My Year Lost in the Dream
How The War On Drugs got me through an insane, dissociative, wonderful 2014
That movie scene, where the main character drives down the road with the windows down, dust flying up from the tires as they fishtail around a turn, the perfect song blaring from the speakers, has rarely happened to me. I don’t drive that fast, I’m allergic to dust, and I often — even as a teenager — worried about disturbing people with loud music. Actually, as a teen, I was probably more concerned that whoever heard my music would think it was lame. For most of 2014, however, I lived that scene again and again, on back roads from Mississippi to Vermont, Alabama to Colorado, Washington to Maine. The album I blared, without fail, was Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs.
In January, after nine-plus years of work and waiting, my first book was published. With a lengthy list of tour dates that increased day by day, I headed out on the road to promote it. This probably sounds like a cool thing. It is a cool thing. In fact, I begged to go. I enjoy talking to people, and I believed in the book, and this would be the closest I would ever come to being a rock star. There was one problem: I have never, ever harbored any interest in being on stage. In fact, I hate public speaking and I don’t much like leaving the house. Further point of fact: I have agoraphobia. I’ve suffered from panic attacks since I was a little kid, often due to new situations or strange places. It’s better now than it’s been, because of therapy, drugs, and the support of my wife and friends. Still, the thought of doing all of those readings in all of those foreign places made my throat close up and my skin prickle with sweat. I knew, however, that I could be a good ambassador for the book, and one of the most centering places on earth to me is a bookstore. I tried to convince myself I was going shopping for a very, very long time.
Outside of wandering rows of shelves, I use music to calm down and feel at home. When I teach, I get nervous about getting in front of a classroom, even after years, even though I love it, and I make playlists to help me relax. Once I realized the meditative power of J. Dilla’s Donuts, I listened to it thousands of times. With this is mind, and having overused my previous playlist (called “Feel Better,” it included some Dilla as well as Radiohead’s “Worry Wort,” the most calming song I know) I made another entitled “Book Tour.” I spent hours combing through the songs in my iTunes and even Googled “Relaxing Songs” a few times. (The preponderance of Enya on those lists reinforced the idea that I was on my own.) The test was if I played a song while packing and didn’t check my computer until it was over, it made the list. If the same thing happened when I listened to the list, it stayed there. So I got an hour and a half of calming tunes and hoped for the best.
I first heard The War on Drugs in my friend Jamil’s apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jamil is the kind of friend who I could talk to for weeks, and we would often go until three or four in the morning, running the gamut from books to movies to sports to life. “Arms Like Boulders,” the first track on The War on Drugs’ debut, Wagonwheel Blues, came up on Jamil’s iTunes. It’s a Byrds-esque, jangling pop song, everything wonderfully muddled by overexposed production, and Adam Granduciel’s plaintive voice whooping and singing lines like, “Yeah, by the time they get your letter of explanation/ You’ll be dead and gone, barking up a new tree.”► I asked Jamil who it was, and we agreed it was a shitty name for a band. Rather than keeping shuffle on, Jamil played the record through, and while we kept talking, I remember enjoying it. I got it the next day, and loved the subsequent Future Weather EP, and 2011’s Slave Ambient, overplaying them both to the point of annoying my wife.
I was about to leave for my first book event in Denver when a review copy of Lost in the Dream showed up in my inbox. I listened to it when I went running and the miles went by and soon enough found myself at home, headphones still in, stretching an extra long time to finish the album. I felt great. Rather than playing “Book Tour” on the plane to Denver, Lost in the Dream soundtracked my nerves.
As a teenager, I listened to albums all the way through all the time. My car didn’t have a CD player, and so I’d dub a tape of the CDs and drive with them. Maybe it was that skipping a song was an inexact and frustrating science, maybe it was that bands made albums while thinking of the greater whole, maybe attention spans were longer, maybe I was less discerning—whatever the case, Lost in the Dream played all the way through, again and again, from the first ticks of “Under the Pressure” that gather like a swarm of locusts and eventually form the rhythm to the sound of the waves (or is it the wind?) and fading notes that close out “In Reverse.” I played it as I worked out in the hotel gym in Denver, and again as I waited in the bookstore equivalent of backstage before my reading.
It made the perfect accompaniment to my drive from North Carolina to Alabama, which was cut short in Georgia by the ice storm that swept through the south in late January. The driving beat of “Red Eyes” became an early favorite, and I strained to figure out what Granduciel was saying as I tried to keep the car on the road.
