Weekly Neil: Brothers

Neil Young, The War On Drugs, and going to a concert with my brother

Good news: We made it through the tunnel.

I didn’t mean to go four months without posting but it happened anyway. Life just continues on, you know? A notable Neil update up top is that his band The Chrome Hearts are set to tour this summer. I will likely not be there but if you go I sincerely hope you have a great time.

Meanwhile, the new Bong Joon Ho sci-fi movie Mickey 17 is still in theaters near me and I very much want to see it, most of all because Robert Pattinson always commits to being an intense idiot. That’s enjoyable to me. So two weeks ago I had some free time on a Saturday and drove to my local indie cinema with the intention of a Mickey 17 matinee, only to be foiled by the St. Patrick’s Day Parade route and its many street closures. The whole process was dumb but kind of funny, so I spent the time navigating through traffic and around pedestrians clad in green listening to Le Noise on CD. What a record! I don’t think I’ll ever get my shit together enough to submit a proper 33 1/3 book pitch, but if I do, Le Noise is absolutely in the running. What a cool record, man. Neil and Daniel Lanois, chief atmosphere architect for U2 and Bob Dylan, hanging in Silver Lake and conducting experiments in stereophonic echo. Lanois also nearly died in a motorcycle accident during those sessions, which is a hell of a story for an album that touches on death and disintegration.

One more quick story about noise. Earlier this year, I saw local artist The Dipper Stove perform in a record shop here in Rochester, and it gave me a deep appreciation for drone. One guy, a keyboard with some keys taped down, a guitar, and a bunch of pedals. Sounds like a good time to me. Anyway at the show I ran into Joe Tunis from Carbon Records, who released the most recent Dipper Stove collection, and we chatted about Neil for a bit before I picked up 1989’s The Bridge: A Tribute To Neil Young for $5. I assumed that, as a purveyor of weird noise recordings, he was a huge fan, but he told me the first Neil stuff he vibed with was the gentle acoustic songs (and then, naturally, he made his way to Arc). Every path is valid. All roads lead to love and only love.

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Just a bit rundown here at the moment…

I’ve published this newsletter for about two years now and somehow The War On Drugs have never really come up. That seems unlikely for a Neil Young project. But better late than never. And so in that spirit I say that “Thinking Of A Place” is the pinnacle of Adam Granduciel’s work as a professional musician and that, despite his reverence for all things Neil and the great covers he’s submitted over the course of his career, I’ll always want to listen to that more than any interpretation he can offer.

Why does this matter? Because brothers, man.

Back in November, I saw Wild Pink live in Buffalo with my own brother, Pete. Fairly standard Saturday night, except it wasn’t. He’s 39 and I’m 35 and yet it was somehow the first time we’d ever seen a concert together. This fact became apparent sometime in the alcohol-fueled hours between an afternoon Buffalo Sabres game and the 9 p.m. set time of the band — too many bars visited, not enough restaurants — and once it took hold in my brain, I fixated on it. This night means something. I ran into people I knew at the show and told them, hey, this is our first show together and I mean ever. No one seemed as tickled as me. Go figure.

But I really was tickled. Pete and I have a good relationship but we don’t share many creative interests. I got a large portion of my adolescent taste in music from him (The Wallflowers CD did wonders, and later, so did Korn’s Follow The Leader) but it’s never been a “hey check out this song” kind of vibe between us. (For the record, he enjoyed Wild Pink. He was not crazy about the opener, Friendship, though.) To see a show together was a way of deepening a relationship that at times feels like it has plateaued due to the natural forces of our respective families and careers. When we see each other it’s usually on a Sunday and we’ve got our kids in tow and that kind of environment doesn’t lend itself to sitting down and shooting the shit about music or anything culturally really.

Not counting nostalgic look-backs, there’s one contemporary band that we share a fondness for. It’s one we exchange lyrical allusions via text and one that even compels us to mention our favorite songs. That’s right. It’s the holy goddamn War On Drugs.

Here’s a sample. Not long ago he texted me: Man that “I don’t live here anymore” I’m about to delete on the way home is simply gonna hit. This is an objectively hilarious text to receive from anyone, but it’s even funnier coming from a guy with an MBA and two kids under 8. (Or maybe The War On Drugs is music for guys with MBAs? I always thought it was the soundtrack to IPAs, but what does the middle of the Venn diagram for those two acronyms look like anyway?) Another time we traded riffs on the chorus to “Thinking Of A Place” and cracked ourselves up. When I asked what he was up to that night, he dug in: I’ll be real, I’m considering moving through the dark. Tremendous.

It’s a way to pass the time but it has genuinely deepened our fellowship in ways I never would’ve considered. I expected this from our father, a fan of the WOD’s primary influences (Bruce, U2, Neil, etc.), so it made sense when I visited home sometime in 2015ish and saw a Lost In The Dream CD lying on the kitchen table at our parents’ house. “These guys are pretty good,” was the review from our dad. And he’s right. My brother’s tastes, on the other hand, are more unpredictable. Texting about a 10-minute song with both an extended ambient introduction and an extended ambient interlude — a song that we both love! — is absolutely enthralling. There’s some meme shit at play, of course. Granduciel calling his band’s 2020 concert album LIVE DRUGS made it an easy sell; 2024’s LIVE DRUGS AGAIN felt like a victory lap (both in sound and title).

