You never get away from that thing in your hometown that it has over you. You don’t outgrow where you come from.
Brian Fallon
Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.
Brian Fallon
Why blow money on a tour bus when you could get your mom a nice dress?
Brian Fallon
I’m on the phone with this guy, and he says to me, ‘People compare you to Bruce Springsteen. I don’t think you’ve written a song as good as ‘Dancing in the Dark’ or ‘I’m on Fire.” And all I could think was, ‘Me neither!’
Brian Fallon
I’ve never read ‘The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,’ but his later works are about whether God is real.
Brian Fallon
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you’ve got to have your story together. You’ve got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He’s got an understanding that you don’t hear that often.
Brian Fallon
You get a realisation at some point in your career that whatever it is you do, you can no longer continue to do it. You just realise you can’t put out the same records forever.
Brian Fallon
On the road, we watch ‘The Mighty Boosh.’ We have so many copies, we have them in different country codes.
Brian Fallon
My friend Danny Clinch, who’s a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It’s hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They’re all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, ‘Don’t sell out!’
Brian Fallon
For me, there’s no point in being an artist and putting yourself out there if you’re not going to really put yourself out there.
Brian Fallon
I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you’ll be OK.
Brian Fallon
Fans look up to us, and that’s creepy.
Brian Fallon
The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don’t usually use organs and strings and things like that.
Brian Fallon
I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem.
Brian Fallon
We didn’t invent this – this rock n’ roll thing.
Brian Fallon
Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.
Brian Fallon
You can learn a lot if you become a student of what’s happening to you.
Brian Fallon
There can be a wrong time – it’s happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.
Brian Fallon
Songs are like anything else – they dictate to you which ones go together and which ones don’t.
Brian Fallon
Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.
Brian Fallon
Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that’s sort of become the way now.
Brian Fallon
There’s no way I’m going to write for other people.
Brian Fallon
I don’t mean it egotistically, but I’ve been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it’s part of my job and my duty – especially where I’m from – to speak the language of the people I’m around and speak for them.
Brian Fallon
With ‘Get Hurt,’ we wanted to see where else we could go with the band. We thought it was time to change things up a bit. The song itself is similar to the feeling of a wreck you see coming, but long past the point you can avoid it.
Brian Fallon
One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. ‘Under the Ground’ is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.
Brian Fallon
I’ll probably continue to write about heartbreak forever. That stuff doesn’t go away as you get older.
Brian Fallon
You’re always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.
Brian Fallon
I can’t really see myself writing about politics because I’m not really into it, and one of the worst things you can do is write about things you’re not into.
Brian Fallon
It’s amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don’t know if we’re supposed to give answers to people, because I don’t know if we have any.
Brian Fallon
There’s never going to be a new Beatles because we don’t consume things in that way anymore.
Brian Fallon
When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.
Brian Fallon
People don’t remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn’t really that ideal at all.
Brian Fallon
Everyone always says, ‘We don’t want to be pigeonholed.’ But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.
Brian Fallon
At the end of the day, you can’t reinvent yourself past a point, because you are you, and there are things that are inherently you that are always going to be there.
Brian Fallon
I think Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ is probably the best comeback or mid-career record that any band has done.
Brian Fallon
I don’t have a ‘Born to Run’ in me.
Brian Fallon
I’m one of those people who, even if I’m invited somewhere, I still kinda feel like I’m not supposed to be there.
Brian Fallon
You can’t shape it. You can’t change it. Your life is what it is.
Brian Fallon
I’m not really into the numbers game of, like, what position our record is. But you find out at the end, you know? You’re like ‘Oh, all right! That’s good!’ We had a Number Three record. That’s crazy! What’s that about? That’s exciting to me! I think that’s good.
Brian Fallon
We want to be big… we want to be a big band, but we don’t want to be your best friends.
Brian Fallon
I’ve always said it’s easier for bands to make a hard stance – like, we don’t do commercials or whatever, blah blah blah – when you’ve sold billions of records. It’s super-easy to be righteous when you’re rich.
Brian Fallon
When you’re a musician, a lot of time people help you out; they take pity on you. Family members will kind of come around and are like, ‘Listen, I bought you a bunch of groceries because I know that you’re a screwup.’
Brian Fallon
I don’t want to be the mayor of New Jersey.
Brian Fallon
You pay your bills and you take care of your family, or you’re not a man.
Brian Fallon
I don’t really hate a lot of songs, but I think Weezer has put out some songs I really hate because they’ve also put out a lot of songs I really like.
Brian Fallon
It’s a beautiful thing, to start over.
Brian Fallon
Sometimes I get the bug to live in London for a year, or something like that, and maybe I will. But New Jersey’s home.
Brian Fallon
I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don’t really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing – this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.
Brian Fallon
Springsteen is a hero to a lot of people in New Jersey. He’s a role model – because he’s a local guy who got out.
Brian Fallon
I grew up in the next town over from Asbury Park and five streets from E Street. My mother fed me ‘Born To Run’ with my Cheerios.
Brian Fallon
Everybody told us we would never make it. Even friends would say to me, ‘Okay this band thing is cool, but seriously, what are you really going to do?’ I can’t think of anyone who believed in us, and that was fuel for the fire, because the more anybody said I wouldn’t do it, the more I was like, ‘No, I’m going to do it.’
Brian Fallon
Shoes are everything. You can tell more about a man from his shoes than his handshake, because they tell where you’re going.
Brian Fallon