Just think for a moment on how a year of life feels, how things change, how you change, and then think what nine years of living feels like. That’s the time and distance The Gaslight Anthem put between the release of 2014’s Get Hurt and current album History Books. During their hiatus, declared in the summer of 2015, life marched on relentlessly. For one thing, frontman/guitarist Brian Fallon had a solo career to launch, releasing four albums in the interim. Gaslight, for their part, did get back together just three years later to mark the 10th anniversary of the New Jersey rockers’ landmark release, The ’59 Sound. Even if only unconsciously, this yawning gap in Gaslight history needed addressing before officially executing a comeback, when it was time to really get the band back together, ie, in a studio, with new material and a vision, and the collective pursuit of an album to deliver to a label and the fans. It’s the sort of thing you’ve got to puff out the cheeks and get serious about.
“When I sat down and thought, ‘Uh-oh! Gotta write a Gaslight Anthem album. Ha! And it’s gotta be good!’ That’s tough,” says Fallon. “This one was us trying to figure out what we sounded like now, but including all of the elements we have ever had. Like a lot
