Living Proof

Album: I Don't Live Here Anymore (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Living Proof" finds The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel returning to an old neighborhood and discovering it's not what he remembered.

    I went down to the corner
    They're building up my block
    Maybe I've been gone too long
    I can't go back


    Granduciel continues to outline his emotional weather throughout this acoustic guitar and piano song. At the end, an electric guitar kicks in, as he declares, "I'm rising, and I'm damaged."

    "I had those lyrics basically very quickly," Granduciel told Mojo magazine. "I didn't think too much about it. I just felt like that."
  • The song is the opening track of I Don't Live Here Anymore. The War On Drugs recorded "Living Proof" in May 2019 in real time at Electro-Vox studios in LA, a deviation from Granduciel's normal writing style. Typically, the frontman assembles The War On Drugs records from reams of overdubs, but for this one, the band drew on their chemistry as a live unit.
  • Filmmaker Emmett Malloy directed the video, shooting it on 16mm film at the Panoramic studio in Stinson Beach, California. Malloy has also directed several of Vampire Weekend's visuals, including "Holiday," "Giving Up the Gun," "Harmony Hall," and "This Life."

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