LAYERS OF PAIN
The War on Drugs’ leader, Adam Granduciel, has a habit of wearing his heart on his album sleeves. Granduciel admitted to having suffered from anxiety and endless second-guessing while making 2014’s Lost in the Dream, noting, “I started going off the rails a little bit, in my own head. Getting a little too sucked in.”
Three and a half years later, on the follow-up, A Deeper Understanding, a rejuvenated Granduciel is able to embrace his elaborate creative process. However, while he may have come to terms with it, that anxiety transferred to engineer and mixer Shawn Everett. During our interview, Everett opened up about anxiety attacks of his own that echoed Granduciel’s own recollections of making Lost In The Dream.
“Adam told me about the time he wanted to be a painter,” began Everett. “He had this layer approach where he would paint, scrape away, then repaint, and so on. That’s what it felt like he was doing while we were working in the studio; him adding crazy amounts of passes and uncovering all kinds of layers in a song, and us going crazy trying new guitar setups, different amps, pedals, and keyboards. After months of working like that on a song, he might mute it all and do several other rounds of guitars! Working on the album was an endless process of layering and scraping, and layering and scraping.
“Part of my job was to be the archeologist and keep track of everything. Riding volumes to let certain parts shine and ensure the strongest melodic elements kept surfacing. On top of all that, we worked in several different classic studios — Boulevard Recording, EastWest, and United Recorders in LA, and Electric Lady and Thump Recording in NY. Every time we went into a new room I would re-amp the snare drum, kick and other instruments, to capture the ambiences of all these rooms. I had tons of different layers and vibes from all those studios! As a result, I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of tracks per session, to the point where you would go