So here we are, two guys who cried watching The Iron Claw and who have often weaponized its final scene to razz each other, texting about a band famously started up by two long-haired dudes with strikingly similar musical palettes that might as well be brothers anyway. And there’s, of course, The War On Drugs song “Brothers,” which features those guys — Granduciel and Kurt Vile — at their melodic best. I’ve been obsessed with the song lately. It’s called “Brothers” but Granduciel sings it to someone he calls “babe.” It’s definitely a love song, though it’s dark and maybe the love is a bit faded. Maybe the “babe” is an actual baby, or a baby brother. (Granduciel is a year older than Vile, for what it’s worth.) I like thinking of calling your brother “babe,” the way Yasi Salek calls people “babe” on Bandsplain. It’s a term of endearment. It’s borderline honorific.

“I love you babe and I’ll be there ‘til the end,” Granduciel sings. “but until then it’s crowded babe.”

Pretty much every time I listen to The War On Drugs I think of some of the great music writing that folks have done inspired by their songs. Their sound, ever-changing and familiar but blurry and alternately keyboard-heavy and not, lends itself to descriptions like the following:

Imagine the exact midpoint between Disintegration and Tunnel Of Love, and you get The War On Drugs’ marvelous 2011 breakthrough, Slave Ambient. (2014)

I cannot help but imagining that this is what would have happened had Neil Young, during that ‘80s period when David Geffen was [suing] him for not sounding like Neil Young, sacked Crazy Horse for Talk Talk, brought in Talk Talk’s producer Tim Friese-Greene and co-written with Bruce Springsteen! (2017)

And others that get more abstract and less concerned with reference points:

There’s one section here that sounds like a small free-jazz/noise ensemble trying to recreate the visceral effect of a July sunshower using, I dunno, a bassoon, a xylophone, and assorted other tools. (2017)

People elide over the more esoteric reference points Granduciel mixed in. The noise drones and krautrock rhythms, the shoegaze demeanor and new wave glistens, the engulfing ambience that blossomed from it all colliding. They miss the more off-the-beaten-path names that Granduciel cites as important influences, like The Waterboys. (Play the latter’s “A Pagan Place” alongside the horn-driven build of “Under The Pressure”; As it happens, Granduciel covered that Waterboys track in the years leading up to Lost In The Dream.) (2018)

And still others that are simply funny because they’re true:

The songs of The War On Drugs exist in a world between knuckle tattoos: love, hurt; home, away; dark, light. They usually begin in medias res, with our hero, the tressy and lovelorn Adam Granduciel, wandering the empty plains of grief with a guitar strapped to his back. He’s down bad; he’s rudderless; he’s desperately trying to find his way out of the rain or pain or chains. Heartbreak is behind him but hope is always just ahead, a pin-light through the clouds in the shape of a mythological figure known only as “babe.” (2021)

So, to use an overused idiom, this is what we talk about when we talk about The War On Drugs. But do we talk about Neil much? Sometimes we do! Sometimes Granduciel rips “Like A Hurricane” and preserves its essence as a screeching guitar blazer but also amps up its folky bones. I’m into that for sure, but I’m also into the quieter moments. Covering “Look Out For My Love,” a tender countrified tune, a few years later and stretching it into a mile-long celebration of crystalline yet exploratory lead-guitar lines.

Granduciel talks about Neil, too. In 2017, while discussing the new album A Deeper Understanding (my favorite of the bunch, if you’re keeping score), he told Grammy.com about how spiritually, Neil played a large part in the recording of the album, and how his influence can be felt quite specifically. Because the internet is simultaneously a landfill and a void, that video is missing from its landing page. But the caption specifies that “Granduciel recalls watching Neil Young wield his famous Gretsch White Falcon guitar with a Bigsby tremolo system from the side of the stage, and how it inspired him to make new types of guitar noises to serve his songs.” Seems very cool!

This is the exact kind of gear talk that makes me ears close up but that I know means a lot to dudes like both Neil and Granduciel. It means a lot less to me and my brother, Pete. We talk about other stuff, though. I’m realizing I’ve never directly asked him what he thinks about Neil and I should probably do that. The reply would be interesting at the very least. (My dad, for his part, is a fan, though too much harmonica can be a dealbreaker for him. Fair play.)

As I’ve mentioned before about a dozen times I grew up Catholic and when you’re Catholic you make sacraments including but not limited to baptism, first eucharist, reconciliation and confirmation. The third one of those, reconciliation, is also called penance and involves telling a priest all your sins and receiving instructions on how to be absolved in the eyes of God. I did this at age 10 in the year 2000 (and not, like my parents, in the more conservative era of the church, the 1960s) so luckily it was all very open and positive — no confessionals or rosaries, just a younger priest with a warm smile. Because I was 10, all my “sins” were things like yelling at my brother, throwing things at my brother, swearing at my brother, and so on. My penance was simple. “Do something nice for your brother,” Father Mayer told me.

I genuinely don’t know if I ever did! I mean, I’ve done nice things for him in the past 25 years but I’m unsure how many of those were done with the explicit intention of reconciliation in the eyes of the Lord. But the next time he texts me and asks what I’m up to, I’ll say: Just a bit rundown here at the moment, bruv. And he’ll laugh, because it’s dumb and funny. That’s a nice thing. We might all be walking through this darkness on our own, but we can always be forgiven.

“Look Out For My Love,” written by Neil Young, from Comes A Time (1978) and Chrome Dreams (2023)