How Brian Fallon got his groove back

Brian Fallon’s new album starts with snapped fingers, a little swinging guitar and some shuffling drums. Chords flutter merrily from an organ in the background. “I’m going to whip these blues away,” he sings, in that slightly torn voice.

It seems there’s been a few blues whip away. Rockstars might get rich and travel the world on the back of a few chords, but anyone with a vague interest in the Gaslight Anthem will have wondered what Fallon’s been going through over the last few years. The band strung out on hiatus. His last record, solo debut Painkillers, opened with the line “I lost my mind in the middle of Toronto”; the rest of the album was a tangle of open-hearted emotions. Before that, there’d been a divorce, ten years of marriage gone, some critical mauling, and a few profiles going around where it seemed like he wanted out, like he’d found his American Dream and it just didn’t suit him. Riddled with self doubt, he seemed ready to hang up his blue jeans and white t-shirts.

“I couldn’t really tell what was happening in the minute. Every time we got a handle on the band, it became something else very quickly” he says, on the decade since Gaslight put out their first record, Sink Or Swim. Though solo out of necessity – “were all saying: ‘Ok, enough of this’ and I was like, ‘uh-oh, I’m out of a gig’” – it seems like some weight has lifted as he prepares the release of his second album, Sleepwalkers.

“On my own, it was like getting to push the restart button. You come face to face with yourself and you realise most of the stuff you’re worrying about doesn’t really matter.

“There are two things that matter when you’re making music. First, that you’re doing what you love, even if it’s crazy and other people tell you it’s crazy. The second thing is the only people you really need to worry about are the people who love your music, not the people who speak badly about it.”

There have been a fair share of people speaking badly about his work. Gaslight’s last album, Get Hurt, was critically eviscerated, a final drubbing which had followed various grumblings in the press and from fans that the band had abandoned the blue collar heartland punk they made their name with.

“I’d like to say I don’t care but I do. ‘Cause when you put out a record you try to do it for yourself first, and you want your audience to accept it, but you also want the press to accept it too, because it validates what you do. They don’t have to say it’s the best thing in the world but if they say ‘this is really good and you should take your time to listen to it’, in the punk rock world, it’s like getting an award. You feel really good about it."

“You know, I can see that definitely I laboured over Get Hurt, maybe unnecessarily. We all laboured to try and do something different instead of doing what we knew."

What's different now?

"With this one I got in Ted Hutt, who did the 59 Sound and I asked him, I said: ‘Ted, it’s been a long road and I’ve had a lot of s*** happen to me but you remember when I first came to you – what was that like?’ and he said: ‘Brian, you didn’t think about anyone else but what you liked, because there wasn’t anyone else.

"'So all you thought about was what you loved, and as long as you loved it, that’s what you did. You didn’t care if you were quoting somebody or using somebody else’s guitar sound, you didn’t care at all. You were a fan and you just wanted to put that out in the world.’ Hearing that back enabled me to let myself do that again. So I’ve just sort of put it out there: this is what I like and that’s kind of it. If people accept that then that’s the bonus and if they don’t, then I can’t really do anything about it because that’s what I love.”

Doing what he loves seems to be a theme for Fallon. Despite the glum photographs being circulated, he talks in long, excited sentences, name checking his favourite bands as he goes, talking up the Jam and the Clash, excitedly explaining his love of ‘Motown Punk’ and wanting to make Sleepwalkers a record he could take on the road for people to dance to.

“I began to write the songs with more of a groove to them. I mean, I can’t copy what, say, Sam Cooke did, but the thing is I don’t even want to because I come from punk rock and I love that stuff. I just wanted it to make me happy because I was like, that’s the whole point, really – to make yourself feel good about it.”

Though he’s upbeat, Fallon is as sincere as is on record, with the same knack in conversation for pausing in the right place. He guesses that “probably 50 per cent of the people who like the Gaslight Anthem have no idea that I put out a record, they probably don’t even know who I am”. You sense this comes with a sense of relief, loosening him from the stranglehold of comparisons with Bruce Springsteen – which left the band with the perversity of having an honour used against them as an insult. Though Fallon is happy to talk about it and while he speaks jauntily, it clearly still stings.

“That bothered me because it wasn’t all there was to us and I didn’t feel that that was very fair to him or to us or to his legacy of music. I felt like there was a little bit of a trivialisation going on because it was really special. I felt like we earned something in a way that I don’t remember a lot of other people earning. We earned the respect of the Boss. That’s huge! You would have never expected that to happen and when that happened, it was like, I felt like, we couldn’t enjoy it fully because it was always being tainted by this other outside force that didn’t know anything about the relationship and they would just sort of make it a joke and it was like, this isn’t a joke, this is a pretty good thing. We’ve literally got the attention of one of the best songwriters to ever walk the earth and he’s come and looked at us and you guys are making a joke of it and that’s not very funny because this is awesome, let it be awesome for us, you should be happy for us.”

There’s a funny thing about Fallon. He’s talking about the big things on this new record – “there’s a lot of fear of growing old and dying and these kind of things, the things you don’t go to a party and talk about” – but he remains sweetly modest. “All I want to do is talk about ‘what records did you hear? What are you listening to now? What have you got? Tell me something I don’t know.’”

He is selling himself short. His new record, in his words, takes on “growing old and dying and these kind of things, the things you don’t go to a party and talk about, the things in life that everybody has but nobody talks about. It’s that in between. It’s who you are when you’re really you. That’s what the record is about. It’s who I am when I’m really me.” So the heavy stuff, then, is still there, and the record is as heartfelt as ever – it's just that Brian Fallon is dancing again.

Brian Fallon’s new album Sleepwalkers is out now. Fallon will play Koko in Camden on February 23.