Gibson Exclusive: The Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon Looks Back on The ’59 Sound

from www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/the-gaslight-anthem-909/


Gibson Exclusive: The Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon Looks Back on The ’59 Sound

Jonah Bayer | 09.09.2009

If you’re not familiar with the Gaslight Anthem yet, we recommend crawling out from under that rock you’ve been hiding under and catching up with one of the most exciting rock acts around. Thankfully we’re here to help. Since release the band’s sophomore album The ’59 Sound last year, the Gaslight Anthem have collaborated onstage with their hero Bruce Springsteen, played every major festival from Leeds to Lollapalooza and been heralded as one of the best live bands around by critics and fans alike. Gibson caught up with the band’s frontman Brian Fallon to discuss the opus that’s helped the band skyrocket to the top of the music world.

What was the writing/recording process like for The ’59 Sound?
We spent three weeks [in pre-production] tightening up and arranging the songs so that when we went into the studio we knew exactly what we were going to play and how we were going to play off each other. That was the thing that made the record “pop” more; I feel like it just comes out at you a little bit more because spent more time doing that. The whole idea with this record wasn’t “when we find something that sounds thin, let’s just layer 100 guitars on it.” Instead we were like, “how about let’s just layer one guitar and make it really tight and that way it’ll pop on its own.” That’s why we didn’t spend a lot of time in the studio adding and subtracting all of these crazy things; we knew exactly what we wanted to do before we did it and that made things a lot more streamlined.

Do you think The ’59 Sound is a good representation of the band’s live sound?
Yeah, the big thing this time around was that we wanted to make the songs sound as live as possible. I think the key was that instead of thinking about it like writing a record, we just wanted to write the coolest live songs we could. We wrote this record with the intention of playing us live, so in many ways it’s just a preview of the live show. The whole mission statement was “let’s make a record that sounds like it should be played live all the time.”

It seems like you’re writing from a lot of different lyrical perspectives on this record, too.
Yeah, I’m actually telling a few stories from some of my friends because it fits in with the theme of growing up and stepping into adulthood. You’re kind of deciding which parts of your youth you’re going to carry with you forever and which parts you’re going to let shed away. A lot of my friends are going through really interesting stuff: some of them are having kids, some of them are getting married and some are getting divorced. It’s such a weird thing; it’s definitely a first-time thing. This was the first time any of us had gone through these things in life and as they happened I kept talking to [my friends] on the phone and I felt like I should tell their stories too instead of just my own, because after a while it gets boring to just write about yourself.

Where did you come up with the title The ’59 Sound?
We were going for the youthful sound of soul music so we picked The ’59 Sound because it had a nice ring to it and expressed that feeling as well. I mentioned it one day at practice and everyone agreed that we should call the record that. The songs came from there and I think we’re kind of defining it as we go. I have this vision of 1959 where Elvis was playing and there were problems in this country about how things were going to work but there was this youthful excitement in the music, too. Back then it seemed like there was a genuine feeling of excitement going on that I don’t think is necessarily happening right now. It seems like when you look back on that era a lot of it is embodied in that Memphis sound, so it’s just a giant celebratory thing.

Is it fun to play these songs live?
Absolutely, we have so much fun onstage. A lot of the times when we’re playing together and we’re smiling it’s because there’s little jokes going on and little musical things that we wrote that we want to see if we can pull off live—and if we don’t we start laughing at each other. We spend a lot of time together but we’re fortunate in the fact that we get along really well. There’s just so much exciting stuff going on right now, so we’re smiling about that a lot of the time, too.

That was interesting, Brian said something about that feeling of excitement that's gone now, dad said exactly the same thing the other day.

Good interview, thanks for posting it.

One thing sprung out: 'little musical things that we wrote that we want to see if we can pull off live' Does he mean lyrically, or musically?

I think he means the stuff they throw into the middle of songs like Say I Wont (Recognize) and Angry Johnny.

rhg5010 wrote:

I think he means the stuff they throw into the middle of songs like Say I Wont (Recognize) and Angry Johnny.

Come to think of it you may be right with that. I haven't seen it live myself but all the videos/audio I've seen/heard it on seem really good.