Ahead of The Gaslight Anthem’s UK tour, guitarist/ vocalist Brian Fallon and lead player Alex Rosamilia discuss their unique chemistry – and how their influences run all the way from Nirvana to Def Leppard
Just think for amoment on how a year of life feels, how things change, how you change, and then think what nine years of living feels like. That’s the time and distance The Gaslight Anthem put between the release of 2014’s GetHurtand current album HistoryBooks.
During their hiatus, declared in the summer of 2015, life marched on relentlessly. For one thing, frontman/guitarist Brian Fallon had a solo career to launch, releasing four albums in the interim.
Gaslight, for their part, did get back together just three years later to mark the 10th anniversary of the New Jersey rockers’ landmark release, The ’59Sound. Even if only unconsciously, this yawning gap in Gaslight history needed addressing before o cially executing a comeback, when it was time to really get the band back together, ie, in a studio, with new material and a vision, and the collective pursuit of an album to deliver to a label and the fans.
It’s the sort of thing you’ve got to pu out the cheeks and get serious about.
“When I sat down and thought, ‘Uh-oh! Gotta write a Gaslight Anthem album. Ha! And it’s gotta be good!’ That’s tough,” says Fallon. “This one was us trying to gure out what we sounded like now, but including all of the elements we have ever had. Like a lot of bands try to run away from whatever it was they were before –and I have done that myself –but if you try and embrace everything that you are and just maybe shine a light on one side of it, or a di erent perspective, it only takes a small change for people to notice.”
Which is to say that HistoryBookshas its surprises but is not going to leave anyone with a black eye and hurt feelings from a wicked curveball. This is Gaslight exploring their centre of musical gravity, a band who graduated from the American punk rock scene to become heirs apparent to Bruce Springsteen’s role as commander-in-chief of blue-collar rock songs that can reach, inspire and a ect all demographics. That exalted status is all but anointed on HistoryBooksby a guest spot from The Boss himself on a title track that lays bare the The Gaslight Anthem’s sound and ethos. Everything you ever needed to understand them is right here, the full emotional range, from haunting and elegiac Michigan, 1975to the wide open spaces and constant movement of Autumn, and it is also a showcase of some of the guitar sounds that had the most profound in uence on Fallon and lead guitarist Alex Rosamilia in their formative years. PositiveChargewas the rst song that came together, and it betrays that with an exhalation from the guitars, as though they’re in a hur
