Once he did, he hit the ground running in support of Slave Ambient, a labor of love largely recorded in his Fishtown living room in the three years since the release of the band's buzzed-about debut, Wagonwheel Blues, that ups the ante on the Drugs' intoxicating blend of Dylanesque verbiage and guitar-driven tapestries of sound.
Granduciel is embracing the quickening pace. He sat for an interview earlier this week in a Northern Liberties eatery before he and his bandmates hurried to New York for a record-store performance, with a song to learn in the van on the way.
But the scraggly-haired 32-year-old is not to be hurried when it comes to making music. Consider the focal point of the 12-song Slave Ambient - the six-minute epic "Your Love Is Calling My Name." Granduciel worked on the track over 3½ years. He speaks of how the "strange electronic backbones" of songs like the tightly coiled "Baby Missiles" or the propulsive "Come to the City" came together over a long process of trial and error.
In a digital era when indie bands use the Web to distribute their laptop pop instantly to the world at large, Granduciel - who grew up Adam Granofsky, in Dover, Mass., and acquired his nom de rock from an art teacher's French translation of "grand of sky" - records his experiments to old-fashioned tape and then nurtures them for months at a time.
The songs he's most happy with, he says, are those that display a quality not apparent much in popular culture: patience.
The son of the owner of a Boston used women's-clothing store and a Montessori school teacher, Granduciel studied art and photography at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., but gave up on painting because, he says, "I wasn't patient enough."
