Brian Fallon: “It felt good to sing like a 25-year-old again”

The ex-Gaslight Anthem frontman talks parenthood, mortality and stepping outside of punk rock on his second solo album.

Brian Fallon has never known how to be anything other than himself. As the frontman of punk rock outfit The Gaslight Anthem, he made the transition to a purveyor of heartland-tinged Americana almost seamlessly on his 2016 solo debut album ‘Painkillers’.

The Gaslight Anthem have got 2018 off to a pretty brilliant start by announcing their return from hiatus to celebrate the 10th birthday of their breakthrough album ‘The ’59 Sound’, but when it came to creating that fabled ‘difficult second album’ of his standalone career, the New Jersey troubadour was faced with something of an identity crisis.

“The funny thing was what they both said was that you have to just be yourself. That sounds so small to say, but at the end of it, you have to let things go because the reason people ever wanted to listen to something you did in the first place was because you were just being yourself.

As his forthcoming second album ‘Sleepwalkers’ evidences, ‘being yourself’ for Brian means being a man of many tastes. The opening beat of ‘If Your Prayers Don’t Get to Heaven’ is evocative of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Part-Time Lover’, while the guitars on ‘Come Wander With Me’ give off vibes not dissimilar from ‘Rock The Kasbah’ by The Clash. It’s a record which dabbles in Brian’s life-long love for soul, R&B and British rock ‘n’ roll in ways you never thought possible for the man to do.

This trip sent him off to rediscover continents and cultures which Brian has embraced since childhood, long before he re-planted his roots in grittier soil.

“When I was a kid I used to listen to Desmond Dekker and Laurel Aitken and The Bodysnatchers – before ska was ‘ska’ you know?” Brian says enthusiastically. “It was pretty much R&B music from Jamaica, and they brought it over to England where it became this other thing. I was letting everything like that in, and my R&B influences and my punk influences kind of gave me a foundation to build from that.

“When I wrote ‘Come Wander With Me’, I had a lot of songs written already, and I took a little bit of a risk with that one. I did the riff first, and it’s a very dub riff. I didn’t know whether I should sing over it because I’d never approached a song like that before. That was when I went back to The Clash, and you know how Joe almost talks his lyrics? He’s not rapping, but it’s like hip-hop because it falls on the beat. I was just getting very inspired by that, and just said what I felt, and that’s what came out.”

Despite all this influence having a very profound effect on the more electric sound of ‘Sleepwalkers’ compared to its predecessor, it’s still unmistakably the handiwork of Brian Fallon with a sincere doff of the cap to familiar pastures of sun-kissed heartland rock.

After he came to the rescue around the writing of ‘Sleepwalkers’, Brian reunited with Ted Hutt to produce the album in New Orleans. It had been no less than seven years since the pairing had worked together on The Gaslight Anthem’s pivotal third album ‘American Slang’ and The Horrible Crowes’ ‘Elsie’ record.

Returning to the studio with Ted for the first time in what felt like forever restored a feeling that Brian had struggled to embrace when his old band were at the peak of their powers, but also at their most scrutinised.

He recalls: “I don’t think any of us were prepared for what ‘The ’59 Sound’ did, so when we recorded ‘American Slang’ there was definitely a heavy weight going on in the studio, which is probably why a record like The Horrible Crowes record was a reaction to the pressure.

“That’s why I went away and did that record because it was like I had to make music where no-one’s looking at it, and you’re not living under that lamp, because that’s a tough lamp to live under. It’s like everybody tries all their life to be successful, and then when you’re successful, you better know what you’re asking for.

The moment on ‘Sleepwalkers’ that signifies Brian stoking the fire in his belly is the single ‘Forget Me Not’, an upbeat folk-punk rager driven by the singer-songwriter’s most fervent vocal performance in years.

“There’s a bunch of vocal moments where I just got to let it out,” he laughs. “There’s a couple of tracks like ‘Etta James’ and ‘Watson’ where I really got to sing. I felt like I was Aretha Franklin for a minute, it was cool!

Despite feeling more than ten years younger in the vocal booth, ‘Sleepwalkers’ comes around at a time where Brian admits that, as a 37-year-old father-of-two, he has started considering his mortality a lot more.

As doomy and gloomy as the proposition of an album addressing the inevitability of death sounds, Brian’s sophomore solo effort altogether takes a more hopeful tone than we’ve possibly ever heard from him before.

Even with that realist mindset, the record also marks the start of a new era of positivity for Brian Fallon. Having dealt with the divorce from his wife of more than a decade at the same time that The Gaslight Anthem were bidding farewell to the world – for now – he is looking ahead to the next wonderful chapter of his career.

“Everyone has these transitional periods in their life where everything blows up; it just happens to everybody. I had that start around the time of ‘Get Hurt’, and I was working it through it between that record and ‘Painkillers’, and then on ‘Painkillers’, I was working through the residuals and the aftermath.

Even as he nears the often-dreaded milestone that is the 40th birthday, life is still proving to be a constant learning curve for Brian. At a time mired by cruel unpredictability – politically, socially or otherwise – finding your idols is increasingly difficult, but Brian believes that there is more than meets the eye, especially in the things and people right in front of him. As the old saying goes: not all heroes wear capes...

With that in mind, who does Brian see as his personal heroes?

“I find my parents are more like my heroes now. Especially with having little children and looking around at the world, I kind of wonder I set them up to be in this world that’s going crazy. But then I look at what my parents did with me, and then I can see that you’ve got to just raise them right and then just teach them to be better than those people that are driving the world into the ground right now. Hopefully, the next generation is the generation that changes everything, so I think putting your time and effort into being those kids’ heroes is really important.”

Brian has also invested time in learning on a more practical level – in 2017 he started taking piano lessons, an ambition he had long postponed and another skill which has lent him a refreshing change of perspective.

He laughs modestly: “I feel like I’m refinding music in general because it’s such a new thing that I’m sitting down with no concept of and I’m not good at. It’s given me this appreciation for all the people that are putting their mind to something and working at it, and that’s exciting to me because I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark with this thing.