In my teenage years, lyrics were critical to me. The bare emotions and literal poetry of Pearl Jam made me feel both understood and transported when I was fifteen. The Bob Dylan songs I leaned towards were Dylan as storyteller rather than Dylan as poet. As time has gone on, I spend less time with lyric books (though this is one of the great losses in the death of physical music—along with sound quality) and gravitate more towards lyricists who suggest emotions rather than define them with clean lines. Granduciel has made this shift, too, with each subsequent War on Drugs release, to the point where I feel like I understand what he’s trying to say even if I have no idea what he’s saying. This makes singing along sometimes difficult, but it makes the listening experience richer and more active. To me, anyway.
And so I could spend eight hours driving a rented Corolla through Mississippi and listen to “An Ocean In Between the Waves” and pound the steering wheel with delight and yell out, “Feel the way that the wild wind blows through the room”► and then mumble the rest of the stanza. I didn’t care. I liked how it felt—a heady combination of hope and despair. It made me want to simultaneously climb a mountain and go back to bed. The closest approximation, emotionally, might be Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (listen to WoD’s “Burning” and then “Darlington County” or “No Surrender”), which offers a similarly confusing mix of sadness and joy.
The fact that my favorite song jumped from one to another day by day is an experience I haven’t had in a long time. Have I changed? Has the way I listen to music? I certainly don’t feel things as acutely as I did when I was a teenager (thank god). Is that why music doesn’t hit me as squarely? Is that why when this tour messed with me, because of the stress and the length and the hours and hours alone, I found myself becoming so obsessed with this one album? Had I reverted back to those frantic times? I tried listening to other things, and I did, of course—Sharon van Etten’s masterful Are We There, Real Estate’s sunny Atlas, Perfume Genius’s beautiful and defiant Too Bright—but nothing came close to Lost in the Dream. I didn’t analyze it too much. I was too busy and had a constant fear that it would stop working and I’d no longer have something to fall back on as I walked through another strange town. Unlike drinking, which had worn out its welcome, and the anti-anxiety drugs I tried to taper down as the months wore on, the efficacy of “Eyes to the Wind” didn’t fade. Every time Granduciel sang, “I’m a bit run down here at the moment,”► I’d think, Me, too, buddy. And when he’d say, “There’s just a stranger, living in me,”► I’d identify completely.
I hadn’t thought too much about that identification. After all, I’d once found solace in “I travel through a tube and end up in your infection.”► But once things slowed down for me, I had some time to catch up on reading about the band and Granduciel in particular. I learned of the rather one-sided spat with Mark Kozelek, whose music I love, but who lost some of my admiration for generally acting like an asshole, and then I read more about Granduciel, most notably David Bevan’s profile on Pitchfork. As it turns out, Granduciel went through many of the things I struggle with, anxiety and panic disorder chief among them. This unlocked a whole new side of the record to me. All of those carefully placed whoops and yeahs, all of the wide open spaces also had an element of claustrophobia. I’d felt it, but thought it was my own invention. Over the course of the year, I’d become intimately familiar with the concept that once the work is out in the world, the reader or the viewer or the listener brings his or her own baggage and opinions and forms a new whole. I’d struggled at first to see this intensely personal portion of myself through other people’s eyes. I know, then, the pitfalls of laying my personal shit on top of a work of art. The thing is, I didn’t come to this record looking for answers or even thinking it might provide me with some solace. But that’s what happened. My relationship to it will change, but nothing will remind me so much of this insane, dissociative, wonderful year.
Writing has always been both a salve and a danger to me. The time I spend at my desk (or the couch, where I am now) passes with no notice, and I can spend five, six hours at a time and not know how long it’s been until I try to stand up and my legs have locked up. But being in my own head all the time makes the transition back to the ‘real world’ difficult. When I was working on my book, there would be times where I would feel horrible while writing it, my heart beating too fast and my body filled with misfiring energy. Not writing, however, was far worse. The only way to get rid of that feeling, to loosen the pressure that squeezed my ribcage, was to finish. Though I could only put my finger on it knowing the process of creating it, that’s what Lost in the Dream represented: the fever sweat of someone crashing through his own walls, those built of the fears and worries and weaknesses that trapped him. I know that’s what it felt like for me, and that catharsis accompanied me on all those car rides, where I lived, for once, the way a song sounds.
