2008 Innovators: The Gaslight Anthem
Featured Album
Reviewers of The ’59 Sound, the Gaslight Anthem’s second album, spent an awful lot of words describing what the record is like rather than what it is. It’s difficult to blame them. The New Brunswick, N.J., band invites Bruce Springsteen comparisons not only by virtue of its Garden State birthright; there’s also a restless, Born To Run energy coursing through singer/guitarist Brian Fallon’s songs about small-town regrets and big-time dreams. The ’59 Sound shoots straight from its working-class heart, evoking the faded, denim-clad glory of Tom Petty and the Replacements.
You don’t have to speak to the 28-year-old Fallon for long to determine he’s not very interested in decades-old notions of American rock ‘n ‘roll and rebellion. Fallon was born in Red Bank, N.J., his father a Nestle factory worker and his mother a grant writer for a nearby hospital. He spent his teenage years in Piscataway soaking up the central Jersey hardcore scene, a melodic variation on all-ages punk embodied by bands such as Lifetime and the Bouncing Souls. This biography is what comes spilling out on The ’59 Sound. Fallon’s earnest, regular-guy lyrics are wrapped in the slashing guitar runs of ’90s pop/punk outfits like Knapsack and the guttural anthemism of contemporaries Against Me! (with whom the Gaslight Anthem toured earlier this year).
Fallon spoke to eMusic from Covington, Ky., on the last night of the Gaslight Anthem’s U.S. tour.
I know you’ve had to talk about Springsteen a lot, so let’s not talk about him at all.
I’m a little bit sick of it. It’s cool and flattering, but after a while, it’s like, “It doesn’t really sound like Springsteen.” The influence is there, but people kind of harp on it … It’s fine. At least it’s not Vanilla Ice or something.
What I did want to talk about were the film references in some of the song titles (“Here’s Looking At You, Kid,” “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues”). What’s behind that?
I don’t really watch too many movies, but certain ones impact me really heavily. It’s the same with music — I don’t own too many records, I just like to digest stuff really well. Some of those old movies just sit with me. It seems like it was better then. You could get wrapped up in the mystery of it all — the plots and the way people were and the different era.
Is referencing movies a way to express something that’s outside of the music?
Well, I don’t think anything I write about is super deep. People don’t need to dig through it. I’ve never thought of myself as a Bob Dylan kind of writer. I’m just like, “That car’s blue. I like that car.” I like to have a good sense of what your average dude thinks. I have the same kind of thoughts that everybody has.
I think that’s one of the strengths of The ’59 Sound. It doesn’t over-think things. It’s kind of a breather from the smart-guy indie-rock bands that have followed Pavement.
I never got into that scene at all. It missed me by a lot. Even Fugazi didn’t sink in with me. I always respected those bands for what they did but thought, “That’s across the street. That’s going on over there.” The Bouncing Souls and Hot Water Music were big things for me. They were regular guys just saying what they thought.
One more thing about the movie-related song titles: I think my favorite one is “Wooderson” from (2007 debut) Sink Or Swim, which is Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed And Confused.
[In character] “Alright, alright, alright.” Wooderson had the best view on everything. He was the older guy, just hanging out and having a great time.
On the surface, The ’59 Sound seems to have a lot of that teenage nostalgia — driving around a small town, drinking down by the river’s edge, that kind of thing — but listening closer to it, there are a lot of ex-girlfriends and ex-wives and life experiences in there, too. It’s not about youthful rebellion.
It’s not at all. It’s about looking back on teenage rebellion regretfully, because it leads to a lot of toughness of growing up. You get scars from that stuff. It’s not really something to be relished and treasured. Teenage rebellion is something everyone has to go through, but that’s where you get the bruises that you carry for the rest of your life. This record is about me becoming an adult and realizing that, “It’s been 10 years, and I can’t shake that.” I almost wish everyone could go through teenage rebellion when they’re 40, because they’d have a better sense of it and it could be productive. People end up stuck because of it; they’re always trying to break out of their town but they find out they gotta get a job somewhere else in some other dead-end town. You gotta learn your purpose outside of that. And that’s what I’m trying to learn.
At some point this past year, you must have thought this band has turned into your career. You’re not going to be doing what your parents were doing.
The light at the end of the tunnel is foreseeable. The getting there is the tough part. There’s a lot of pitfalls you can fall into. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Somebody asked me the other day how many bad reviews (of The ’59 Sound) I’ve read, and I haven’t read any. That kind of scares me. We’re not trying to trick anybody. I’m trying to be careful and not do anything silly or self-indulgent, like trying to make a crazy record that shows how deep we’ve gotten. At the same time, we don’t want to feed the kids the same thing.
Speaking of the kids, you guys did the Warped Tour this year. Was that a good experience?
It was fun, yeah. We met the Bronx. We hung out with the Street Dogs. It was really hard, though. We were touring in our van. The big bands have buses, so they have somewhere to get out of the heat. But for bands like us who are poor, it can be brutal.
You obviously get a lot of younger people at your shows. But I heard that a lot of the people downloading The ’59 Sound at eMusic have been older.
That’s actually half our crowd right there. A lot of the younger kids will bring their dads. The seasoned guys. That’s cool with us.
