Brian Fallon gives you everything of himself on Not Bad For New Jersey. Heart, body and soul, and a guided tour of all the musical preoccupations that have kept the Gaslight Anthem frontman chasing down songs and melodies all these years.
His first solo album in more than five years, it is the sound of Fallon going all in with the unguarded melodic power of ‘80s rock, the forward-motion and urgency of punk, the blue-collar drama of country-folk arrangements and the neon-lit romanticism of FM rock balladry.
All that and more is here. Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon 101.
Before writing the album he put together a playlist of all the songs that would get him closer to what he was looking for – and he listened to it obsessively, letting it all sink in.
“I was listening to a lot of the ‘80s stuff,” he says, joining MusicRadar in central London, sounding pumped. Because even though it’s a Monday morning, the music he’s talking about brings with it decades’ worth of Friday-night memories. This is the kind of energy he was looking for.
“Born In The USA, Bryan Adams for sure, and we were listening to like Def Leppard and Siouxie and the Banshees, the Cure and the Smiths, and all that kind of stuff,” he says.
The list goes on. Dire Straits were a big one, too, not so much their Money For Nothing era but So Far Away and Romeo And Juliet. These songs resonated with the emotional tenor that Fallon was looking for. The Police and the guitar playing of Andy Summers was another influence.
“Big one. The Police was huge for us,” he says.
Skid Row is another band Fallon brings up repeatedly in conversation (his party piece is playing the solo to I Remember You on a short-scale Fender Mustang). St Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club, and everything from the ‘80s cinema all helped create this vibe, establishing its emotional push and pull. Fallon absorbed it all and he the ideas just poured out of him.
“It’s like a Gaslight Anthem record for me,” he says. “That music is just in my soul, and it’s who I am, so when we go out there and write a song like [The] Patient Ferris Wheel or 45, that just comes right out of my guts, and so does this, because this is the other half of my musical being.”
When we go out there and write a song like Patient Ferris Wheel or 45, that just comes right out of my guts... This is the other half of my musical being
The title track opens the record in a fever, a battery of snare drum and the clang of big open chords, with Butch Walker’s production super-sizing everything. Better Before follows, and it makes good on Fallon’s promise that he and his backing band, the Painkillers, won’t be pulling their punches.
“We just said, ‘You know what? Let’s not be shy about what we’re doing because none of this music was shy,” says Fallon. “It’s got to be heart-on-your-sleeve. You got to go all in. That’s why I did the cover in pink. That’s why I put the leather jacket [on the cover], pull my collar up, because I was going all in.
“I was like, ‘This is my tribute to all these guys and girls who I don’t think I would have gotten where I got without. I’m telling you, Tina Turner, Lita Ford, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard – these people were crucial to me.”
Speaking of the Painkillers, they feature the ridiculously talented Nathaniel Murphy on guitar, whom many will recognise from Chicago Music Exchange’s social media content.
Murphy is one of the few players who could stop you in your tracks with a gear demo; he’s one of the few who could listen to the ripping guest solo from Def Leppard’s Phil Collen on Somewhere You Shouldn’t Be and totally nail it. “I guarantee you, come see this band live and they will blow your mind,” says Fallon.
Pearls lets everyone catch a breath, taking the tempo down for a woozy ballad that’s got this really gnarly tremolo guitar intro, and it’s the kind of small detail that seems silly to talk about among all these big, bold brushstrokes of bittersweet yearning and heartache, and all this serious emotional content. It’s like going for a nice meal and talking about the tableware...
But to guitarists – and especially to guitarists like Fallon – these details really matter, and that tremolo sound is one sweet electric guitar tone.
“The thing is, I got it from Aretha Franklin,” he says. “She does this really good cover of The Dark End Of The Street, and in the beginning of the song, her guitar player just – it’s probably just live – but he strums a chord, and it’s with the tremolo on it, and it’s on the whole time, and for some reason I caught that and I was like, ‘This is really something for me.’ And I kept it in the back of my mind. But I like that pulse, and even even when it’s exaggerated, I am really enjoying that in any kind of music now.”
We can probably credit Muscle Shoals session ace Eddie Hinton for that Aretha Franklin guitar part. The pulse, that steady tempo that runs through Fallon’s work, once more goes back to the Bruce Springsteen influence. With Fallon, you can’t avoid talking about the Boss. He suspects “that heartbeat thing” probably arrived via osmosis from listening to Born In The USA on repeat, tracks such as I’m On Fire programming Fallon’s rhythmic sensibility, and perhaps also his feel for the dynamics of pop-rock songwriting.
Fallon is a sucker for old Marshall tube amps, a “diehard” about these things, and likes to pull amps apart and build them. That he uses the Silver Jubilee speaks to his reverence for John Frusciante's tone, but it also has everything he is looking for from a Marshall.
Even when he is using Fender amps, as he did on Gaslight Anthem signature track, The '59 Sound, there’s still something Marshall about it. Then, he used a tweed Bassman 4x10 and played through a compressor, adding tape echo to taste – given the similarity between the JTM45 circuit and the Bassman, it was like he was constructing a Marshall sound from Fender elements.
“That’s exactly what I was doing,” he says. “So with the Silver Jubilee, most people who like [JCM] 800s and those kind of amps, they turn up the gain. But I turned down the gain. I play them almost clean, but it really does a thing where it’s like a compression that kind of helps you play.
