So Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon – how does Bruce Springsteen like his burgers?
“Oh you heard about that? Yeah, Bruce came on up to the house for a party we threw,” laughs the chiselled, tattoo-wreathed singer. “Alex, our bass-player, cooked him a burger. It was pretty awesome. What way did he cook it? Do you know, I can’t remember. Ha ha…”
Kindred New Jersey-ites, Springsteen and The Gaslight Anthem’s history goes beyond an afternoon chomping junkfood and chugging beers on the porch. Since the New Brunswick four-piece broke out with their yearning, blue-collar sound – think Born To Run for Generation Recession – Bruce has been a relentless champion. Sometimes, it could be contended, too much of a champion.
“You think, ‘Well come on, guys, we’ve got our own thing going on, you know,’” protests Fallen. “I mean, we don’t sound exactly like Bruce. We’re doing our own stuff. As musicians we want to make it on our own. We want people to like us on our merits. Not because Bruce told them to.”
What’s he saying? That Gaslight Anthem would rather Springsteen quit banging a drum on their behalf?
“Not at all. Man, I love that guy. He has been such a kind and good person for us. A lot of folks would not have heard of The Gaslight Anthem if it wasn’t for Bruce."
Music aside, they’ve learned some salutary lessons from Springsteen. Number one: just because you’ve had success, don’t treat the people around you like extras in the movie version of your life. It’s a New Jersey thing.
“If I go to a store and someone knows who I am, or say, I’m with Bruce, they don’t treat us like royalty,” explains Fallon. “And we don’t treat them as if they’re any less than us. I’ve seen Bruce hang with people and he honestly doesn’t care what they do. To him, they’re human beings. I don’t know… maybe it’s to do with being from New Jersey.”
Gaslight Anthem are back with a smoking new record, Handwritten. It arrives after a two-year hiatus, during which they’ve been pretty much off the map. Their exile was not, says Fallon, exactly voluntary. People in their organisation feared they were in danger of wearing out their welcome.
“Our management had always been telling us, ‘Tour, tour, tour – get out there as much as you can’,” says the singer. “Now they were telling us, ‘Jeez, guys – you’ve kind of toured everywhere. You really can’t go on the road right now.’”
For Fallon and his hard-toiling crew it was a shock. Since breaking through with their blue collar rock 2006, they’d spent most of their life on tour. Now they were being told to knock live performance on the head?
“We were basically forced to take a break,” says Fallon. “So we all did a couple of side projects. I did this thing called The Revival Tour with Dave Adriano of Alkaline Trio. Which meant that, when it came time to do Gaslight Anthem again, we couldn’t wait to get back in the saddle and play loud rock ‘n’ roll.”
If American Slang was a disappointment – a hodgepodge of workin’-for-the-man clichés that failed to cohere into anything new or interesting – Handwritten is the cracking record the group have always threatened. Working in Nashville with – but of course – Springsteen producer Brendan O’Brien, it achieves the tricky feat of being in-your-face catchy, but also slow-burning and nuanced.
“We were ready to write it,” Fallon reflects. “With some records, bands write when they’re not ready. You can hear it in the results: it sounds kinda forced. You can tell with someone like Bob Dylan – when he released Time Out Of Mind, you know he was ready. And the whole thing comes out really easily – it was cool.”
The biggest departure this time around is that Gaslight Anthem are signed to a major, Mercury Records. At a time when bands are deserting big labels in droves, aren’t they swimming up-current?
“The thing about a major is that they can get your music out there in a way that isn’t possible at an indie,” he avers. “With an indie sometimes there simply aren’t enough people. Usually, there’s maybe ten people there. With a major, they might have 1,000 on staff. They’ve got a lot of connections, which they can put to work for you.”
Yes, but isn’t there a trade-off? Majors expect hit singles and albums with the potential to go platinum.
“It was the easiest thing in the world. We didn’t have these guys sitting across from us at a boardroom table saying, ‘Where’s the single?’ A couple of year ago, that’s how I might have impinged things. The reality is different. It isn’t as corporate as you think. The guys at Mercury, ultimately they’re just music fans.”
O’Brien is based in Nashville. However the decision to record in the capital of country music was reached before they’d settled on a producer. The goal was to get outside their comfort zone, to move to a city where they knew absolutely nobody.
“We’d never really spent any time in Nashville before. It was like, ‘Where can we go where we are completely isolated?’ And we’d been big fans of Brendan. We had so many people offering to produce us, including lots of crazy folk who weren’t really involved in music. I think the stuff he’s done with Bruce is his best since the late seventies. Brendan was the only guy who said, ‘Hey, let’s just make a great rock ‘n’ roll album.”
As an old-school, barnstorming rock band Fallon is aware that, in a way, Gaslight Anthem, are a voice in the wilderness. The mainstream has gone pop, the underground is in love with the retroactive likes of Twin Shadow and Ariel Pink. Where do a bunch of bad-ass rockers from the sticks fit in?
“The way things are now reminds me of 1990, 1991,” he says. “I was about 11 and I’d never really been into all that hair metal, aside from a few Guns N’ Roses songs. All of a sudden the floodgates opened with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. That’s what it feels like now. That we’re on the brink of something. It’s all ready to happen.”
He may be Springsteen’s BFF. But in a way Fallon has more in common with another New Jersey rock institution.
“The Bon Jovi guys grew up just down the street from me. They really did come from humble origins. They’re regular guys. It’s funny. Now Jon Bon Jovi has a place just across the river from where I live. I can see his house from my house. I guess the only difference is his house is a helluva lot bigger than mine!”