Brian Fallon Tells His Love Story in “You Have Stolen My Heart”

“It’s not about these glorious dreams or miserable failures,” says Brian Fallon. “It’s just about life and how I see it.” In a nutshell, this is Local Honey, Fallon’s third studio album, and his follow up to 2018’s Sleepwalkers, out March 27. A personal and present album, he gives a glimpse inside with single “You Have Stolen My Heart.”

The first release off of Fallon’s own label Lesser Known Records, which he launched along with Nashville distributor Thirty Tigers—a collaboration of Sturgill Simpson, John Print, and Jason Isbell—Local Honey, produced by Peter Katis (Interpol, The National, Death Cab for Cutie), dives into Fallon’s life as it is.

Recently on tour the Gaslight Anthem for the 10th anniversary of the band’s second album, The ’59 Sound—he and the band previously took a hiatus in 2015 before reuniting at 2018’s Governor’s Ball in New York—Fallon will kick off his North American tour, backed by his live band, The Howling Weather, supporting Local Honey in March.

There’s nothing seeped in the past on the new album. Everything is in the present with Fallon’s intricate storytelling from “When You’re Ready,” which reads like a letter from a father to his daughter when she has grown up, picking up the pace in “21 Days” and “Lonely for You Only” and more soulful tracks like “Vincent,” and his latest single.

“You Have Stolen My Heart” is Fallon’s most direct attempt at a love song, which wasn’t an easy task for the singer. He tells American Songwriter that pulling the track’s lyrics together was a struggle, before he just let the song work itself out. “I had to wrestle with the lyrics and the arrangement of this song quite a bit,” he says. “I kept trying things, pushing it to have big sweeping changes, and it just never felt right.”

The video, shot in black and white, leaves a stark, blank canvas that lets the track speak for itself. Emotional, raw, and perfectly sewn, this love story is delicately woven with lyrics And now if you need me, you know where to find me/I’ll be always falling under your spell … Or maybe we were always strangers on mystery trains / And you were only a ghost that has stolen my heart away.

“The whole time it wanted to be almost a lullaby, a note to my wife,” he says. “I had to learn to let it be what it wanted to be, in the end I think I did.”