Brian Fallon

FOR HIS THIRD SOLO ALBUM, EX- GASLIGHT ANTHEM LUMINARY BRIAN FALLON EXPLORES A WEALTH OF NEWFOUND ARTISTIC INTROSPECTION. THE END RESULT IS SOME OF HIS BOLDEST AND MOST STRIKING MATERIAL TO DATE.

As the old adage goes, you either die a punk or live long enough to see yourself release a folk album. Though the roots of folk and country have always planted themselves throughout Brian Fallon’s discography – most notably when he was the frontman of heartland heroes The Gaslight Anthem – the 40-year-old New Jersian has officially made the crossover into fingerpicking singer-songwriter territory with Local Honey, his third solo album and a blindingly beautiful compilation of introspective reveries.

A mostly lowkey affair, Local Honey showcases Fallon at his rawest and most vulnerable; he has nowhere to hide with his emotional fervour, he can’t bury a feeling in an onslaught of riffs or shake off his worries in a breakdown. The music is resoundingly mature and understated, yet it’s undoubtedly some of his most complex and mosaic. It’s a fitting album for right now, too, offering some much-needed calm in an era of calamity.

With nothing else to do but twiddle around on his collection of dreadnoughts, Fallon took a break from social distancing to chat with us about his serpentine new set of slow-burning jams.

I read that you started taking guitar lessons again recently. What made you realise you wanted to get back to school with the instrument, and what’s that been like?

Thing is, I could do it, y’know? Like, I’ve been playing the guitar for a long time. But I reached a point that I think everybody gets to, where you sort of reach your limits – you know everything that you’re able to do with your own motivation. And I wanted to be able to do more things!

I wanted to be able to play the acoustic guitar and not just have it be, like, campfire strumming. I didn’t know how to fingerpick, so I had to learn how to do all of that stuff and break it down really slow. And then that led into other things, and

I sort of went, “Well, if I can do this, then what about that?” I started looking at all these different things, and I’m still doing it! I’m still learning. .

When people think of Brian Fallon, the guitarist, most people think of that big, driving Les Paul sound, those huge punky riffs and big hooks. What’s it been like going from that sort of playing style to this really clean, fingerpicked acoustic vibe?

Well, it’s been a slow journey. Over the last probably five years, I’ve been inching slowly – with each record, I suppose – towards sounding cleaner and cleaner, and more acoustic and fingerpicked. It’s almost like I’ve had a little bit of a lead-up, and now it’s pretty normal for me – it feels comfortable, y’know? But it’s definitely made me concentrate on things a lot more, because if you don’t have the amp turned all the way up, you have to be really precise with what you’re doing. Every off note sounds a million times worse when it’s acoustic.

So going into this new chapter of your story, how did you want this album to be the best reflection of who you are and what it is you have to say in 2020? And do you think you achieved that in the end?

I did! But I didn’t really know that I would when I set out to write it; I thought I was just going to continue down the path I’d already been going down, and then somewhere in the middle of the writing process, I said, “Wait a second…” I’ve been wanting to do a more acoustic record my whole career. I was like, “Why are you waiting to do this? Why don’t you just do it!?”

And then it came from being uncertain and having a certain lack of skill in the beginning. But I felt like I achieved what I wanted to – I was like, “I can play! I can do this stuff! I might as well dive in!” And it really was a good thing to do, because I didn’t know I was doing it. I was a little unsure about it and nervous, but once I finished, I felt such a strong sense of satisfaction.

I don’t know if this is, like, my best record or whatever – I wasn’t judging it like that. I just said, “I’m so satisfied with this – this is exactly what I needed to do right now for myself.”

It’s such a cliche thing in music journalism to bang on about the maturity of a record that comes as far into a musician’s career as this one has for you – but I feel like this is one of those records where I can get away with it, because it genuinely is a really personally dense and matured album, especially compared to your past in bands like The Gaslight Anthem. When you look at these songs yourself, do you feel like this is the kind of record you could only have written now that you’re an adult and you’ve lived as much life as you have?

Absolutely. I don’t think I could have written

this record when I was in my 20s – not a chance. I think it took a lot of sort of experimenting and writing other songs first to find my footing with this record. I had to write all of those other songs to get to these songs. There’s no way that I could have done this – at least not in this way – back in the 2000s.

Musically speaking as well, compared to your last two solo albums, this record feels a bit more stripped back and a bit closer to the chest. Is that a byproduct of how personal these songs are for you?

I think the lyrics led it to be that way. In the beginning, I was trying to play electric instruments all over it – some of the songs were a lot faster as well – and they started to lose something when I did that. It was really the lyrical themes that dictated how it went, because every time I would go back to a song with just the acoustic guitar or a piano, I went, “Okay, this is supporting the song much, much better than the electric guitar was.” I played a resonator a lot on this record, too, and that gave it a whole new vibe.

What is it about the resonator that just pickled your onions?

It has a real percussive element to it. I don’t know if it’s just from being American and hearing that old appellation sound that reminds us of the Mississippi Delta, the blues and folk music… I don’t live in the South so I don’t have that connection with the blues that some of those people do, but I have a very close connection to things like Woody Guthrie and that whole upstate New York scene. And that just resonates with something at our core, where we hear the resonator and our hearts start to vibrate.

Have you always had a soft spot for music of the more twangy equation?

Yeah! I mean, I think you can hear that even on Gaslight’s first album, Sink Or Swim. I had the song “Red At Night”, and you can hear how it’s totally that dusty, wide, Americana-esque thing. And on every record we did, there was always that one song like that. I always felt like that was my one chance to really speak on every record. I can remember recording each one of those songs and being like, “Yeah!” I felt so strongly about those.

What other guitars were you jamming on for this record?

As far as the electric guitars go, I went back to the Telecaster; I got a Custom Shop Broadcaster recently, and I used that on every single song. And I have a little Deluxe Reverb from 1966 that I used – every guitar that you hear on the record was played through that amp. We tried other amps – we had a whole bunch of newer and more advanced ones in the studio, but that one just sounded the best.