“We’ve taken everything we do and gone to 10 with it,” says the singer. Put more simply, it’s a supercharged American rock ‘n’ roll classic. Brian Fallon likens its incandescent electrical storms to “Tom Petty songs played by Pearl Jam”. Introduced by muscular lead-off single 45, which received it’s world premiere on BBC Radio 1 as Zane Lowe’s Hottest Record In The World on April 30, it finds the Jersey boys in inspired form, decanting ’60′s soul, ’70′s stadium rock, ’80s hardcore and ’90′s grunge into eleven white-knuckle, blue-collar everyman anthems. The result is Handwritten, the most committed, affecting and compelling album of The Gaslight Anthem’s career to date. “After six weeks of that there’s nothing you want to hear more than a Marshall stack turned all the way up,” he says with a laugh. And then he returned home to New Jersey and Gaslight, re-energised, renewed and ready to make a full-tilt rock ‘n’ roll record again. After the band’s acclaimed debut album Elsie dropped in September, Fallon joined fellow punk rock troubadours Chuck Ragan, Dan Andriano (Alkaline Trio) and Dave Hause (The Loved Ones) on the acoustic Revival Tour, airing stripped-down versions of Gaslight Anthem and Horrible Crowes songs to packed rooms across Europe. And so, in January 2011, together with TGA guitar tech Ian Perkins, he formed The Horrible Crowes, a darkly melancholic side-project inspired by his love of The Afghan Whigs, Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. After three albums of soulful, impassioned, hearts-on-fire punk rock – 2007′s Sink Or Swim, 2008′s The ’59 Sound and 2010′s American Slang – Fallon needed a change of pace, a change of scenery. He wasn’t wrong.īut there was a time, not so very long ago, when The Gaslight’s Anthem frontman had grown weary of the sound of electric guitars. Their mission: to reconnect with rock ‘n’ roll in its most feral, pure, stripped-raw form.īrian Fallon was thirteen years old when he discovered The Clash’s self-titled debut album in the racks of Sound Effects Records in Hackettstown, New Jersey: the owner of the store promised the young teenager that the record would change his life. Their destination was 2806 Azalea Place, Nashville, Blackbird Studio, where the New Brunswick quartet had booked five weeks recording time with producer Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, AC/DC). On January 18, 2012, The Gaslight Anthem piled into their old tour van and headed across the New Jersey state line for a 14 hour road trip to Nashville on their own quest for the truth. Every songwriter knows three chords, but laying bare the truth? Now that can be an altogether trickier affair… The late Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard famously defined the ingredients of a great song as “three chords and the truth”.
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