By Chris Wasser
http://www.herald.ie/
Saturday September 10 2011
I'm not good at much," says Brian Fallon. He, the flat-cap wearing ringleader of New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem. Which doesn't make much sense given the 31-year-old's enormous, Springsteen-approved talent. "Yeah, well . . ." he shrugs.
Jeez man -- learn to take a compliment.
"I don't think it's something that I can really take too much credit for," he replies. "Like, if you're born being able to do something, you can't really take any credit for that. You didn't do anything."
Woah . . . that's deep. A bit like Fallon's shiny new project, -- a two-man guitar band called The Horrible Crowes.
It's "the darker side of soul music", says Fallon of their debut album, Elsie. Truth be told, it sounds more like The Gaslight Anthem with their feet on the brakes -- and without the punk. Which is a good thing as Fallon and long-time friend and collaborator Ian Perkins deliver an intriguing collection of sweeping rock numbers with splashes of folk, country, and even jazz.
But it is just over a year since The Gaslight Anthem followed their hugely successful 2008 album The '59 Sound with their third album, American Slang. Somebody likes to keep busy.
"Well, I get these ideas that I have to kind of get out," he says. "Rather than sit around on the road, I write songs."
crew
As Fallon explains, the other half of The Horrible Crowes is a member of The Gaslight Anthem's crew. They just didn't realise how good a musician Perkins was.
"We discovered he was a really good guitar player and it was like, 'why aren't you in a band?'" he laughs.
"He and I are really close friends and, one day, we were sharing records and I said 'hey man, let's write some songs'."
So, Brian and Ian put away their PJ Harvey and Tom Waits records and decided to give it a shot.
"It's something that I was always into," he offers. "When I was a kid I would always listen to weird records, like Afghan Whigs records. And none of my friends were into that. They were like 'we're into punk rock and that's for girls because it's got slow songs on it'. And I like that stuff!"
The songs are very personal, he insists. But who's Elsie?
"That's just a name that we decided on. I mean, that's not anybody in particular. It kind of seemed like a real classy . . ." Brian pauses for a second, "Elsie sounds like a woman that wouldn't do the things to you that has been done in the songs."
Gotcha. And the name The Horrible Crowes you got from a poem, right?
"Yeah, it was a Scottish poem called The Twa Corbies," he explains. "It's about these two crows deciding what to do with a dead knight -- what parts of them they're gonna eat. It's horrible. I mean, it's more than that . . . you'd have to read it. But it's pretty insightful."
I'm sure it is. And I'm sure the guys in The Gaslight Anthem weren't worried at all when their lead singer told them he was going it alone for a while.
"At first, it was like, 50/50," he nods. "Some of the guys were like, 'that's cool, go ahead -- do it'. And then some of the guys were a little bit like 'what are you doing? Why are you doing something else?' And then I think once they heard it, they realised 'oh, okay --I see why you're not bringing that here because it doesn't make sense'."
Brian doesn't see The Horrible Crowes as a side project. Instead, it's as if he has joined another band. Come September, he'll have another group of musicians to contend with when he joins US musician Chuck Ragan's Revival Tour -- an "acoustic collaborative event" featuring a handful of American punk artists reinterpreting each other's songs.
fame
Meanwhile, The Gaslight Anthem will begin work on a new record later this year. Must be a good position to be in, I say -- selling records, touring the world, making famous friends (Springsteen joined Fallon and the gang at Glastonbury in 2009), and yet, at the end of the day, you can still walk down the street unrecognised.
"I think that that's the goal," says Brian, "to be able to live off the music but to not really have the celebrity thing. Hopefully it stays that way," he smiles. "But I'm not gonna complain if one day I'm Bono . . ."
