Brian Fallon
Find out what the former Gaslight Anthem frontman bought when we gave him £50 to spend on vinyl records.
As Nick Hornby illustrated in his novel High Fidelity, a record shop is about so much more than just retail and stuff. A good one is a place to make friends, get recommendations, and bicker about the relative merits of the more obscure corners of the musical universe. It’s about heart and soul.
Rough Trade East, located in a fashionable corner of London, has a special place in the heart of Brian Fallon and that of his British wife. When they first started dating, she worked just around the corner, and the then-Gaslight Anthem frontman would spend many happy hours waiting for her here, drinking coffee and browsing the aisles. The band even played their first UK show here, the night before their debut appearance at the Reading and Leeds festivals. So today, when we meet him bright and early to shop for vinyl and chat about his musical loves, he’s in a relaxed and nostalgic frame of mind, although the all-important coffee is more vital than ever, as he had a late night at the Americana awards the previous evening.
With that event still a fresh memory, he gives a bleary grin and leads us straight to the country section, heaping praise on The Highwomen, who were also at the awards, before landing on a batch of Lucinda Williams albums. “The lyrics and the stories that she’s telling, she creates this world where you kind of forget you’re listening to a record and you start just putting yourself in the story,” he says, full of admiration.
Fallon’s new solo album, the poetic Local Honey, sits alongside the world of Americana comfortably, while retaining his own style shaped by an array of influences. He credits Ian Perkins, his bandmate in the Horrible Crowes, with guiding him towards acts such as The War On Drugs and his current favourite, Lana Del Rey.
“As soon as I put on Video Games I was like: ‘I do not care what happens for the rest of her career, I will be a fan.’ To me she is Leonard Cohen for my generation. I think Leonard Cohen said things that were extremely offensive at the time. He talked about things that no one talked about. But it was always with taste and it was always poetic, it wasn’t just to shock. It was always a little bit religious in a way, almost more like you were listening to a sermon than hearing a record.”
A search for some mid-90s Bob Dylan in the shape of Time Out Of Mind proves to be fruitless, but it does lead us neatly to the 60s and 70s section, which is packed with artists he’s taken his cues from over the years.
“The biggest influence on me as a performer, live, period, is Tom Waits,” he says, rummaging through the great yarn-spinner’s vast back catalogue and pulling out a copy of 1999’s magnificent Mule Variations.
“I think it’s where everything came together,” he says. “Tom Waits sort of left behind all the pomp, and instead of being the drunken balladeer he was just like: ‘I’m going to be myself, and if that isn’t good enough for people that’s okay.’ This was his first record to win a Grammy, when he was around fifty-five. I remember the day this came out. It encouraged me to realise you don’t have to succeed when you’re young, you don’t have to reach your pinnacle when you’re young.”
Age is very much on Fallon’s mind at the moment. He’s just turned 40, and middle age suits him, thanks to an air of personal contentment and artistic satisfaction. “I think I was born forty,” he says. “I’ve been waiting to be forty my whole life. I can’t wait until I’m forty-five.”
At home he’s not a rock star, just a doting husband, and father to a seven-year-old son obsessed with chaotic house music and drum’n’bass, and a threeyear-old daughter who loves Broadway show tunes. This sense of peace is artfully rendered on Local Honey, a beautiful reflection of his current mind-set.
“Lyrically I was trying to be as straightforward as possible,” he explains. “Sometimes I felt like I would use imagery and my lyrics were more like vignettes. Whereas now I was sitting down and I tried to actually start a story and see it through and not make it about a million things. I wanted to be clear and direct and not try to impress anybody with language. It’s kind of where my life’s at. I’m comfortable as a parent and my role as a husband, and just being a person in the world. There’s this great freedom in not having to try to be cool any more.
“I love watching the younger
“I’ve been waiting to be forty my whole life. I can’t wait until I’m forty-five.”
kids. I was watching the Grammys, and I saw Billie Eilish up there with her brother. That’s cool. They recorded it in their bedroom, it was so awesome. But I also know that’s not for me to try to do, that’s for them. I think the saddest thing you can see is somebody who’s clearly not of that generation try to jam themselves into something that they’re not. It’s creepy.”
