Great article about Painkillers in Paste magazine

"I thought, ‘That’s cool. Just take in everything and spit it out, and it’ll come out as you. Because it is you.’”


http://bit.ly/22DvQCa

I don't think I've ever seen Brian be so honest and open in an interview. Really great read.

great interview

Great article!

Great article but at the same time, not so great.

Quote :

Amid the disc’s meat-and-potatoes power chords that have been the New Jersey group’s stock in trade since its definitive sophomore outing in 2008, The ’59 Sound

Power chords never have been prominent in TGA's music. It was mostly open chords for rhythm and octave chords for leads, especially on T59S.

The record that have a lot of power chords is GET HURT.

Quote :

and the self-explanatory “This is Where We Part.”

Which was a bonus track, and a cover from an other band...

Quote :

In fact, Fallon admits, he didn’t compose a single number for several months after returning from that tour to his mausoleum-spooky new bachelor pad, which had no art or posters hanging on its walls—an embarrassing fact that he would eventually address on one of Painkillers’ most propulsive cuts, the Dylan-jangling “Red Lights”: “In all good faith and sentiment I can’t believe somehow/ That I haven’t died of grief or something since you left this town/ I’m all undecorated, cigarettes, standard white apartment walls.”

Red Lights was written before Get Hurt, for MATZ, so it is chronologically impossible that he got back from the GET HURT tour and wrote this song.

The_River wrote:

Great article but at the same time, not so great.

Quote :

Amid the disc’s meat-and-potatoes power chords that have been the New Jersey group’s stock in trade since its definitive sophomore outing in 2008, The ’59 Sound

Power chords never have been prominent in TGA's music. It was mostly open chords for rhythm and octave chords for leads, especially on T59S.

The record that have a lot of power chords is GET HURT.  

Quote :

and the self-explanatory “This is Where We Part.”

Which was a bonus track, and a cover from an other band...

Quote :

In fact, Fallon admits, he didn’t compose a single number for several months after returning from that tour to his mausoleum-spooky new bachelor pad, which had no art or posters hanging on its walls—an embarrassing fact that he would eventually address on one of Painkillers’ most propulsive cuts, the Dylan-jangling “Red Lights”: “In all good faith and sentiment I can’t believe somehow/ That I haven’t died of grief or something since you left this town/ I’m all undecorated, cigarettes, standard white apartment walls.”

Red Lights was written before Get Hurt, for MATZ, so it is chronologically impossible that he got back from the GET HURT tour and wrote this song.

I wouldn't take the power chords thing to actually mean what it means to a guitarist. Author probably just means 4 chord rock instead of the more riff based stuff there was on Get Hurt.

And I think that paragraph about Red Lights is just badly written. I think 'eventually address' is referring to when the song was released (on Painkillers) and not when it was written. So he was in that apartment when he wrote it but they're ignoring the MATZ release and considering it addressed on Painkillers. It's a really bad written paragraph actually, it can be interpreted in a few ways.

The 'This Is Where We Part' thing is unforgivable. I read that and thought shit! A TGA song I never heard and was pretty disappointed to see it was a cover.

I was coming in here to say the same thing. Especially crediting a song from another band, This Is Where We Part, to Gaslight. I realize since they are a lesser known band, but there were a few obvious mistakes in there. I guess it shows the difference between real fans and general readers.

Keele wrote:

I was coming in here to say the same thing. Especially crediting a song from another band, This Is Where We Part, to Gaslight. I realize since they are a lesser known band, but there were a few obvious mistakes in there. I guess it shows the difference between real fans and general readers.

One would also think he or his people would have gotten to see the copy before it went live. I'm nobody compared to BF/TGA but I have always been given the chance to read my stuff, or articles where I was quoted, before it was republished.

It was cool to read such introspection from him, though.  I felt like he was more engaged/open to the audience at the Starland Ballroom show on this tour than I remember from TGA shows, but that could have also been the scale of the venue and it's location near TGA ground zero with lots of longtime fans.

In other cool (to me, probably not to you!) news, my friend's band just got to play Court Tavern for the first time. Hope history repeats itself!

The factual errors are a shame given that it's otherwise a really good article, but I guess if you're a journalist you don't have time for extensive research about every band you interview. I'd guess most of us have a some point assumed a cover song was an original; I certainly remember being drunkenly amazed to hear Lita Ford doing what I thought of as a Reel Big Fish song!