Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon on New Solo Debut, Why He’s No Rock Savior
When Rolling Stone catches up with Brian Fallon, the New Jersey native is in Los Angeles, and feeling a bit like a fish out of water. “I like it out here, but I don’t understand it,” he says. He admits, however, that this isn’t necessarily L.A.’s fault: “I’m one of those people who, even if I’m invited somewhere, I still kinda feel like I’m not supposed to be there. And that’s just the way I feel out here all the time. I’m always looking around, like, ‘Am I doing something wrong?'”
But getting comfortable in unfamiliar spaces is something that the 36-year-old Fallon, who has spent a decade fronting chest-beating Garden State rock heroes the Gaslight Anthem, is going to have to start getting used to. The day following this conversation, he will hop a flight to Arizona to kick off the official tour in support of Painkillers, his first-ever solo album, out March 11th. As for how he feels about being out on his own after so many years in a band? “I try not to think about it too much,” he says with a laugh. “Because it’s all on you. There’s no shielding.”
As a songwriter, Fallon has always seemed unafraid to reveal personal details — the Gaslight Anthem‘s last album, 2014’s Get Hurt, dealt in part with his then-recent divorce — but Painkillers presents quite possibly the most unshielded portrait of the artist yet. And it does so by placing his characteristically confessional lyrics in a more intimate musical setting, largely eschewing the swelling, electrified punk-rock-tinged anthems of Fallon’s other band in favor of something more small-screen, rootsy and acoustic. In the nimbly fingerpicked “Steve McQueen,” he laments an existence that is “only chains,” as he imagines himself as the titular movie star, while on the album’s leadoff track and first single, “A Wonderful Life” (admittedly, with its insistent snare hits and whoa-oh-oh gang-vocal backing, the most Gaslight-sounding of the bunch), he lays out his longing for a “life on fire/Goin’ mad with desire.”
“That’s probably one of the simplest and most direct songs I’ve ever written,” Fallon says of “A Wonderful Life.” “It’s about what I’m striving for, both personally and musically. What we’re all striving for, really — people just want their lives to mean something.” And while he acknowledges the song’s Gaslight-y feel, he also says, “I’m the primary writer in that band, so, yeah, some of this stuff is going to sound similar. That’s just me. But overall, I had to take a bit of a different approach. I didn’t want to make a record that was competing with the sound of the band, because then why not just do the band?”
Fallon, of course, had been doing the band for a long time. And a few years back, it could have been said that if Gaslight Anthem were not the biggest rock act in the world, they were certainly among the most critically lauded. Their breakthrough second album, 2008’s The ’59 Sound, and in particular the title track, a driving, lighter-waving rumination on young life — and young death — launched them to “Next Big Thing” status. Soon the band was sharing stages with the likes of Eddie Vedder and the Boss himself, and being championed in the press with phrases like “the saviors of rock & roll.”