THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM’S BRIAN FALLON & CO. BRING THE NOISE ON THEIR FIRST ALBUM SINCE REFORMING
By Jim Beaugez
— that’s who taught me how to play those songs that I’d learned to write,” Brian Fallon says
OVER THE COURSE of Brian Fallon’s three-album solo career — all recorded and released while on hiatus from his main gig fronting the Gaslight Anthem — he never played any of his other band’s songs with his solo group, despite having sure-fire crowd pleasers like “45” and “The ’59 Sound” in his pocket.
“I just felt it was weird to have another band playing your old band’s songs,” Fallon says from his home in New Jersey, where he’s been tinkering with amps ahead of the October 27 release of History Books, the first Gaslight Anthem album since 2014’s Get Hurt.
“I guess it’s not weird if you’re Noel Gallagher and your band’s broken up and you’re not getting back together — or Johnny Marr,” he says. “But for us, it was less about it being over and more like, we just don’t know what the next move is. And it took about eight years to figure that out.”
Being off the road for a year and a half following the release of the introspective Local Honey in 2020 gave him space to think about what might come next for his solo career. The answer was easy: nothing. “I was like, ‘I’m good,’” he says. “I feel like I did what I wanted to do for myself, and I really did not have anything else to add.”
While at first he was hesitant to whisper the word “reunion” even to himself, he began writing songs that felt a lot like his old band. “Positive Charge,” the first song fans heard from History Books this summer, was also the first song he wrote in that initial spurt of creativity. “I was like, maybe I wanna write rock songs again,” he says, “and then that came out so quickly and easily, like it was waiting there for me to grab it.”
Fallon slow-walked the steps to the band’s eventual reset in 2022 from there, first calling on drummer Benny Horowitz, whom he credits as the “unofficial spiritual advisor” of the band. They talked, and then they jammed some of Fallon’s new songs. Once they brought in guitarist Alex Rosamilia and bassist Alex Levine, they dove into the back catalog without a plan, calling out songs on the fly to see if they still felt like the Gaslight Anthem.
That reconnection inaugurated the