“It’s an empty canvas where you’ve got this rhythm tone and you’re like, ‘This is great. Whatever I do from here is going to be good because the foundation is good.’ So if you like a Fuzz Face, cool. If you like a Big Muff, cool. It just stacks so nicely on top of it.”
And yet despite his affinity for all things analogue, Butch Walker would grab sounds from his Fractal Axe-Fx and patch them in, and it kind of blew Fallon’s mind.
“I could not believe how good it sounded,” he says. “It inspired me. When you have a good tone, I feel like everything lights up.”
Not Bad For New Jersey finds Fallon leafing through his contacts book and drafting in some guest appearances. Longtime friends and writing partners Lori McKenna and Donovan Woods appear on the album. McKenna co-wrote On Good Terms. Woods joins Fallon on The Big Sleep.
Fallon has his publisher to thank for Collen’s guest solo. He introduced the pair. When Fallon pitched the song to the Def Leppard guitarist, he jumped at the chance.
“He was on tour, doing a residency with Def Leppard in Las Vegas, and he just did it in his hotel room,” says Fallon. “He brought his whole rig over there and he just ripped this crazy solo.”
Marc Ribot might seem like an unorthodox collaborator on a Brian Fallon record but they were tracking Wolf By The River and were needing a lead part that sounded “a little bit mangled”. Fallon was going to do it himself but drummer Eric Slick had a better idea.
“I’m like, ‘I kind of want like a J Macis thing or like a Marc Ribot thing,’” says Fallon. Slick piped up and suggested they just asked Ribot directly. He knew him via Dr Dog. “Within a half hour, I was on the phone with Marc’s manager, and she’s like, ‘Yeah, he’ll do it. He’s totally into it,’ and then he just sent back the coolest thing,” says Fallon. “It’s awesome! [Laughs] But that’s my style, that’s how I would approach being a lead guitar player, a little anarchy in there, a little Neil Young/Kurt Cobain in there.”
Brandon Flowers cowrote Love At The End Of The World, a love song for the apocalypse that plays fast and loose with the conventions of song structure, leaving us without a chorus, and without the need for one either. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild,” says Fallon. “He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”
![Brian Fallon - Love at the End of the World (feat. Brandon Flowers) [Official Audio] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/f_qSU3K8RLU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Fallon’s wife introduced him to Flowers. They bonded over Depeche Mode and CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and arranged for Fallon to fly out to meet the Killers’ frontman in a studio in Utah, where they put together the song.
“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song “It’s a very unusual chord progression. It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar.”
They started putting some words to it. They wrote the lyrics in Flowers’ truck, with Fallon finishing it up in his hotel room. Now they had to fit it all together.
“[Brandon] was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’”
A little rule-breaking was in the spirit of the album. That’s how Fallon felt back in the day when he was growing up, gripped by punk rock, wanting to fit in and cutting his hair into a mohawk, putting the spikes on his jacket, only to get beat up by the punk kids. Eventually, by the time they did accept them into his company he was not so sure he wanted to hang out with them anyway. Too many rules. That wasn’t how he was brought up.
Hackettstown, New Jersey, was not the centre of cultural happenings. It was a town, not the city. Nobody Likes You In New York City speaks to Fallons sense of being an outsider. The bright lights of NYC was where everything happened. That was the scene. His cultural awakening came via the television and reading liner notes on his record collection. “MTV was all we had,” he says.
In hindsight, this was a blessing. It was Skid Row one minute, Pet Shop Boys the next, or Fine Young Cannibals. Soon, Nirvana were to upend genre conventions, partially dismantling the tribalism around punk.
For Fallon, who was “always walking the balance between the punk guys and the guitar hero guys”, this was a period of liberation, with Kurt Cobain a tribune of the musically curious, this great cultural figurehead who’d talk about Crosby, Stills and Nash and L7 in the same breath.
![Brian Fallon - Wolf by the River (feat. Marc Ribot) [Official Audio] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/mNPfPhhYRCw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Stylistically, Fallon was gravitating to players who had the gift of playing simple, or at least making the complicated sound simple
“I grew up in such a mix of the Ramones and the Replacements and then also like Skid Row, or the Police,” he says. “The guitar players in these bands were phenomenal. If you listen to the live takes from the Replacements, Bob [Stinson] was an incredible guitar player. He really could shred, and same with Andy Summers.
“Andy Summers, when you try to play Message In A Bottle you find out how difficult it is, and that’s really the beauty about why I like these guys – and John Frusciante – because they make things sound so simple that are maybe very complicated and take a lot of skill and finesse to do.”
Fallon admits he was still a little jealous of New Yorkers, who had Interpol and the Strokes. They had the glamour. They were there while Fallon had to watch it from afar on the tube.
“It was just so cool, and everybody looked cool, but I couldn’t get there because I didn’t have a car,” he says. ‘And then I probably wouldn’t have fit in. Whatever. But it was definitely a sense of being an outsider, and you can either get bitter as an outsider or you can get creative, and I chose to be creative. And I said, ‘If I can’t get in that world, then I’m gonna make my own world.’ And that’s where Bruce Springsteen really spoke to me, because he invents these worlds to live in.”
And Springsteen’s world where everything was going on, all of humanity’s dramas, big and small. There, life was happening. It was, as Fallon says, not bad for New Jersey.
- Not Bad For New Jersey is out now via Lesser Known Records
- Catch Brian Fallon and the Painkillers live on tour – see Brian Fallon for dates and ticket details.
