Top 60 Brian Fallon Quotes

I think Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ is probably the best comeback or mid-career record that any band has done.

When I first started fingerpicking, the first thing I learned was ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ from Bob Dylan.

Why blow money on a tour bus when you could get your mom a nice dress?

I would love to learn how to paint motorcycles and stuff like that. I really, really am fascinated by that.

There’s never going to be a new Beatles because we don’t consume things in that way anymore.

We want to be big… we want to be a big band, but we don’t want to be your best friends.

It’s all about knowing your audience. When I buy a record by a band and it sounds completely different, I’m just like, ‘Why didn’t you change your band name?’

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.

I can’t sit still for long and need creative outlets and think you should try different things. I mean, if you’re a musician all of your life, you gotta try different things. I really believe you can have it all.

The Clash will always be from London, and we will always be from New Jersey. But New Jersey doesn’t create us.

When you’re older, you realize a little bit more hard truths. You are who you are. And the people that like you, they like you for being you.

The piano is where everything starts and ends. Everything is based off of it. If you understand that, you wind up understanding a lot more in all other instruments. For me, it had always been something important to try and learn.

I like movies and radios and Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey. That’s what I like, and if people don’t like that, well, literally you can go on iTunes, and there’s hundreds of other bands you can listen to.

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.

Songs are like anything else – they dictate to you which ones go together and which ones don’t.

I’d like to say I don’t care, but I do. ‘Cause when you put out a record, you try to do it for yourself first, and you want your audience to accept it, but you also want the press to accept it, too, because it validates what you do.

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.

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.

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.

When you write a lot of songs, sometimes you don’t have a place for them, and you need an outlet for them.

I don’t go to rock bars. Why would I go to rock bars? I can do that every night; it’s boring.

You can learn a lot if you become a student of what’s happening to you.

A lot of people get writer’s block, and I think you just have to show up for work, sit down, and be like, ‘I’m here.’ You have to stay confident and positive that you’re going to write something.

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.

There’s no way I’m going to write for other people.

I do find that I tend to write about big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? How do we relate to each other?

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.

I’ve spent my life playing music.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the element that sounds like The Gaslight Anthem that’s mine is always going to be me. The other three-fourths of it is going to be the other guys. I can’t stop doing what I do naturally, whether I’m in The Gaslight Anthem or my own thing.

I don’t want to be the mayor of New Jersey.

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.

Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.

I’ll probably continue to write about heartbreak forever. That stuff doesn’t go away as you get older.

We come from that school where we don’t believe we’re different from you, and it’s insulting to me on some kind of weird level that musicians are put on a pedestal.

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.

You never get away from that thing in your hometown that it has over you. You don’t outgrow where you come from.

If you asked me to make a Gaslight Anthem album on my own, I would say, ‘No way, that’s crazy.’ I would never have been able to do that.

You can’t shape it. You can’t change it. Your life is what it is.

You just have to know your story from the beginning. You have to know what you’re going for and be honest with people about that. Don’t sit there and say you’re gonna be a DIY punk band for your whole life and then move on to arenas; you can’t do that because then people don’t trust you anymore.

If you’re just making a record to pay the bills, that’s not a great idea because chances are it might not come out that good.

The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don’t usually use organs and strings and things like that.

I don’t envy anybody else’s career because I feel they’ve earned where they’re at and worked hard. I wouldn’t mind Jack White’s gig, though. He does it all!

I don’t have a ‘Born to Run’ in me.

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.

I sure wish I’d written ‘One’ by U2.

I did the coffee house thing – we have coffee houses where people play, or we used to – and when I was 14, I started there. Just played all the time. Every weekend I had a show, or every Thursday. Open-mic nights, the whole thing.

You’re always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.

On the road, we watch ‘The Mighty Boosh.’ We have so many copies, we have them in different country codes.

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.

I think some people don’t even know what they’re talking about, and they just start talking with an opinion, not even asking questions.

We built something very special with Gaslight, and we don’t want to mess with that sound too much. But I’ve always wanted to do a record where I can put strings or organs or pianos or whatever on it.

I’ve never read ‘The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,’ but his later works are about whether God is real.

The first time I heard ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais,’ I loved the vulnerability in the music and the lyrics.

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.

Fans look up to us, and that’s creepy.

That’s how I would describe myself, persistent.

When ‘American Slang’ came out, everyone was like, ‘This is the next big band in the world, and this is blah blah blah Bruce Springsteen Junior and blah blah blah,’ and I was just like, ‘I don’t know what that means. I don’t know. We’ll see.’

Too many bands record an album and feel, ‘Well, this is okay,’ but after a time, they grow to not like it.

Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.

When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.