Red Bank native rocker is a solo star at the House of Independents, playing Stone Pony Summer Stage and Sea.Hear.Now with The Gaslight Anthem
By Alex Biese
ASBURY PARK – Brian Fallon and Asbury Park are going to be seeing a lot of each other this summer.
Fallon, the Red Bank-native rocker and singer/ songwriter, will perform on a trio of Asbury Park stages in the coming months, starting with the House of Independents at 572 Cookman Ave., Saturday, June 1 and Sunday, June 2. The shows, solo bows for Fallon, will serve as the venue’s re-opening weekend; it was shuttered in November following flood damage.
Fallon has strong ties to the downtown venue. He filmed his 2017 “Forget Me Not” music video there, which has racked up more than a million views on YouTube. He returned to the club the following year for pre-tour rehearsals with his band, The Gaslight Anthem.
“It’s a great venue,” Fallon told The Two River Times. “You kind of can’t beat it.”
He said its size makes it special. “There are bands that maybe can’t do 800 or 1,000 people or however big the (Stone) Pony is, and it’s just a nice place to have an alternative,” Fallon said. “It’s cool. I’ve seen a lot of cool shows there.”
Fallon will be back in town a couple of months later and a few blocks east when The Gaslight Anthem headlines the Stone Pony Summer Stage Aug. 16. It’s the band’s first time at the iconic venue in six years, and plenty has changed in that time. Back in 2018, the band reunited to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their 2008 breakthrough sophomore LP, “The ’59 Sound,” and the show was a celebration of their storied classic rock revivalism.
Now, the band is on tour to support its first new material in nearly a decade, the 2023 album “History Books” and its 2024 companion EP, “History Books – Short Stories.” The album marks a stylistic evolution for the band, as it combines its New Brunswick-honed rock ’n’ roll power with the sort of raw, stark songwriting glimpsed in Gaslight classics like 2008’s “Blue Jeans & White T-Shirts” and fully realized on Fallon’s solo albums, “Sleepwalkers” (2018) and “Local Honey” (2020).”
“I realized anything that I write, whether it be solo or Gaslight Anthem or whatever, it sort of always is the same path starting out,” Fallon said. “So when I’m just sitting here in my room and I’m writing a song, it’s just me, it doesn’t matter what I do, what band that I do it with; I feel that it always has that same thing. But then the band adds the real character on top of it.”
It was around the release of “Local Honey” and the COVID-19 lockdown that Fallon began thinking about rock bands and how they grow over time.
“Even Kiss, for that matter, they did that ‘MTV Unplugged’ thing,” Fallon said. “But you take the guys that I admire – not that I don’t admire Kiss, I do – but Pearl Jam and bands like that, the Foo Fighters, Metallica, Nirvana, they all have this element. And I said, ‘You know, the guys (and) I can really do whatever I want with the band because we’re a rock band, we can do whatever. So if I wanted to do something like ‘Local Honey,’ I could get the band to do that and we could do it and it would sound how it would sound – I think it would sound much different with the band playing than it would if I was hiring musicians, but still the essence of it could be done.
“What I’m trying to say is I have a band that is very flexible, they can do anything. If I came in with a record that was 100% Robert Johnson-style blues – which is not for me – it could happen. We always joke around, because we do a lot of cover songs, we always say we would be the best wedding band on the planet because if we wanted to play early Aerosmith we could and we could really make it sound good, and then again we could sound like the Replacements. We do a good job at finding the essence of a song, and I think that it’s one of our strengths. So if you’ve got a bar mitzvah or a wedding, you call us up.”
Fallon and The Gaslight Anthem will take a far bigger stage than that when they play the Sea.Hear.Now festival Sunday, Sept. 15 in Asbury Park. The day will feature fellow iconic New Jersey artists Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Trey Anastasio Band and Kool and the Gang, all part of an eclectic lineup that includes Norah Jones, Gogol Bordello, Action Bronson and Larkin Poe.
“It doesn’t get any bigger than it does this year,” Fallon said of the festival. “You’ve got Bruce there and we’re there and Trey’s there and Norah Jones is there.”
“It’s going to be great. I think you’re going to see a lot of camaraderie going on.”
What does Gaslight have in the works for Sea.Hear. Now? Fallon’s not spoiling anything, but he is promising something to remember.
“I can’t tell you what, but I’m working on all these ideas for Sea.Hear.Now,” he said. “I really want to make it as cool as possible and have a real special set that just sort of is something nice for the fans, the people that have been standing there all day long, and really just give them something to look forward to and then hand off the torch to Bruce (and) let him go.”
Brian Fallon, 8 p.m. Saturday, June 1 and Sunday, June 2 at the House of Independents, 572 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, $43, houseofindependents.com. The Gaslight Anthem also performs at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 16 on the Stone Pony Summer Stage, 913 Ocean Ave., Asbury Park, and Sunday, Sept. 15 as part of the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park. Both events are sold out.
The article originally appeared in the May 30 – June 5, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
