Thinking of a Place

Adam Granduciel builds his songs in the studio the way other musicians build cathedrals — piece by piece, over months, chasing a sound that’s already in his head. “Thinking of a Place” is the longest and most patient thing he’s ever made, eleven minutes that unfold with the specific geography of a drive through country he almost remembers.

The song has three movements, a long instrumental passage in the middle that functions as the drive itself, and a return to the refrain that feels less like repetition and more like arrival at the place the title names. You can hear Dylan in his phrasing and Springsteen in the Americana-scale ambition, but the patience is his own — the willingness to let a song take as long as it needs to become what it’s trying to become.