Brian Fallon has never known how to be anything other than himself. As the frontman of punk rock outfit The Gaslight Anthem, he made the transition to a purveyor of heartland-tinged Americana almost seamlessly on his 2016 solo debut album ‘Painkillers’.
The Gaslight Anthem have got 2018 off to a pretty brilliant start by announcing their return from hiatus to celebrate the 10th birthday of their breakthrough album ‘The ’59 Sound’, but when it came to creating that fabled ‘difficult second album’ of his standalone career, the New Jersey troubadour was faced with something of an identity crisis.
“I think when I sat down to write the record I was more nervous than I had ever been,” he admits. “I had to call a few of my really close friends, so I called Ted [Hutt, producer] who produced the record, and I spoke to a friend of mine, [singer-songwriter] Matthew Ryan, and I was just saying about how I don’t know what’s next or how I follow this up, because people really liked ‘Painkillers’.
“The funny thing was what they both said was that you have to just be yourself. That sounds so small to say, but at the end of it, you have to let things go because the reason people ever wanted to listen to something you did in the first place was because you were just being yourself.
“There was no audience in the beginning, so when you do it this time, you have to go back to that same mindset, you have to force yourself back there.”
As his forthcoming second album ‘Sleepwalkers’ evidences, ‘being yourself’ for Brian means being a man of many tastes. The opening beat of ‘If Your Prayers Don’t Get to Heaven’ is evocative of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Part-Time Lover’, while the guitars on ‘Come Wander With Me’ give off vibes not dissimilar from ‘Rock The Kasbah’ by The Clash. It’s a record which dabbles in Brian’s life-long love for soul, R&B and British rock ‘n’ roll in ways you never thought possible for the man to do.
“When I had the first idea for the record, I watched that documentary about The Jam called ‘About A Young Idea’. One of my friends said, ‘you’ve gotta watch this documentary’ and showed it to me because they knew I love The Jam. I watched it and it sort of set me off on a trip.”
This trip sent him off to rediscover continents and cultures which Brian has embraced since childhood, long before he re-planted his roots in grittier soil.
“When I was a kid I used to listen to Desmond Dekker and Laurel Aitken and The Bodysnatchers – before ska was ‘ska’ you know?” Brian says enthusiastically. “It was pretty much R&B music from Jamaica, and they brought it over to England where it became this other thing. I was letting everything like that in, and my R&B influences and my punk influences kind of gave me a foundation to build from that.
“When I wrote ‘Come Wander With Me’, I had a lot of songs written already, and I took a little bit of a risk with that one. I did the riff first, and it’s a very dub riff. I didn’t know whether I should sing over it because I’d never approached a song like that before. That was when I went back to The Clash, and you know how Joe [Strummer, The Clash singer] almost talks his lyrics? He’s not rapping, but it’s like hip-hop because it falls on the beat. I was just getting very inspired by that, and just said what I felt, and that’s what came out.”
Despite all this influence having a very profound effect on the more electric sound of ‘Sleepwalkers’ compared to its predecessor, it’s still unmistakably the handiwork of Brian Fallon with a sincere doff of the cap to familiar pastures of sun-kissed heartland rock.
“I wouldn’t say this is a very challenging record to anybody,” he assures. “There are some bits from The Gaslight Anthem; there are some bits from [blues side-project] The Horrible Crowes… It’s just a natural record for me, and I’m not trying to push any boundaries with it. I’m not trying to make any big statements or reinvent the wheel – I’m just trying to say, ‘hey, this is all the different things that Brian Fallon likes’.
“I’m proud of the whole thing, I think it’s a really solid start-to-finish record, but I would say that I’m proud of some of the rhythms we got and some of the soul and R&B beats that I’ve tried to do for a long time.”
After he came to the rescue around the writing of ‘Sleepwalkers’, Brian reunited with Ted Hutt to produce the album in New Orleans. It had been no less than seven years since the pairing had worked together on The Gaslight Anthem’s pivotal third album ‘American Slang’ and The Horrible Crowes’ ‘Elsie’ record.
“I’d just got home from the last tour for ‘Painkillers’ in Europe and I got a phone call the next day from Ted, and he hadn’t called me in a while,” Brian explains. “He was just calling to see how everything was, and then immediately the idea struck me about getting back in the studio with Ted.”
“It had been a long time, so to get back together and to be able to just have fun again was really cool,” he adds on working with the man who also sat behind the desk for the making of The Gaslight Anthem’s ‘The ’59 Sound’ nearly a decade ago. “He’s the guy that brought all that stuff out of me about how you can let go and be yourself and not worry about people making fun of you, because that’s the biggest thing when you’re making a record.”
Returning to the studio with Ted for the first time in what felt like forever restored a feeling that Brian had struggled to embrace when his old band were at the peak of their powers, but also at their most scrutinised.
