“It felt like such a break because it was after The ‘59 Sound, American Slang and all this hype, where it felt like everybody was surrounding us all the time. “I’m kind of person who needs time alone to think and I had that time during Handwritten,” Fallon explains. No managers, no girlfriends, no wives-nothing.”įollowing their runaway success and rapid ascent in the late ‘00s-including enviable stage-time with long-time influence Bruce Springsteen-being hailed as ‘the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll’ by an overly enthusiastic music press began to take its toll on the group.
There was no one there, it was just the four or five of us, and I remember just being so happy to not be in an area that I knew. “We had just gone away to Nashville to go record with Brendan O’Brien and we were alone, no one was bothering us. shoes, apologizing as his dog excitedly slams around in the background. “ Handwritten is my favorite record from all the records,” Fallon says over the phone on a Wednesday evening, in the middle of unboxing a new pair of Dinosaur Jr.
It’s the one album in the Gaslight discography that best captures the moment when the quartet were able to combine much-needed solitude with unfettered creativity. Of the five studio albums on offer, Handwritten (2012) and The ’59 Sound featured most prominently in their Crossroads set, landing five and six tracks, respectively.Īll of this close reading begs the question: what’s driving the sudden love and appreciation for Handwritten? Could it be the tenth anniversary of the group’s moderately well-received fourth studio album and major-label debut for Mercury Records? The answer, according to Fallon, is actually rather simple and achingly sentimental. Perhaps most notably, Get Hurt (2014), the band’s final (and somewhat divisive) release before their indefinite hiatus in 2015-described in a particularly savage Pitchfork review as the sound of “a band with the heart of a Dodge Challenger” and the “plasticine production of a Kia”-received only a single cursory mention. Entries from American Slang (2010) and Sink or Swim (2007) took a few slots, while the fan-favorite Señor and the Queen EP (2008) and a wild Nirvana cover skated through with individual inclusions. Yet much like the Grateful Dead anecdote above, sifting through the group’s choice of songs yields curious observations of where this newly revitalized Gaslight Anthem of 2022 find themselves. In front of 300 attendees at Crossroads in Garwood, New Jersey, the quartet-rounded out by lead guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine, and drummer Benny Horowitz-roared through eighteen tracks that pulled liberally from their back catalogue, generating full-throated sing-a-longs and ear-to-ear smiles all around. One can learn a great deal about an artist by looking at their setlist, and there’s a compelling argument to make for mixing things up and subverting audience expectations.Īfter returning to “full-time status” earlier this year, New Brunswick institution The Gaslight Anthem surprised devoted fans last month by turning what was originally billed as a make-up date for one of frontman Brian Fallon’s canceled solo acoustic sets into an impromptu reunion show-their first since the group’s brief 2018 tour celebrating their landmark sophomore record, 2008's The ’59 Sound. However, the devil is truly in the details, and a handful of stage schedule double-ups are known to exist. With the band’s storied career stretching across three decades and more than 20 studio albums, empirical data does appear to lend some credibility to the legend. Or, at least, it would be if it were true. There’s an urban legend that says the Grateful Dead never played the same set twice.
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