The Broken Drum Machine That Powered the War on Drugs’ ‘Lost in the Dream’

Gear Me is a column in which we ask some of our favorite musicians about the racks, stacks, and instruments they love best.

Put on a blindfold and throw a dart at any Hot 100 chart from the heart of the 1980s, and you’re likely to land on a hit powered by the LinnDrum. Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Billy Idol, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Kurtis Blow, George Michael, Genesis, Michael Jackson, and Donna Summer all made signature records with the classic drum machine, which helped to define the crisp and punchy sound that dominated the era between the last days of disco and the dawn of grunge. (Prince, who did more than any artist to popularize Linn’s drum machines, mostly used an earlier model known as the LM-1.) 

Getting your hands on one of these storied machines in 2024 will probably set you back something like $7,000. Adam Granduciel got his for free. Around 2011, right before the War on Drugs leader started making his breakout 2014 album Lost in the Dream, a friend just handed him a LinnDrum that was gathering dust in his basement. There was one problem: It wouldn’t turn on. Granduciel, ever the tinkerer, eventually got it working—sort of—and it became an integral part of his songwriting and production process as he conceptualized the record that would turn him into an indie rock star. That’s the LinnDrum you hear as the propulsive backbeat of “Disappearing,” providing Granduciel’s reveries with a sense of unstoppable forward motion, even as the song looks backward at memory and loss. 

After Granduciel’s initial DIY fix, his LinnDrum was still only good for about eight seconds of rhythm at a time before it fizzled out again. His process involved capturing a brief snippet of a beat, then running it through a delay pedal on an infinite loop and building a song around its repetitions. It’s of a piece with the way he makes music more generally: salvaging bits and pieces of rock history, figuring out which parts will still work for him, and filtering them through his scrappy lived experience—plus a whole lot of reverb and delay—until they’re rendered dreamlike and new. 

Last month, the War on Drugs released the deluxe edition of Live Drugs Again, a triumphant live album that demonstrates how far the band has come since the days of Granduciel fiddling with busted electronics at home alone. (The physical release ships on December 13.) Below, Granduciel demonstrates and talks about the drum machine that helped to kickstart his now-signature sound.

Do you still have the same LinnDrum, and did you ever get it fixed?

Adam Granduciel: Yeah. Five or six years later, after I moved to Los Angeles, someone was like, “There’s a guy out here who rebuilds those, but you gotta be careful, because when you drop it off, he might talk to you for five hours about aliens.” I was like, All right, I’m in the right place. 

I can’t help but feel like there’s something romantic in the image of you working with this tool that’s basically broken, coaxing sounds out of it and using them in whatever way you can. Did you ever regret fixing it?

When I got it fixed, it was almost overwhelming. It was like I had a new LinnDrum, and I was like, I don’t know if I really need a new LinnDrum. I basically just liked the stuff I was making with it. I liked having a very simple beat to write around that becomes part of the song. But I didn’t feel like I lost anything. It was more like I felt bad that I’m still just going to use this in the barebones way I used it when it was still broken.

Over the years, my engineer would bring out the manual and figure things out that I have no idea how to do. It has opened up a lot of worlds: syncing it to other instruments, changing the pitches—you can be playing along and slowly change the snare from super low and slow to a high sort of ping. Or putting different effects on different drum sounds, so the kick is all blown-out and the snare has delay on it.

For anyone who’s not a huge gear head, can you talk about what a LinnDrum sounds like versus some other famous drum machine, like a TR-808?

The 808 is known for that super-low, subby bass kick sound that’ll shake your car. The Linn is more punchy. It’s more like an emulation of a drummer than it is like an electronic drum thing. Roger Linn was a recording engineer in L.A. who was moonlighting making shit on the side. The LinnDrum uses samples of actual drummers, and I’m pretty sure that [legendary session drummer] Jim Keltner was the source of a lot of those early Linn sounds. 

The more songs you hear with it, you’ll be like, Oh, that’s the LinnDrum. I had this Halloween party with my kid the other day, and Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” was on the playlist, and I was like, That’s probably a Linn. And of course, “Time After Time,” that’s a Linn. “Boys of Summer,” classic Linn. There’s always something immediately recognizable when you use it, because it’s the sound of so many amazing recordings. And like everything, once you start adding reverb or delay to things, it starts opening up all sorts of things you could do with it. 

I’ll be honest, I thought you would have chosen a guitar or a pedal as the one piece of gear you can’t live without.

I’ve been going back and forth. Looking around my studio, I truly couldn’t live without an acoustic guitar, or a little Casio keyboard, or a delay pedal. Sometimes I feel like everything I do basically goes through a delay pedal. If I plug into an amp, and the amp doesn’t have reverb or delay, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I mean, I do, but it’s a big part of playing for me. 

I collect a ton of gear, and at the end of the day, the important thing is always: Maybe, inside of this piece, there’s another song. And I’m just always inspired when the LinnDrum is around. Nowadays, it would be very easy not to use it: You can get all the different samples in Pro Tools and just click and drag them onto the grid. With a guitar, you kind of have to play the guitar—I can’t just drag some app into the session and it’ll play a guitar solo for me. With the LinnDrum, you really have to choose to use it, and spend the extra 20 minutes to sync it up, get the outputs going, check the levels, and commit to a tempo—all these things.

The Linn is tough to live without as a spark of unpredictability. Sometimes it glitches, but it just sounds so good. My favorite sessions are usually when I’m in the studio with my engineer friend with the Linn, a couple keyboards, and maybe a sequence going, just creating a really beautiful bed for a song. I kind of write on guitar, but with guitar it’s more a reaction to what’s already happening. I don’t really sit down and write riffs. I’ve never been into that.

I’m interested in what you said about wondering whether a piece of gear has a song in it. There’s a certain old-fashioned idea about songwriting, where you sit at the piano or guitar, put the chords together, write the melody and the words, and everything else is “production” or “arrangement”—stuff that comes later, after the process of the true, quote-unquote, songwriting. And I feel like some people might be surprised to learn that, in fact, you can start a song from a drum machine. This feels especially true in your music, where the songwriting and the production are all part of the same organic thing. 

If you just sit down with an acoustic guitar and just strum, E, F-sharp minor, A, you’re like, All right, that’s cool—what else? Maybe you could write some words. But then if you turn on your LinnDrum and there’s a beat behind you, immediately, for lack of a better word, there’s a vibe happening. All of a sudden you’re part of a bigger sound. Ideas may come before that, but for me, it’s when you have something interesting happening in the rhythm section that the chords and the words that you’re putting around it start to make a lot more sense. 

I’m jealous of people who can sit with an acoustic guitar and write and sing an entire song. That’s really cool. But for me, it’s just different. I need a little bit more of an atmosphere, and a world to live in sonically, to feel like the chords I’m writing have a home. You sync the Linn up to the Juno 60 and you have the two talking to each other. You have this arpeggio and the drums all locked together, and I’m playing three suspended chords on a piano. And all of a sudden, because there’s something behind it, these suspended chords feel way vibier than they did when I was just playing them on their own for a month at the piano. 

I want to create a little world for these songs. Once I have that, I can take some idea for a guitar or piano line that I recorded at home as a voice memo, and start playing that, and it comes to life within that world.