The Gaslight Anthem’s reunion story is so unbelievable, that one might think it was simply New Jersey lore. The incredible tale involves a fundraiser for the governor and meetups with Garden State musical heroes Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen.
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Ahead of performing a benefit for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy with Jon Bon Jovi and the Goo Goo Dolls’ Johnny Rzeznik in September 2021, The Gaslight Anthem vocalist and guitarist Brian Fallon mentioned to his wife he wanted to get the band back together. The couple were headed to lunch with Bon Jovi and Rzeznik at Bon Jovi’s request when he shared the news. When Fallon arrived, the musicians shared how much they enjoyed The Gaslight Anthem and the band’s songs.
“I was shocked by it all,” Fallon tells American Songwriter over the phone. “I’m sitting there and they’re telling me how much they like my band, and I’m like, ‘You guys know who you are, right?’ … It felt like it was all signs pointing to this thing. But it wasn’t easy. I had to figure out how to do it still. Mechanically, it was very difficult.”
The Gaslight Anthem went on hiatus in 2015 following a tour in support of the 2014 album Get Hurt. With a massive decision to reunite, Fallon decided to reach out to one more New Jersey music legend: The Boss.
“I texted Bruce and I said, ‘Hey, can I get your ear for a minute? I’m having some thoughts about the band,’” Fallon recalls. The pair met over pizza in New Jersey and Springsteen offered his advice. Following their meetup, Springsteen gave one more suggestion.
“He texted me and he’s like, ‘You should write us a duet,’” Fallon says, incredulously. “He called it a duet. You say yes because it’s Bruce Springsteen. I can’t believe that it happened because no one would believe this. You couldn’t write this as fan fiction if you wanted to.”
Fallon went home and tasked himself with writing four songs before he called his bandmates. He wanted to pen music that would fit the band and a potential new project. Those tracks include “Positive Charge,” “The Weatherman” and “A Lifetime of Preludes,” all featured on the Garden State rockers’ new album, History Books. Once he finished the last song, he called longtime friend and drummer Benny Horowitz. He was in, as were bassist Alex Levine and lead guitarist Alex Rosamilia.
The 10-track album blends The Gaslight Anthem’s punk-rock roots with introspective songwriting. The lyrics detail love, loss, mental illness, and mortality. Some songs came quicker than others. “Michigan, 1975” was inspired by Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides,and was written in 10 minutes while “Autumn” took more than a year to write despite Fallon’s best attempts to finish the song.
“How would you talk if you couldn’t speak to another life form, from beyond our world? That’s what writing a song feels like,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff going on around us that we don’t see, we only perceive. You’re trying to close your eyes and touch the infinite. … It’s difficult to catch that and describe it.”
When Fallon is writing songs, he burns incense. He says the music for “Michigan, 1975” started in January 2023 while at his brother-in-law’s home in Scotland. At the time, his sister-in-law had gifted him incense from the Middle East.
“I was so enamored with the fact that it was from somewhere I had never been,” he says. “Where are these people? What’s their culture? Who are they? What are they afraid of? When I was smelling it, I was in the presence of all these things that were foreign to me, but so common to them. I was sitting there and I wrote the music, the guitar part to it.”
So what incense was burnt while writing “History Books,” The Gaslight Anthem’s duet with Springsteen?
“There’s this incense maker in Seattle,” Fallon says. “The incense is called Love & Pain. It’s probably some of the best-smelling incense I’ve ever smelled in my life.”
Fallon says writing a duet for Springsteen was a daunting task. After he threw away his first song attempt, he decided to write the entire record instead. When it was finished, he let the rest of the band and Springsteen select which song fit best.
In the end, he and the band decided the title track to its comeback album, History Books, sounded like a song they could hear Springsteen on.
“We sent it to him, and that was it,” Fallon says, still dumbfounded by the events that led to The Gaslight Anthem’s reunion. “It feels like it happened to someone else. Every once in a while, I’ll poke my head up and be like, ‘My band is back together, and we own our own record label and we’re singing with Bruce Springsteen on it. That happened. That’s not a dream.’ It’s pretty amazing. It’s not lost on us how insane this is.”
Photo by Kelsey Hunter Ayres
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