Kerrang!, issue 1304, 20 March 2010
THE GASLIGHT Anthem are currently working on American Slang, the follow-up to 2008’s The ‘59 Sound — and Kerrang! have been given an exclusive sneak preview!
The New Jersey rockers - vocalist/guitarist Brian Fallon, guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine and drummer Benny Horowitz - invited K! to New York’s Magic Shop recording studios to listen to three completed songs: Bring It On, The Queen Of Lower Chelsea and the album’s title-track.
Fans will be surprised to hear that The Gaslight Anthem have moved away from the small town American rock ‘n’ roll sound that characterised their 2008 breakthrough album, and have instead incorporated arena-sized riffs into stomping verses and huge, confident choruses, which look set to catapult the foursome to the next level.
Here, frontman Brian gives us an in-depth look into what shaped their new record and why American Slang is their most personal album yet.
WHEN DID YOU START WRITING AMERICAN SLANG?
“We attempted to write over the summer of 2009 on tour but I had a tough time because nothing was coming out. From about June to November, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I was pretty stuck. I wasn’t clear enough about what I wanted next and how we were going to move on. I guess I had writer’s block.”
WHEN DID YOU GET OVER THAT HURDLE?
“I had a breakthrough the day after Thanksgiving. I wrote Bring It On and realised what the album was going to be like. We wrote the whole thing through December and January.”
HOW HAVE THE BAND PROGRESSED SINCE THE ‘59 SOUND?
“On the last record, we had a lot of ‘50s influences and anything else would get pushed out. But on this record, we’ve made an effort not to deliberately bring in our influences or push them to the front. I don’t want to put out the same thing we did before. So this time, the album is gonna sound more like The Gaslight Anthem and less like the The Gaslight Anthem’s record collections!”
WAS MAKING THAT STEP FORWARD SOMETHING THAT CAME NATURALLY?
“A lot of the really fast punk stuff we used to do just wasn’t fitting in any more. At first, we just banged out stuff as fast and as energetic as we could but we realised the songs really called for good players. We didn’t do that by studio magic, we practised it. We’d do it for six hours a day at rehearsal and then we’d go home and do it on our own, too. We had to put the work in to make sure it was right.”
WHAT WAS THE CATALYST?
“I’ve been getting into a lot of early Eric Clapton stuff - like The Bluesbreakers and Derek And The Dominos - and the thing with Clapton was that he was very interested in playing properly. It can’t be off-time, it can’t be too ragged, it’s got to be right. That’s the sort of idea I had for the new album. We also watched AC/DC’s Live At Donington DVD and that was pretty inspirational too, in terms of technique. You could see how good they were as players.”
WHAT DOES AMERICAN SLANG MEAN TO YOU?
“American Slang is what describes our lives and lifestyle. People present you with the American Dream when you’re little; you can do anything because America is the land of opportunity. What actually happens is that a huge proportion of people don’t finish school, they end up being what their father was or they end up working at a job they don’t necessarily like. I think only about one per cent of people get to really live the American Dream and become the President or the Mayor or Leonardo DiCaprio.”
WHAT HOPE IS THERE FOR THE 99 PER CENT, THEN?
“It’s about people that aren’t living the American Dream but are living their lives for what they are. American Slang is about thinking, ‘OK, I’m not what I thought I was going to be, but I’m here and how can I make the best of it?’. That’s what American Slang is. You can’t just give up and be miserable your whole life. There’s only a certain group of people who understand that, like construction workers for example. That’s what I would be if the band hadn’t taken off.”
WITH THE CHANGE IN MUSICAL DIRECTION, DOES THIS MEAN YOUR APPROACH TO STORYTELLING HAS CHANGED TOO?
“It’s easy to hide behind imagery and use other bits of lyrics because it’s time-tested, even though it was honest and it was true. But now it’s time to say it in [my] own words. What would I say if I was writing letters, what slang words would use, how do talk? That led me to tackle what I’ve been dealing with in the background in my life for years but never really talked about because I didn’t want to deal with it or put it out in public. The old records were all about ‘we’ and ‘us’, but this time, it’s an extremely personal album. It’s a record about a boy trying to grow up and figure out what it is to be a man.”
WHEN THE ‘59 SOUND WAS FIRST RELEASED, YOU STATED THAT YOU WERE SIMPLY HAPPY TO BE IN A BAND AND TOUR FULL TIME. NOW YOU’VE ENJOYED INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS, WHAT ARE YOUR AMBITIONS NOW?
“I want to break the mould of what people expect a big rock ‘n’ roll band to be. I really want to make sure every album we do is worth hearing and to be that band that never lost it. And if we do lose it, I hope we realise and shut it down before we make a record like that last Clash record [1985’s Cut The Crap]! I don’t want to become a joke, like when we’re 70 and just goofing around and I can’t hit the notes anymore! Nobody wants that.”
[made by OCR]
now go and buy your copy of Kerrang!
Subject: kerrang 
Fri Mar 19, 2010 6:09 am