Elsie is out now. Brian Fallon appears live as part of The Revival Tour at the Academy, Thursday, September 29
Gaslight Anthem's Brian Fallon Looks Inward With The Horrible Crowes
by RJ Cubarrubia, N.Y.
http://www.billboard.com/
September 13, 2011
"I needed to write these songs so that I could carry on as a person on my own and function," explains Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon of his new project, the Horrible Crowes. "With 'Elsie' [the Horrible Crowes' debut album], we wanted to find out what else is there -- what else are we capable of."
More intimate and haunting than his previous work, Fallon's collaboration with friend and Gaslight Anthem guitar tech Ian Perkins sounds confident in its vulnerability. While the Gaslight Anthem sticks mainly to the classic guitar-bass-drums formula to create loud, soulful American rock laced with punk and hardcore energy, "Elsie," released Sept. 6, finds Fallon and Perkins exploring more diverse sonic arrangements and new songwriting forms. "The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined," Fallon admits. "We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that. We wanted to separate what we were doing [in Gaslight Anthem] to something new and something that we could experiment with."
Perkins and Fallon aren't shy about their sweeping musical influences and aren't afraid to admit their more hardcore punk roots presented a challenge with the Horrible Crowes. "I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem," Fallon explains, also citing The Afghan Whigs' album "Black Love" and Elvis Costello's 1977 single "Watching The Detectives" as major inspirations. "That takes a certain amount of finesse that maybe a rock band doesn't have, so we had to learn all that finesse [for the Horrible Crowes], which was difficult."
However, both readily admit a lack of pressure in recording the album. "People didn't know who we were and they didn't know what we sound like, so there were no expectations," Fallon says, with Perkins in agreement: "It was just something else to do as opposed to we have to do this."
Known for his referential, folktale storytelling on early Gaslight Anthem records, Fallon has instead looked inward, personally, on "Elsie." "The record is about three relationships that I had -- one when I was 18, one when I was 19 or 20, and my current one now," Fallon says. "[They] ended up causing me a lot of grief and a lot of sorrow from the process of living through [them] but it felt like big rock songs weren't the right way to do it. I think that this record taught me how to write more personally and not necessarily use stories. It was just me trying to work out my own stuff from my head."
The result is a gripping 12-song album with massive cinematic highs ("Crush," "Behold the Hurricane") and sparse, lonely lows ("Blood Loss," "I Believe Jesus Brought Us Together") that express the complexities of personal relationships with chilling sincerity.
For Perkins, playing music with his close friend has been an unexpected experience. The Gaslight Anthem guitar tech developed a special understanding with Fallon, eventually joining the group as a touring member supporting last year's "American Slang." The earnest friendship led to musical collaboration during down time on tour, leading to the Crowes' formation.
"I'm a lucky boy, that's what I think," Perkins confesses. Although Fallon is quick to remind him that this is equally their project, Perkins remains understated. "I'm helping him out doing his thing, and I'm just focused on doing that. I never thought I'd have the opportunity to do [this], especially a record that I would listen to [myself]."
Making their live debut on Thursday night (Sept. 8) at Bowery Ballroom, Fallon and Perkins -- accompanied by a bassist, keyboardist and drummer -- played a powerful and passionate set to a soldout crowd. Fallon thanked girls who had broken his heart, the new boyfriends they had, and the mothers who raised these "horrible women" for inspiring his music. The band played "Elsie" straight-through with a couple surprises, turning Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" into a touching rock anthem and for the encore, tearing though a riveting performance of INXS' classic 1988 ballad "Never Tear Us Apart."
Fallon isn't done with the Horrible Crowes; he and Perkins have plans to record more material in the future under the moniker and have their sights set on experimenting with some electronic drums. "I like those beats that Gorillaz use but imagine more classically-oriented songs with beats under them, like Moby's 'Natural Blues,'" Fallon says.
As for the Gaslight Anthem, Fallon confirmed that they're currently recording new material. "We're making demos and our goal is 25 of them, and we've got 10. The songs that are fast, they're a lot faster. It's definitely pretty personal and pretty aggressive right now. I'm really happy with it so far."
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