking toward the horizon hasnt fully dissipated.

No one is 100 percent confident in every choice theyve made, he says. I wouldnt consider myself fully confident in any sort of adulthood. I think Im still writing from a kind of displacement.

THE WAR ON DRUGS

At House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St. Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 at 8 p.m. Tickets $46-$66. 888-693-2583, http://www.houseofblues.com/boston

Follow Eric R. Danton on Twitter @erdanton.