Adam Granduciel explains why The War on Drugs will always be a “Philly band”
From its earliest days as a project between Kurt Vile and Adam Granduciel, The War on Drugs has always been proud of its Philadelphia heritage. Granduciel was a California transplant who found himself in Philly in his early 20s. There, he met lifelong Philly lifer Kurt Vile, who had recently returned to the city after a brief stint in Boston, Massachusetts, Granduciel’s state of birth.
“Adam was the first dude I met when I moved back to Philadelphia in 2003,” Vile told The Line of Best Fit in 2011. “We saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I was obsessed with Bob Dylan at the time, and we totally geeked-out on that. We started playing together in the early days, and he would be in my band, The Violators. Then, eventually, I played in The War On Drugs.”
“My friend Julian and I came up with it a few years ago over a couple bottles of red wine and a few typewriters when we were living in Oakland,” Granduciel told Pop Headwound in 2008. “We were writing a lot back then, working on a dictionary, and it just came out, and we were like ‘hey, good band name’ so eventually, when I moved to Philadelphia and got a band together, I used it.”
“It was either that or The Rigatoni Danzas. I think we made the right choice,” he added. “I always felt though that it was the kind of name I could record all sorts of different music under without any sort of predictability inherent in the name. [It’s] kind of mysterious—but you HAVE TO have the ‘The’ in there.”
By the time the first album by The War on Drugs, Wagonwheel Blues, was released in 2008, Vile was gearing up to leave the band to start his solo career. Subsequent members were shared between The War on Drugs and Vile’s band, The Violators, but they always came from the same city. As Granduciel told Fender in 2018, keeping the band a Philly enterprise was paramount to their identity.
“The band needs to have its home and its heart in Philly,” Granduciel explained. “The identity of the band being from Philly is because at different moments of our different lives, we all ended up in Philly and then ended up having very different musical paths and then all met each other. That’s kind of why we became a Philly band, because this is where our home was with or without music.”
Check out Granduciel’s interview with Fender down below.
