Gaslight Anthem sails ever since sink-or-swim ultimatum
Brian Fallon was 25 and the member of a struggling rock band called Gaslight Anthem when he got an ultimatum: Sink or swim.
“I had been in bands for years, plugging away and I had the conversation with my wife,” Fallon says. “She says, ‘If this doesn’t work out, you have to figure something else out.’ My parents said it. Her parents said it. Working two jobs, trying to make the band work. It was going nowhere. That was no joke.”
Appropriately, the Gaslight Anthem named its first album “Sink or Swim,” released in 2007 and the band has been on an upswing ever since with Fallon’s ultra-earnest, hard-strumming folk songs played by a punkish rock quartet.
Fallon, with his cropped hair, boyish face and countless tattoos, is the band’s affable guiding light, a student of music history who was reading about, listening to and playing rock since he was 11 while growing up in New Jersey.
“I had been in bands for years, plugging away and I had the conversation with my wife,” Fallon says. “She says, ‘If this doesn’t work out, you have to figure something else out.’ My parents said it. Her parents said it. Working two jobs, trying to make the band work. It was going nowhere. That was no joke.”
Appropriately, the Gaslight Anthem named its first album “Sink or Swim,” released in 2007 and the band has been on an upswing ever since with Fallon’s ultra-earnest, hard-strumming folk songs played by a punkish rock quartet.
Fallon, with his cropped hair, boyish face and countless tattoos, is the band’s affable guiding light, a student of music history who was reading about, listening to and playing rock since he was 11 while growing up in New Jersey.
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