"Songwriting is one of those
old school preacher things, I think. I feel like singers and preachers
get smacked by some kinda crazy lightning right before they deliver; because
I'm completely oblivious if you asked me how to write a song, it just happens,
I can't take the credit for it, and then bang: hallelujah."
(Brian Fallon
- VoxAmps.com, 2009)
"It's 30% craft of knowing how to move things around and word play and
70% Divine Intervention. I don't think man in general can take too
much credit for the art they produce, it certainly seems bigger than anything
I can comprehend."
(Brian Fallon - blog
post, 30 August 2010)
"I think a good melody is what gets
you hooked in initially, but the story is what keeps people going back.
I think that is what separates a 'one-hit-wonder' from a 'classic song'."
(Alex Rosamilia
- Room Thirteen, February 2009)
"If you're gonna write anything that's
melody or hook-oriented, you're always gonna dance on that line of it being
cheesy. Sometimes you wonder, is it Social Distortion or the Goo Goo Dolls?
But we have a very serious filtration process in the band. There's a lot
of stuff no one ever hears. And there were songs, while we were writing,
where we just kind of said, 'Nah dude, that's too close to the edge.' We
had to develop some sort of insight into the middle ground. But I'm over-critical."
(Benny Horowitz
- Glide magazine.com, 16 November 2009)
"We're a soul band, but a soul band
who grew up on punk and hardcore. We sing about everyday stuff -
working, the ladies, growing up, dying ... but we tell the stories with
the language of basement, VFW Halls, dirty clubs, tour vans, and a youth
spent listening to The Clash."
(Brian Fallon
- WonkaVision, August 2008)
"But as far as our influences, where
we come from and how we value ourselves and the people around us, it is
punk. [...] But it’s a lot easier to hold onto those cookie-cutter,
punk ideals when you're 16, living with your parents and getting ready
to go off to college. You've got your whole life ahead of you. It's a big
fucking difference when you're in your late 20s, everything that was supposed
to be great is behind you now and you're still sitting there, in the middle
of the fucking rain with no umbrella because of punk rock. When you reach
that point, your standards can bend a lot. [...] With age not only comes
wisdom but real life tumbling down on your shoulders. It's just a lot easier
to be punk when you don’t have that all coming down on you. [...] If you
grow up punk, and you really believe in those ethics when you do it, it
doesn't matter whether you're a doctor, or a lawyer, whatever you do, you're
going to carry that consciousness and that morality with you. And on that
basis, I think we're about as punk as a band in our situation can get.
We don't treat people wrong. We don't rip people off. We're direct, we're
honest with everyone."
(Benny Horowitz
- Glide magazine.com, 16 November 2009)
"Being punk rock is nowadays more
of an ethic or a sense of morals than it is a genre."
(Alex Rosamilia
- WFXN, April 2009)
"Everybody in what they do has some
or several people that they look up too. I think that as artists, it develops
their personality. I think that as an artist, in very rare cases there's
a person who'll step out of the gate that's completely original. [...]
I think you copy people, and emulate people, until eventually you've copied
so many people, and emulated so many people, that eventually it's all mashed
together and you've got you're own thing."
(Brian Fallon
- Racket, March 2008)
"You have to give credit where it's
due. I've been cautious to make people know who our influences are.
When I was a kid and heard a band, then accidentally stumbled upon the
band they stole the riff from, I'd feel cheated."
(Brian Fallon
- Chart Attack.com, 5 November 2008)
"New Jersey has an essence. It has
a different vibe than a lot of places. There’s a lot of hard-working, blue-collar
roots, especially with where we’re from and our families. That definitely
comes out in our music."
(Alex Levine - The
Vancouver Sun, 22 September 2009)
"I wouldn't say there's a specific
Jersey sound or Jersey genre. But even though everything sounds different,
there's a similar sense of desparation. There's a hint of claustrophobia
because of how easy it is to get stuck in New Jersey. So it's not
a genre, but a state of mind."
(Alex Rosamilia
- Gravity Rides Again.com, 26 March 2009)
"We've taken Springsteen's spirit,
because we come from the same place. We're seeing the same things
he saw down the highway 30 years ago."
(Benny Horowitz
- Q magazine, December 2008)
"I don't want to tell what the songs
are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which
is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my
story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then
it's only my story."
(Brian Fallon
- Backpackrock.net, March 2009)
"You can't grasp the weight of what
someone else thinks about your work. You hear it, and you understand
it, but to actually receive it is something I can't quite do yet. [...]
Like with Joe Strummer; there's no way anybody could feel about my stuff
like I felt about that. And it's not a false sense of humility."
(Brian Fallon - Express
Night Out, May 2009)
"I'll spend three months working
on one song because I refuse to have someone who likes music go through
what I went through when I went out and bought a band that I love's new
album only to learn it was total crap."
(Brian Fallon - Kerrang,
January 2009)
"I won't continue down the same path
all the time. Hopefully, I'll get it right on the next record, but then
I'll want to do something different. If you get something right,
you gotta do something different, 'cause the only thing left to do is get
it wrong. Nobody wants to hear the same thing over and over again."