Fallon’s own musical awakening came via his mother’s record collection. She introduced him to the Rolling Stones, early Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell (“that was gospel in the house”), everything that was cool during her own youth. He went on to discover The Clash, The Replacements and bands like Pearl Jam for himself, although the first record he bought for himself, at the age of eight, won’t be topping any best-of lists any time soon.
“It was New Kids On The Block, Hangin’ Tough,” he admits says a laugh. “You know why I bought it? Because that’s what the girls liked. I actually hadn’t got to the point when I was trying to convince them of anything, all I knew was that the girls that lived down the street would go out on the front lawn and play that record and dance to it. I wasn’t trying to win them over at that age, all I knew was I wanted to be part of what they were doing. I thought they would think I was cool and they’d let me dance with them.”
He picks up a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, considers buying it, then remembers he already has three copies of it at home. “Tango In The Night, though! That’s an odd one, but I like it.” There are two albums sitting alongside it, though, that he pulls from the racks and holds like the lifelong friends they are: the Springsteen pair The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle and The Ghost Of Tom Joad.
“This is the record that I think influenced me more than any other record,” he says of the latter. “The song that hit me the most right off the bat was Highway 29. I could hear the words going in my ears, but in my head I saw a movie. When I first heard this song, I graduated high school and I went on a road trip by myself. On my way I stopped at a bookstore that had cassettes, and this was the record I bought. I listened to the first three songs and got to Highway 29, and I didn’t listen to anything else for five hours, I just kept rewinding the first three songs. I remember these songs hitting me so hard. It was
“Mule Variations [by Tom Waits] encouraged me to realise you don’t have to reach your pinnacle when you’re young.”
depressing and it was dark, but it was a hundred per cent how I felt inside. It was like everything I felt was in these three songs.”
Fallon, like Springsteen, grew up on the streets of New Jersey, and the characters that flesh out his songs clearly resonate. In fact one extra bad decision in his youth and Fallon could have easily been one of the guys doing jail time, just like some of his childhood friends.
“Straight Time on this record is about a guy getting out of jail and is trying to work out his life not as a criminal,” he says. “That’s everyone I knew! That was sometimes me! When we were young that’s how we grew up. I didn’t do anything super-bad, but some of my friends from when I was a kid are permanently in jail. So people I grew up with weren’t upstanding people. Good people, but they weren’t upstanding. Even The Ghost Of Tom Joad talking about a homeless preacher under the underpass, and all he’s doing is sitting around waiting for Jesus to come back, that blew my mind! It influences every record I’ve done. That to me is a real Americana record.”
Fallon has all of these records at home, though, so we continue through the aisles until he spots something that almost overshadowed one of the greatest moments of his life. In 2009, when The Gaslight Anthem played at Glastonbury festival, Bruce Springsteen joined them onstage to perform their hit The ’59 Sound. His hero had not just become his peer, but for a few minutes, his bandmate too – this is the stuff aspiring musicians dream of during all those years of practice.
“That was an extremely influential thing,” he says. “But this other thing affected me so much that I still ran back to the hotel to watch the recap to figure out who this person was. That’s how bad it affected me, even though I had just played with Bruce Springsteen. I was pumped. I knew I needed not to forget this person I had seen.”
The act in question was Florence & The Machine, and he scoops up their debut album, Lungs, with unconcealed joy.
“I have always been a massive Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fan, and when I saw Florence on stage I was like, this is an extension, like a newer version,” he says, awestruck. “This is like Nick Cave and Stevie Nicks and PJ Harvey and everything that I think is cool in the world, and even Bach and Mozart, all together in one. If you asked me what the music in my head sounds like, it sounds like this stuff mixed with Tom Waits. It’s just brilliant songwriting.”
Draining the last of his coffee, he searches the rack for their second record, Ceremonials. With £50 to spend, he’s going for quality over quantity, and heads to the tills inspired and excited by the work of two women challenging him to evolve in his
own work. Tonight, though, he has a show, and will be taking his intimate new songs to the audience that holds him up as their own hero.
“I’ve had this music in me for a long time, and now it feels like the right time to come out and it feels like I can do it well,” he says. “The work that I’ve done with my band, I feel more proud of it now than when we were doing it, because now I have some reflection. And now with the newer stuff that I’m doing solo, the main thing is that I’ve settled down in my life, I’ve calmed down, my interests have expanded into a different kind of music. So it feels like a natural progression of my life.”