I love honoring musical anniversaries, mostly by dropping songs with birthdays into my Friday Playlists.
I missed a big one while we were on spring break, one that demands more than just a song in a playlist.
March 18 was the tenth anniversary of the War on Drugs’ Lost In The Dream.
It is an album that has been a huge part of my life since the day it was released. It is certainly one of my two favorite albums of this century,[1] and should comfortably slot into my top ten favorite albums of all time list the next time I revisit that collection.
Over the past week I’ve listened to Lost In The Dream, front-to-back, at least three times. Everything about it still holds up.
At the time, Lost In The Dream was TWOD’s commercial breakthrough, as much as you could say that in 2014. It took a band that generated a lot of positive critical buzz with their previous album, Slave Ambient, and put them onto the front page of every music website in existence at the time. They transitioned from small clubs to larger ones, and within a few years were selling out Madison Square Garden.
I’ve written many times about Lost In The Dream, so it’s not worth going deep into it again. It remains an almost perfectly sequenced album. Starting with the twitchy, unsettled “Under the Pressure,” and ending with “In Reverse,” one of the truly great final tracks ever made. In between are two massive, Springsteen-esque songs written to be played endlessly (“Red Eyes,” “Burning”), the massive tent pole song in the middle that supports the weight of the entire album (“An Ocean in Between the Waves”), and the two gentler tracks that counter “Ocean” (“Eyes to the Wind,” “Lost in the Dream”). “Suffering” and “Disappearing” are the only B/B+ tracks on the album, and even then they fit into the perfect slots, giving the listener a slight respite from the heaviness of the rest of the album.
Adam Granduciel labored with the record for over a year, going through a destructive breakup, experiencing a crisis of confidence over his musical path, and reaching the point of near mental breakdown because of crippling anxiety about his life along the way. Songs were worked, reworked, and then reworked again. Months of work was scrapped, then reclaimed at the last minute. The agita of the project became part of its legend. I doubt Granduciel would want to go through that journey again, but the result was a confirmation of his talent and ambition.
The War on Drugs has made two excellent albums since Lost In The Dream. 2017’s A Deeper Understanding explored similar themes, both musically and lyrically, with the benefits that came from being signed to a major label. I Don’t Live Here Anymore, released in 2021, took the band on a new path. The sounds weren’t all that different. But rather than focusing on drifting between emotions, locations, and relationships, it was about accepting that you can be happy even when all of that other stuff is still hard work. It was also an album where Granduciel pared back his modern guitar hero histrionics in favor of making a truly collaborative album that allowed each member of the band to shine.
Both of those albums are awesome and I still listen to them often. But neither can match Lost In The Dream for its emotional impact. Even if he is still making great music – and hopefully has much more ahead in his career – Lost In The Dream was the apotheosis of everything that Granduciel believes in musically.
Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight being the other. ↩
