Source: http://www.billboard.com/news/gaslight-anthem-s-brian-fallon-looks-inward-1005345612.story#/news/gaslight-anthem-s-brian-fallon-looks-inward-1005345612.story
"I needed to write these songs so that I could carry on as a person on my own and function," explains Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon of his new project, the Horrible Crowes. "With 'Elsie' [the Horrible Crowes' debut album], we wanted to find out what else is there -- what else are we capable of.
More intimate and haunting than his previous work, Fallon's collaboration with friend and Gaslight Anthem guitar tech Ian Perkins sounds confident in its vulnerability. While the Gaslight Anthem sticks mainly to the classic guitar-bass-drums formula to create loud, soulful American rock laced with punk and hardcore energy, "Elsie," released Sept. 6, finds Fallon and Perkins exploring more diverse sonic arrangements and new songwriting forms. "The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined," Fallon admits. "We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that. We wanted to separate what we were doing [in Gaslight Anthem] to something new and something that we could experiment with."
Perkins and Fallon aren't shy about their sweeping musical influences, and aren't afraid to admit their more hardcore punk roots presented a challenge with the Horrible Crowes. "I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem," Fallon explains, also citing The Afghan Whigs' album "Black Love" and Elvis Costello's 1977 single "Watching The Detectives" as major inspirations. "That takes a certain amount of finesse that maybe a rock band doesn't have, so we had to learn all that finesse [for Horrible Crowes], which was difficult."