Brian Fallon can thank his wife Stacy for the fact that the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers is on his new solo album.
She was producing the Killers’ concert film of their 2022 Madison Square Garden show when Bruce Springsteen joined the Sin City band for the encore. They played Badlands, A Dustland Fairytale and Born To Run. It was a real event. But not all the Fallons were having the time of their lives. Brian Fallon had FOMO.
“Funnily enough I didn’t get invited – and it was Bruce Springsteen and the Killers at Madison Square Garden!” he says with mock outrage. “I was like, ‘How come I’ve got to stay home with the kids!? Those are my friends!’ She obviously says, ‘Bruce says hi!’ Whatever. I didn’t get to go.”
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But it brought Flowers into Fallon’s orbit. When the Killers swung through Atlantic City, he went along for the ride.
“I went to the Jersey show, and my wife was going to talk to the band and talk to the crew, like, ‘Hey, how are we going to do this? What shots do you want?’ I was just tagging along,” he says. “This was strange. I was going as my wife’s plus-one. That’s not usually the way it goes [but] my wife has got her own thing going on. She gets emails from Mick Jagger!
“So I was tagging along and then Brandon was like, ‘Hey, how are you doing, Brian from the Gaslight Anthem?’ I was like, ‘Hey! How you doing?’ And we just hit it off, exchanged numbers, and the rest is history.”
They had a lot of shared interests. Both of them love Depeche Mode. They share a love of CS Lewis. “The Screwtape Letters! Both of us have the same favourite book,” says Fallon. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild. He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”
Fallon’s first solo album in more than five years, Not Bad For New Jersey, has a lot of guests. There’s stunt guitar from the venerable Phil Collen from Def Leppard, of whom he is a longtime superfan. Marc Ribot plays a wicked solo on Wolf By The River.
And there are some old friends too, such as Canadian country-folk star Donovan Woods, who joins Fallon on The Big Sleep, and Lori McKenna, who is on On Good Terms. “Donovan, Lori and I are kind of a team,” says Fallon. “We write together a lot.”
Fallon dropped Flowers a text to see if he would be up for writing something. When he said yes, he took off to meet him in a studio in Utah. However this song was going to turn out, it was going to be an adventure.
“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song.”
This caught Fallon’s ear. It wasn’t like anything else that he had for the record – and it certainly wasn’t something he would have come up with there and then.
“It’s a very unusual chord progression,” he says. “It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar. I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What’s that?’ He was like, ‘Nothing, I thought it was another song.’ ‘That’s nothing? Let’s use that.’ So we started a little melody, and we had a title and a few lyrics, maybe a chorus, and then we started working on a structure.”
And that is when things got weird. Much of Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon on home turf musically, with the triumphant Friday night feeling of ‘80s FM rock, blue-collar power-pop that leans hard into the chorus, and then there is the punk-rock energy of Nobody Likes You In New York City. Love At The End Of The World is not like anything else on the album.
It tumbles out as though under a spell, roots-y folk acoustic guitar and the caw of something – electric slide guitar and maybe wah – in the upper registers. And then there’s the verse and it just keeps going until its three minutes are up. It’s like the All Along The Watchtower principle of foregoing a chorus, because maybe there’s too much going on in the verse, or because maybe it’d break the audience’s concentration.
Fallon says that was Flowers’ idea.
“He was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’
“We wrote the lyrics together – honestly – just talking together in his truck, and just worked it together. I get to the hotel room, I put it together as lyric structure, brought it back to him the next day, we worked on it, he came up with the vocal melody and that was it.”
Neither of them had that much left in the tank. Both had been out on the road for a long time when they wrote it. Maybe that’s why it came out like it did, like, as Fallon says, “a conversation”, without a chorus and all forward momentum. But it’s also a love song for the end of the world and how do you write a chorus for that?
“It was incredibly freeing,” says Fallon. “I think that’s what we were both trying to do, because I was fresh out of The History Books Tour with Gaslight Anthem, and he was just finishing up the Killers tour, so we were both kind of exhaling. Phew! No pressure for a second, because we were like, ‘If nothing happens with this, who cares?’”
Not Bad For New Jersey is out now digitally via Lesser Known Records, on all formats tomorrow (September 11).
While we caught up with Fallon to discuss the making of the album, he also told us about the time Bruce Springsteen gave him a guitar tip and taught him an old Roy Buchanan trick.
