12/29/2023 0 Comments Deeper understandingGranduciel’s Dylan-like lyricism is poetically evocative throughout A Deeper Understanding. Nor is he just an old-fashioned guitar hero. The solos on A Deeper Understanding are emotive thunderbolts executed tastefully. Granduciel’s playing never resorts to nebulous, self-fellating noodling, though. Strangest Thing, Granduciel gazing up at a “sky painted in a wash of indigo”, houses equally hair-raising guitar moments, including a huge solo and wailing Bigbsy bends that flirt continuously with toppling over the edge into untamed feedback. Do yourself a favour and look up one of the online lessons, it’s a joy to play. It unfurls steadily from a lilting arpeggio, the singer recalling wistfully, “I met a man with a broken back/ he had a fear in his eyes that I could understand” before he winds up for an epic two-part pentatonic solo that epitomises the War On Drugs’ celestial appeal. The song is built around a simple C-E-D progression, which Granduciel plays with a capo at the third fret. Of the many guitar highlights on A Deeper Understanding, perhaps the most thrilling arrives as early as the second track, Pain. “I have all these different melodies going on in the song, and you want to highlight each of them, so it’s trying to sculpt this thing where, if you put everything in, it would just be a wash, so you’re trying to paint this picture, but keep all your favourite elements in.” “I spend six, seven, eight months on the same song,” he explained to Guitar Magazine. In the hands of a lesser musician, they could drift into the realms of cloying AOR, but Granduciel’s visionary attention to detail wins out. The songs themselves are exhilarating widescreen American road trip anthems, indebted to Springsteen, Dylan and Petty and the modulated sonics of the 80s, canyon-deep reverb soaking Granduciel’s soaring guitar solos. Granduciel told Guitar Magazine in 2017: “I knew I only had ‘em for a week and I wanted to squeeze everything into that week – rehearsal, writing, friendship, barbecues… so we did it all at the studio – we barbecued at the studio!” ![]() The cross-country relocation brought a laser-guided focus to the sessions, the band flying in from the East Coast for a week at a time. Returning from the tour, the now 41-year-old moved to Los Angeles. While the Philadelphia band is essentially Granduciel’s project, he’s surrounded by an evolving cast of stellar musicians and their major label debut started to emerge while they toured Lost In The Dream. Granduciel re-recorded the whole of that 2014 album, his attention to microscopic detail almost destroying the entire project as he disappeared so far down the rabbit hole at one point he was reportedly measuring minute speaker vibrations.Ī Deeper Understanding, too, involved hundreds of hours of studio time, revealed in its intricate layers of vintage guitars, organs and synths, meandering multi-part solos and dreamy sonics. ![]() A Deeper Understanding is Granduciel’s magnum opus, a luminescent epic and stunning example of obsessive studio craft that betters its predecessor Lost In The Dream – a record which itself drove him to the brink of insanity. Coming from one of modern rock music’s great restless perfectionists, it’s no empty hyperbole. ![]() ![]() “Guitar is my life, y’know?” That was Adam Granduciel speaking to Guitar Magazine in 2017, following the release of The War On Drugs‘ fourth album.
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