The Gaslight Anthem: Great Expectations

There’s little difference between who Fallon is as a listener and who he is as a songwriter – something the singer is as honest about as he is unpretentious. “I’m not as cool as everyone else,” he says, “I’m really affected by what I listen to and I really love influences – taking a little bit from this guy, a little bit from that guy – that’s kinda my thing.”

Without hesitation Fallon says that (in addition to fellow Jersey Devils) as a songwriter, he takes his biggest cues from Joe Strummer, Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder and Hot Water Music’s Chuck Ragan – who himself has matured from an angst-y,’90s/early-Aughts microphone screamer to a respected bard of Americana. Paul Westerberg, Mike Ness, Lucero’s Ben Nichols and Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace (née Tom Gabel) also deserve honorable mentions “… Maybe a little wannabe Jack Kerouac [too],” Fallon jokes.

These are writers that, by and large, represent an apple-pie American continuum of roots-rooted, aggressively earnest, oft-anthemic, gravel-voiced troubadours. Fallon unapologetically aspires to join their ranks and freely cops to using their records as cheat sheets.

But he doesn’t have to admit it. One listen to any of his band’s four full-lengths – 2007’s  Skin Or Swim, 2008’s breakthrough The ’59 Sound, 2010’s acclaimed American Slang or 2012’s forthcoming Handwritten – and Fallon is caught red handed, wearing their signatures on his sleeves like the collage of tattoos scrolling the length of his arms.

“Some people don’t like that,” he says, “They’ll be like, ‘Well why don’t you sound like yourself?’ Usually it’s because I’m a little shy, I’m a little embarrassed – because I don’t know who I am, I’m still trying to figure that out.” On Handwritten (TGA’s Major Label debut, which drops July 24) he says he has figured it out, claiming the record is the target that the band was aiming for on previous releases.

“[With] this record I didn’t need to use any reference points,” he says, “I didn’t need to say anything about any other bands or any other songs because I’ve already said that. I didn’t need to tell anyone where we were coming from or use any kind of stories, I just was able to sit down write what I felt.”

Have you seen my heart, have you seen how it bleeds, Fallon raggedly howls on Handwritten’s lead-off single “45” – a propulsive, top-deck-reaching stadium-punk anthem along the lines of The ’59 Sound standout “Great Expectations.” “If people don’t like the other records, they might not like this one,” he says, “it still sounds like the same band.” The difference, however, between “Expectations” and “45” is that now he himself is the character with the bleeding heart.

At the risk of sounding saccharine in an irony-obsessed age of post-modern derision, Fallon would rather be a sentimental confessor than a sneering cynic. “Sarcasm has never been my strong point,” he says, “Sometimes the cliché is there because it’s true. When you are sincere, sometimes those things do end up being cliché.” Fallon’s defiant defense and assertion of his earnestness drives even harder on “45”’s mid-album companion-piece “Too Much Blood” – a strapping, riff-heavy bar rocker in which he rhetorically asks the listener if there’s “too much blood on the page.”

While any similarities between “Too Much Blood” and the forgotten 1983 Rolling Stones cut of the same name are accidental (Hint: there aren’t any), one song that is still very much a reference to Fallon’s record collection is Handwritten’s acoustic-guitar-shrouded, sunshine-pop, Byrds/Tom Petty-homage “Here Comes My Man.” That title sound familiar, doesn’t it?

“I’m not really a Pixies guy,” Fallon recalls, “I was asking in the studio, I was like, ‘Isn’t there another song called ‘Here Comes My Man’?… And then we found out, ‘oh, the Pixies, yeah. And I’m like, ‘What’s their song about?’”

Not unlike Fallon’s lyric and title, Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” is inspired by The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting For The Man.”

“It kinda came from a mix between Beyonce, with ‘Single Ladies’ – and this is totally true; and this is what I’m talkin’ about, about not being cool,” Fallon says, “and Lou Reed – ‘Waiting For My Man.’”

There is a difference between writing responses to top 40 pop songs and trying to write a top 40 pop song, though. Fallon is only familiar with the former. Not only is that fine with him, it’s fine with Handwritten producer Brendan O’Brien, who the band cut the record with at Nashville’s famed Blackbird Studio.

Fallon says the band choose Nashville because it’s a place where they didn’t know anyone and could avoid distractions. And he says they hired O’Brien – an A-list knobsmith behind some of Gaslight influencers like Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam and (in recent years) Bruce Springsteen’s biggest records – because the producer said the right thing.

“Brendan was the only guy that was sayin,’ ‘Don’t sit down and try to write a radio hit. Don’t try and chase hits around. You need to go and write the songs that you love and then you bring them to me and together we’ll build the sound to make them sound like huge-sounding, big rock and roll records,” Fallon says.

With that said, Handwritten red-letter rockers like “Howl,” “Biloxi Parish,” “Keepsake” and the stellar “45” are some of the band’s best candidates to date for its “Hungry Heart” moment.