(Brian Fallon
- Chart Attack.com, 5 November 2008)
"I want to write lyrics for people
who don't have a voice and talk about things that people can't get out
there and make public. We have a recession going on here and there
are things people can't talk about, like health insurance, the struggle
to feed your family and keep your job. I want to write songs that
make people think 'Yeah, I can make it through another day'."
(Brian Fallon
- Kerrang, 20 May 2009)
"[A]s a writer, you're always trying
to reach one person, and that's the listener... if you're Muddy Waters,
The Rolling Stones, or MGMT, I don't care... you're always only reaching
that one person who's hearing you at that very moment with a record...
so embrace that, accept the invitation and step into the artist's living
room for a moment and hear the conversation."
(Brian Fallon - blog
post, 12 May 2010)
"From the very start, movies and
books were always important for me when it came to writing. That's something
I picked up from Dylan and Springsteen. A lot of people just stick with
other musicians, but there's plenty of inspiration on your bookshelf or
in your film collection. It was stuff like Dante's Inferno, and
a lot of Jack Kerouac. With Kerouac, I really got into the travelling and
the idea of not having a valid explanation for the constant travelling.
As a touring musician, I suppose I appreciated the constant need to be
on the move. His lifestyle was quite different to mine, though. I don't
do drugs, I'm too focused, so that side didn't resonate with me. During
the writing of American Slang, I was trying to educate myself on
classic American movies that you really should watch but which I never
got around to seeing. I dug in to Martin Scorsese's movies a lot, Chinatown
with Jack Nicholson, that sort of thing."
(Brian Fallon - The
Irish Times, 11 June 2010)
Performing
"Once
you figure out how to separate what you do when you are normal and what
you do when you are performing, it gets easier. In real life, I'm not the
life of the party. I'm usually the guy in the corner trying to eat
as quietly as I can. That's who I really am. The character is the
person I wish I was in high school. That's not who I am, that's who
I was when I went home and played guitar in the mirror. It's the
same thing."
(Brian Fallon
- Rant n' Rave with John Nagle, 22 October 2009)
"I get up during
the day, and my hair is messy and I'm wearing the same ratty clothes. When
it gets close to showtime, I start combing my hair and then I put my boots
on. When I put the boots on, I become the guy. I'm the guy wearing the
boots to work. It's the little things like that. The one thing I haven't
done is change my clothes. Whatever I wear that day is what I wear onstage.
Then when you put the guitar on, you become a different person. [...] But
I don't turn on the character when I'm outside and someone comes up to
me. If a kid comes up to me, they get the real person. That's the difference.
That's what Joe Strummer was doing."
(Brian Fallon
- Rant n' Rave with John Nagle, 22 October 2009)
On playing with Springsteen at
Glastonbury: "He just showed up. That was it. Nobody knew about
it, nobody said anything, and he showed up and went, 'Can I play with you,'
and we were, like, 'Absolutely. Yeah. All right.' It was literally three
minutes before we went onstage. I asked him if he had a guitar, he said
no, and I'm like, 'Well, OK, I've got one. Here. Play this.' The funny
thing is the guitar I gave him I got that day and I'd never played it.
So he was the first person to play that guitar. . . . And he uses these
big, massive picks and he really jams on the guitar, so he scratched it
- on the surface he totally put scratches on it, but it was hilarious because
it was him. If somebody's going to scratch your brand new guitar,
it better be him."
(Brian Fallon
- The Calgary Herald, 22 September 2009)
Music
"Music today
has turned into this ridiculous hybrid of five different things that all
sound like s--t. And people are starting to realize that it's a cyclical
thing - fans and critics attach themselves to the one thing that seems
different from all of that, a big corporate monster gets a hold of it and
then they start factory farming out the copycats. For now, we're
the exact opposite of the MySpace band with three songs. We're no frills,
we don't dress up and we don't have keyboards."
(Alex Rosamilia
- Toronto Star, 11 July 2010)
"There are so many bands who have
no substance. [...] They're not saying anything, there's no effort put
in and they have no soul. It just sounds like some guys with a million
dollar record deal, a funny hair cut and not a lot else. I have no
interest in what they say at all."
(Brian Fallon
- rocksound.tv, 2008/9)
"Now everybody
ever born knows that the blues is not the white man's, it's too awesome
for any pale skinned man or woman to have come up with."
(Brian Fallon - blog
post, 27 April 2010)
"There is redemption in every song."
(Brian Fallon - NPR,
11 June 2010)
Success
"I'm going to do everything
I can to be a success as it's ridiculous to be afraid of that. It's easy
to do this, you just have to keep perspective and stay away from things
that make you a mess and ruin your career. Just don't be a jerk, don't
take drugs, don't sleep with lots of chicks, don't stay out until four
in the morning. Very simple."
(Brian Fallon
- Rock Sound, April 2010)
"Even if we get really, really big,
I still want us to be the band that care about their art, care about the
people that come to see them play [...]."
(Brian Fallon
- rocksound.tv, 2008/9)
"Where we're from, if we come back
to our home towns with some kind of attitude, we're not going to be taken
back. We try to be real people inside of all this."
