Kerrang - March 12, 2016

BRIAN FALLON
PHOTOS: ANDY FORD THANKS TO: FRANKIE AT THY BARBER
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HAVE JUST SAVED HIM, HE TELLS KERRANG!’S EMILY CARTER…
When Brian Fallon stepped offstage
at Reading Festival last August,
things went silent. The frontman
had just played The Gaslight
Anthem’s last scheduled gig since
their beginning in 2006, and it was a heavy weight to
process. “It felt really quiet,” the 36-year-old says today,
sipping on three different caffeine-fuelled drinks in an
east London barbershop, attempting to combat jet-lag
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happened, and it was very odd.”
Just months prior, the New Jersey quartet had
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“We’d like to recharge and take a step back until we
have something we feel excited about,” a statement read.
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Simply, The Gaslight Anthem weren’t going to make a
new album just for the sake of it. For Brian, this marked
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A mere few years prior, the frontman had found
himself in a state of self-turmoil. On the outside, things
were going well for The Gaslight Anthem – their fourth
album, Handwritten, had been released on a major
label, sales were good, reviews were kind and shows
were full. But, amidst the band’s success, anxiety hit
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“To tell you the truth, I went to, like, real therapy. I’d
developed a crazy anxiety problem and I didn’t know
when it was going to strike,” he admits today, with the
outlook of somebody who has come out the other
side, stronger and wiser. “I was onstage somewhere in
Austria and – this is stuff that I haven’t told anybody – I
got hit with a giant panic attack. It was a nightmare. I felt
like I was dying onstage.”
The anxiety buried itself deep, and a cure for these
episodes took its time to surface. For a start, with
Gaslight’s busy schedule, Brian would be jetting off
around the world every time he started to make any
personal progress. His demons lingered for several
years, through the Handwritten cycle, his divorce and
the writing of 2014’s Get Hurt. “I didn’t know what to
do,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh great, I’m the musician who’s
going to therapy… What a cliché, what a joke you are.’
I wasn’t going to sit around feeling sorry for myself,so I
decided to go and talk to someone.”
The musician found a therapist in his native New
Jersey to help him address his issues. Taking time
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accepted that his perceptions were way off. “I would go
and play shows thinking that the audience was against
me,” he sighs. “It was like, ‘Why are you scared of the
people who have paid money to come and see you
play? These are your fans – they don’t want to hurt
you, they want to see you succeed.’ I was just looking
at it all wrong.”
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The Gaslight Anthem became tighter than ever. “We
personally got really close, and that’s kind of what came
to the point of us going, ‘We have an end-date for the
Get Hurt tour, what are we going to do now?’”
Struggling to come up with a new idea following their
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next step. “We talked about it for a few weeks and just
realised that it would be better to stop while it’s good –
don’t wreck it,” he says. “It was hard, because there was
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an obligation, and I don’t feel that that’s right.”
“A short track and
B-sides, you say?”
Having already dabbled with side-projects –
The Horrible Crowes, with Gaslight touring
guitarist Ian Perkins, and Molly And The
Zombies – a solo album was the next logical step for
Brian, though that wasn’t immediately obvious to him.
“I realised that I didn’t want to do another band,” he
says. “And a friend of mine was like, ‘You should really
just do a solo album under your own name, and then
you can do anything you want.’”
And so, Brian took his friend’s advice and started
writing as soon as Gaslight’s hiatus was decided.
He revisited his roots and embraced who he was –
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previous albums. “I spent so much time trying to change
and do all this stuff, and, really, at the end of the day, you
can only be who you are, and you like what you like,” he
smiles. “The worst thing in the world, for me, would be
to feel that I got successful because of someone else’s
work; that would feel like cheating. That’s why I was
always really concerned about the Bruce Springsteen
[comparisons], because I didn’t want people to like me
just because of Bruce Springsteen – but they don’t, and
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just going to embrace who I am.’ This is Brian Fallon up
to here, to this point. This is me right now.”
The dozen brilliant folk-rock tracks that make
up Painkillers – a name born from Brian’s feeling
towards the comfort of music – are the most assured
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second album, 2008’s breakthrough The ’59 Sound.
“This is the only record since then where I’ve been,
like… It’s not that I don’t care what people think,
because I do, and I hope people love it,” he grins. “But
I didn’t do it for them – I did it for me. And that felt
really good to just let go and say, ‘You know what? I’m
making this record, and I’m going to have a good time
whether you like it or not (laughs)!’”
Whether or not The Gaslight Anthem regroup, then,
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get bummed-out still. I don’t like the wind and the rain,
and I have bad days,” he says. “But, overall, I’m trying to
remember how fortunate I am to be where I am.”
PAINKILLERS IS RELEASED ON MARCH
11 VIA UNIVERSAL. BRIAN TOURS THE
UK NEXT MONTH –– SEE THE GIG GUIDE
KERRANG! 37