BRIAN FALLON
Delicate fingerpicking is possible even when you have tattooed knuckles. Just ask Brian Fallon. Sat in the café of London’s Rough Trade East record store, swaddled in a heavy green coat to shield him from the January cold, the New Jersey native talks animatedly about taking guitar lessons again. “I wanted to get better, for myself,” he says. “I wanted to be able to do things I couldn’t do before.”
Fallon’s fingerpicking skills came in handy while working on Local Honey, his third solo album in five years since stepping away from The Gaslight Anthem, the slash-and-burn punk ’n’ roll band with which he made his name. It’s a low-lit Americana record, heavy on atmosphere and light on the punchy soul-indebted stomp of earlier releases Painkillers and Sleepwalkers.
After embarking on an acoustic tour dubbed Songs From The Hymnal in 2018, Fallon realised that by breaking down his old songs to their constituent parts he had unlocked in them something new. “I didn’t know at the time that it would affect the writing of Local Honey,” he says. “I just wanted to try and tour like that. I’d never done it. It ended up showing me that there’s this whole other side – you can carry a song with minimalistic instrumentation and still make it equally as powerful as it would be with a band.”
The LP holds a mirror up to who Fallon is right now: he’s 40, married with
