Billboard Magazine

The Gaslight Anthem Readies First Major-Label Debut | Billboard.com: http://bit.ly/NQadqL

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"You can learn a lot if you become a student of what's happening to you," Fallon says. "That's the way you have to make those decisions. There can be a wrong time -- it's happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie . . . You have to look at what you've done and where you've come from and set goals with the label and make sure that your expectations don't collide in some kind of disastrous way along the road."

Mercury president David Massey made a point to ensure that the group's and the label's expectations and goals matched. The idea was to augment and supplement what the band was already doing rather than change the overall tone.

"There's so many aspects to what they're doing that they're a step up from where they were before in terms of their activities," Massey says. "They absolutely have the ability to widen out at radio. And that's something that we'd like to achieve on this album. [But] in an organic way, at the right time and with the right demand."

Radio is a significant aim on all fronts, and something that specifically drove the band to leave the indie-label territory behind. "Handwritten's" debut single, the gritty, anthemic rocker "45," which feels like a companion piece to the group's 2008 breakout album, "The '59 Sound" (138,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan), has already seen sizable growth, climbing Billboard's Alternative chart since its release in April. (It's now at No. 18.) A follow-up single has yet to be selected, but the label is considering various possibilities, including what it believes are album standouts: "Here Comes My Man" and the title track.