(Benny Horowitz,
St
Joe News, 17 April 2009)
"I could care less about ever having
a No. 1 single. I would just like to be able to play and have people who
grow old with you, and you stay with them through their life. We've got
a few sentences, maybe, to say what life's about. Hopefully, we'll get
a chapter later."
(Brian Fallon
- The Boston Globe, 30 May 2008)
"I would reccomend to really play
music you love, and most importantly feel....if it feels good and you can
stand behind your music, then success is achieved whether you get paid
or not."
(Benny Horowitz,
DimestoreSaints.com,
13 June 2010)
"After parties are not my forte.
I'm a meat and potatoes guy, famous people scare me. I'm much more
comfortable around construction workers and screen printers."
(Brian Fallon
- NJ.com, 28 July 2009)
"The real consistent thing with us
is that we're still trying to stay the same guys. It would be cool
if we were the biggest band in the world... that people were like, 'You
know what? Those guys are still cool. I remember them when they were playing
in a basement and they are the same guys playing in whatever big arena.'
That would be the coolest thing for me. That they hadn't changed."
(Brian Fallon
- ExploreMusic.com, 2 March 2010)
"My friends always go, 'Are you rich
yet?' Look at you on the TV and the magazines. You're on the cover of the
internet,' they say. I'm like, 'That doesn't translate into dollars. You
have to be OK with that, with doing that because you actually love it,
not because you're waiting for some kind of miracle payday. That's the
American reality. It shouldn't be called the American Dream, it should
be the American Opportunity: 'dream' is elusive and a lot of people don't
get there."
(Brian Fallon
- Spinner Music, 28 May 2010)
Life
"Nobody needs me to tell
them that times are hard right now. There are bands [...] who will
raise awareness about the political and social problems that you need to
be aware of, but we're here to remind people not to loose sight of themselves
and to take time away from it to actually live their life. I know
everything's weird and messed up right now, but don't let that take anything
away from the joys of being alive."
(Brian Fallon
-
rocksound.tv, 2008/9)
"But that's life, you know?
A weird mixture of bitter and sweet."
(Brian Fallon
- Reax Music, September 2008)
"The thing that's so cool about living
in America is that everyone will give you a chance to try. The thing that
isn't good necessarily is the spoon-fed American Dream thing - just because
you try doesn't mean you're going to be rich and successful. It's a long
road."
(Brian Fallon
- Spinner Music, 28 May 2010)
"I think we need to learn to take
care of each other better, I think people have lost human kindness. We're
all in this together really. Nobody's better than anyone else [...]."
(Brian Fallon
- Backpackrock.net, March 2009)
"There's safety and dignity in tradition.
This generation is about instant gratification. I don't like it."
(Brian Fallon - Q
magazine, December 2008)
"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? I guess I'm very young to be writing
like that, and I may not find the answers in the whole of my writing career,
but those are the questions that move me to song. Sometimes I wish
I didn't look so deeply into everything, but I do. I can't do small talk
- I never talk to people about the weather or what I've seen on TV.
I'm much happier writing about bigger topics, heavier stuff, because that
is where the communication is. That's where you can talk to others
and discover: I'm broken and so are you."
(Brian Fallon - The
Guardian, 12 June 2009)
"[O]riginal Les Pauls of the 1958-1960
breed can sell for upwards of $300,000! I don't know about you, but to
me that is an absolutely inconceivable amount of money. [...]
I'm reading this book [which] goes into great detail about how these guys
buy one of these old guitars, and then they want another, and another,
and another, because the flame of the wood, or the sunbursts are a bit
different on each one... WHAT!? There are people starving to death down
the street from me, and people are blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars
on a guitar!?! Get serious about your whole life right now."
(Brian Fallon - blog
post, 27 April 2010)
Personal
"My
dad has worked a lot, and he's got this old school work ethic that a lot
of people have where I grew up. I remember when I was getting pretty serious
about playing in bands, and my dad was sitting there with me at about one
in the morning, and right before I went to be, he said 'Hey listen…' in
that real stern New Jersey accent, and he had my full attention. 'You gotta
follow whatever dream it is you have here, because I can't let you end
up like me, where you're just killing yourself to make a dollar. What I'm
doing is always waiting for you if you fail, because you can always work
with your hands.' Having my dad be so supportive when playing in
a band to make money is so totally against the way my dad was brought up
was huge for me. I come from a very old school family background where
you're always living your life in your father's shadow, and always seeing
if you measure up to your dad. I've always looked up to my dad and wanted
to make sure he approved of me, so having him push me out there and giving
me his support was monumental for me."
(Brian Fallon - Ravemagazine.com,
22 June 2010)
Wacky quotes
"This song's about stealing
from pirates."
(Brian Fallon
at the Area 4 Festival introducing 'We Came to Dance', August 2008)
"We sold a bunch of our internal
organs to get the gig; it was tough to pull off without a liver, but we
did ok."
(Brian Fallon
on performing on the Late Show - Backpackrock.net, March 2009)
and here's that
liver-less gig:
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"It's 30% craft of knowing how to move things around and word play and
70% Divine Intervention. I don't think man in general can take too
much credit for the art they produce, it certainly seems bigger than anything
I can comprehend."