Everybody told us we would never make it. Even friends would say to me, 'Okay this band thing is cool, but seriously, what are you really going to do?' I can't think of anyone who believed in us, and that was fuel for the fire, because the more anybody said I wouldn't do it, the more I was like, 'No, I'm going to do it.'
— Brian Fallon
Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.
It's a beautiful thing, to start over.
I don't want to be the mayor of New Jersey.
We want to be big... we want to be a big band, but we don't want to be your best friends.
I'm on the phone with this guy, and he says to me, 'People compare you to Bruce Springsteen. I don't think you've written a song as good as 'Dancing in the Dark' or 'I'm on Fire.'' And all I could think was, 'Me neither!'
I think Green Day's 'American Idiot' is probably the best comeback or mid-career record that any band has done.
People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.
It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.
I'll probably continue to write about heartbreak forever. That stuff doesn't go away as you get older.
I don't mean it egotistically, but I've been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it's part of my job and my duty - especially where I'm from - to speak the language of the people I'm around and speak for them.
Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.
You can learn a lot if you become a student of what's happening to you.
I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem.
I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK.
On the road, we watch 'The Mighty Boosh.' We have so many copies, we have them in different country codes.
I've never read 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,' but his later works are about whether God is real.
I grew up in the next town over from Asbury Park and five streets from E Street. My mother fed me 'Born To Run' with my Cheerios.
I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don't really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing - this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.
I don't really hate a lot of songs, but I think Weezer has put out some songs I really hate because they've also put out a lot of songs I really like.
When you're a musician, a lot of time people help you out; they take pity on you. Family members will kind of come around and are like, 'Listen, I bought you a bunch of groceries because I know that you're a screwup.'
I'm not really into the numbers game of, like, what position our record is. But you find out at the end, you know? You're like 'Oh, all right! That's good!' We had a Number Three record. That's crazy! What's that about? That's exciting to me! I think that's good.
I'm one of those people who, even if I'm invited somewhere, I still kinda feel like I'm not supposed to be there.
At the end of the day, you can't reinvent yourself past a point, because you are you, and there are things that are inherently you that are always going to be there.
When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.
I can't really see myself writing about politics because I'm not really into it, and one of the worst things you can do is write about things you're not into.
One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.
There's no way I'm going to write for other people.
Songs are like anything else - they dictate to you which ones go together and which ones don't.
Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.
The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that.
For me, there's no point in being an artist and putting yourself out there if you're not going to really put yourself out there.
You get a realisation at some point in your career that whatever it is you do, you can no longer continue to do it. You just realise you can't put out the same records forever.
Why blow money on a tour bus when you could get your mom a nice dress?
Springsteen is a hero to a lot of people in New Jersey. He's a role model - because he's a local guy who got out.
Sometimes I get the bug to live in London for a year, or something like that, and maybe I will. But New Jersey's home.
You pay your bills and you take care of your family, or you're not a man.
I've always said it's easier for bands to make a hard stance - like, we don't do commercials or whatever, blah blah blah - when you've sold billions of records. It's super-easy to be righteous when you're rich.
You can't shape it. You can't change it. Your life is what it is.
I don't have a 'Born to Run' in me.
Everyone always says, 'We don't want to be pigeonholed.' But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.
There's never going to be a new Beatles because we don't consume things in that way anymore.
You're always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.
With 'Get Hurt,' we wanted to see where else we could go with the band. We thought it was time to change things up a bit. The song itself is similar to the feeling of a wreck you see coming, but long past the point you can avoid it.
Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.
There can be a wrong time - it's happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.
We didn't invent this - this rock n' roll thing.
Fans look up to us, and that's creepy.
My friend Danny Clinch, who's a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It's hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They're all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, 'Don't sell out!'
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you've got to have your story together. You've got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He's got an understanding that you don't hear that often.
