You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

The War on Drugs is a band from Philadelphia who formed in 2005.

They won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2018.

This year, they put out their fifth album. I don't live here anymore.

Adam Grand Duciel is the singer and lead guitarist in the band, and I talked to him at his recording space here in LA.

In this episode, Adam breaks down the title track from I Don't Live Here anymore.

He explains how the song was influenced by Bob Dylan and his own newborn son.

We had just had our first child, late July of 2019.

We don't live here anymore. It started basically as me sitting in the nursing chair in Bruce's room when he was about six weeks old.

He just began his little blanket. I would be in the chair, just strumming an acoustic, lightly.

I was just strumming these two chords that were cool. It wasn't even that exciting.

It was just b flat to c in this way that had a nice little vibe to it.

He's making a bunch of sounds.

That night, I went downstairs. Bruce had been asleep for a couple hours.

The point was to just record this little idea.

I just did a quick drum machine for in the floor, 808 kick.

When I sit down to the mic with my headphones on, it's really loud usually.

When I'm demoing something, I work so fast.

I put one mic up and that's for the vocal and the guitar in that moment.

Just so I can capture whatever is happening.

I go into another world. When I have my headphones on, it really puts me in a totally different place to channel whatever idea I have for this song.

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