He recalls: “I don’t think any of us [in The Gaslight Anthem] were prepared for what ‘The ’59 Sound’ did, so when we recorded ‘American Slang’ there was definitely a heavy weight going on in the studio, which is probably why a record like The Horrible Crowes record was a reaction to the pressure.
“That’s why I went away and did that record because it was like I had to make music where no-one’s looking at it, and you’re not living under that lamp, because that’s a tough lamp to live under. It’s like everybody tries all their life to be successful, and then when you’re successful, you better know what you’re asking for.
“No matter what you do, someone will always have another side and another point of view, so you can’t worry about that, you have to just be you. I felt that recklessness in the recording, in just singing and yelling and screaming.”
The moment on ‘Sleepwalkers’ that signifies Brian stoking the fire in his belly is the single ‘Forget Me Not’, an upbeat folk-punk rager driven by the singer-songwriter’s most fervent vocal performance in years.
“There’s a bunch of vocal moments where I just got to let it out,” he laughs. “There’s a couple of tracks like ‘Etta James’ and ‘Watson’ where I really got to sing. I felt like I was Aretha Franklin for a minute, it was cool!
“We had so much fun just screaming that one ‘yeah’ in the middle of ‘Forget Me Not’, but it was just complete yelling madness. We were like, ‘let’s just make it as much like The Who as we can’. I must have done about 50 screams, and I was surprised because I could still talk afterwards. It felt good to sing like a 25-year-old again.”
Despite feeling more than ten years younger in the vocal booth, ‘Sleepwalkers’ comes around at a time where Brian admits that, as a 37-year-old father-of-two, he has started considering his mortality a lot more.
“The whole record is pretty real about the age that I’m at,” explains Brian. “Where you realise that one day you’re not gonna be here, and you’ve got to deal with that. I have kids now, so that really comes and slams home, and you see life as not infinite anymore.”
As doomy and gloomy as the proposition of an album addressing the inevitability of death sounds, Brian’s sophomore solo effort altogether takes a more hopeful tone than we’ve possibly ever heard from him before.
“I’m with Noel Gallagher, I wanna live forever, but I just don’t that’s possible anymore!” he chuckles. “It’s scary, and for some people, you can run from it, but on this record, I decided to sort of face up to it but not in a morbid way. There’s a big theme on the record of dealing with yourself not being permanent, and then also dealing with the joy of the fact that there’s a life here to be had.”
Even with that realist mindset, the record also marks the start of a new era of positivity for Brian Fallon. Having dealt with the divorce from his wife of more than a decade at the same time that The Gaslight Anthem were bidding farewell to the world – for now – he is looking ahead to the next wonderful chapter of his career.
“Everyone has these transitional periods in their life where everything blows up; it just happens to everybody. I had that start around the time of [The Gaslight Anthem’s last album] ‘Get Hurt’, and I was working it through it between that record and ‘Painkillers’, and then on ‘Painkillers’, I was working through the residuals and the aftermath.
“I ‘levelled off’, I would say, and I found my footing in my personal life and was able to feel like a person again. I’m not who I was before, but I’m okay with whoever I am now.”
Even as he nears the often-dreaded milestone that is the 40th birthday, life is still proving to be a constant learning curve for Brian. At a time mired by cruel unpredictability – politically, socially or otherwise – finding your idols is increasingly difficult, but Brian believes that there is more than meets the eye, especially in the things and people right in front of him. As the old saying goes: not all heroes wear capes…
“I think it’s always important to have some sort of hero,” he says in a more contemplative tone. “Sometimes you look too hard at celebrities or musicians or writers or artists, and I don’t think they’re equipped to be heroes. I almost think that in this day and age, you’ve got to find your own heroes in the people that are around you and support you, and the people that stand up for the right thing. Those people are what I would consider to be heroes.”
With that in mind, who does Brian see as his personal heroes?
“I find my parents are more like my heroes now. Especially with having little children and looking around at the world, I kind of wonder [if] I set them up to be in this world that’s going crazy. But then I look at what my parents did with me, and then I can see that you’ve got to just raise them right and then just teach them to be better than those people that are driving the world into the ground right now. Hopefully, the next generation is the generation that changes everything, so I think putting your time and effort into being those kids’ heroes is really important.”
Brian has also invested time in learning on a more practical level – in 2017 he started taking piano lessons, an ambition he had long postponed and another skill which has lent him a refreshing change of perspective.
He laughs modestly: “I feel like I’m refinding music in general because it’s such a new thing that I’m sitting down with no concept of and I’m not good at. It’s given me this appreciation for all the people that are putting their mind to something and working at it, and that’s exciting to me because I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark with this thing.
“It’s a joy that seems trivial and stupid – all the really good things in life can be dismissed so easily by cynical people just saying, ‘that’s stupid’ or ‘I’ve heard that before’. It’s hard to do, but if you just stop for a second and enjoy something, there’s so much in every day that you can find to lift your spirits.”
Brian Fallon’s album ‘Sleepwalkers’ is out 9th February. Taken from the February 2018 issue of Upset. Order a copy now bellow.
