I'd love to do denim merch sometime, though. That's pretty much the mainstay of my wardrobe. I have a bunch of denim jackets I wear all the time.
— Adam Granduciel
I don't know how it is for people who write fiction or literature, but for me, when I'm writing music, especially with this album, I felt compelled to hold up my end of the conversation. I want people to connect deeper with it.
Not everyone who writes about you is going to be a fan of your music.
In terms of tone and style, I've always been influenced by a lot of different players. I love Nick Drake, Mike Bloomfield and Sonic Boom. I like those three a lot!
In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.
When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.
I work off of my early demos. I'll keep adding on top of that, but I usually gravitate towards whatever that original idea was.
I love when things can repeat and you can make things slightly different each time and just react to the music and react to the recording.
That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.
I've never set out to do anything other than get better at guitar and record and have fun. I feel like the Jazzmaster's just your comrade on that journey. It can be really subtle, it can be angry, it can be chill. It can be anything.
I love Tom Petty the way a lot of people love him. He's got so many amazing songs, and you know them by heart. They're classics.
All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.
I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.
I don't like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.
It was definitely strange to come home and all of a sudden have to shift gears into creative mode. I kind of had to figure out what it was about music that made it exciting, and question what it was that made it worth sacrificing all the other parts of my life that weren't as satisfying.
My siblings weren't playing music; I was the only one who wanted to buy a guitar and was listening on headphones the whole time.
As he grew older, his material was just as relevant and just as exciting and the band's just as killer... It seems surreal that there's no more Tom Petty, in person.
With 'Under the Pressure,' I just found two chords I liked, and built it up, did like a ten-minute drum pattern.
In high school, I was head of the lab. I dumped a whole five-gallon bucket of D-76 on my head once. It ruined all my clothes.
I learned Neil Young songs, Bob Dylan songs and older songs. It wasn't until I moved to Philly that I had aspirations to maybe forming a band.
Sometimes it's hard for me to just be the guitar player and lose myself.
It's cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter's purview as well as an exercise, I'm trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.
You can't really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I've loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.
I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.
When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.
I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.
Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.
When I was a kid I was definitely into Neil Young.
I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.
I never have a clear goal or a theme when it comes to writing an album.
I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon.
Touring is a rough thing. You don't have any time to look around or stop and think if what you're doing is making you happy. The more you tour, the better the band gets, and you get caught up in a lot more things than just traveling.
I immediately felt welcomed, whereas in Massachusetts, I'd grown up there but I felt like such an outsider. Within a week or two of moving to Philly I felt there was something I could be a part of.
The Heartbreakers were what you imagine being in a band would be like - best buddies and great players and guys who took it all really seriously.
With 'Slave Ambient', I was writing things on top of loops. Now I really get the structure of the song down, but I leave room for improvisation in the studio.
I'm really picky about stuff like videos or even pictures of the band, but at the same time, I don't really know what it is I want; I just know what I don't want.
I started guitar when I was like thirteen. I had a friend whose dad had an electric guitar. In sixth grade or seventh grade I went over and played it and immediately I was super excited by the whole thing.
I tend to think about so many different things on a recording. I'll be trying to tune into what the drummer's doing, trying to keep everyone playing the groove and other things like making sure the piano's in a nice pocket.
Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.
I try to take whatever I can from the songs I grew up listening to, these vibed-out pop numbers, and make them my own in some weird way.
If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.
I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.
I try to just keep chipping away at, you know, this little idea you may start with and then work on something for seven, eight months. Eventually it just kind of turns into something.
I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.
I love playing guitar every night, and to be at this point where it's like, the songs are done and I'm happy with the way they are on record, and I get to hear them be reinterpreted by the live band? That's kind of the icing on the cake. It's the best.
I ended up renting a studio in L.A. for about 15 months. Starting in January of 2016, some of the guys in the band were coming out once every five to six weeks for like five days a time.
No I don't play bluegrass harmonica or anything like that. I don't listen to country or bluegrass records.
When you're in the moment and not over thinking the song is when things tend to really work. You're not so focused on the minutiae. You're focused on the overall feel, and that's the stuff that I get from the demos.
My kind of music is probably not going to shoot to the top, but I'm fine with that. There's still enough rock'n'roll soldiers.
There's a lot of older musicians who say your whole life making music, you're really trying to get back to that first couple of things you liked when you were a kid. And as much as you might like to think you're not, you really are.
