Quotes from Brian Fallon

There are two things that matter when you're making music. First, that you're doing what you love, even if it's crazy and other people tell you it's crazy. The second thing is the only people you really need to worry about are the people who love your music, not the people who speak badly about it.

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

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

I'm a pretty private person.

Gaslight Anthem's thing is its power. It's just like boom and explosions and loud, and play with everything you got.

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.

Everybody told us we would never make it. Even friends would say to me, 'Okay this band thing is cool, but seriously, what are you really going to do?' I can't think of anyone who believed in us, and that was fuel for the fire, because the more anybody said I wouldn't do it, the more I was like, 'No, I'm going to do it.'

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 just like a good song, it doesn't matter. I mean, I am into girl groups and stuff like that. I listen to anything.

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

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.

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

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.

Shoes are everything. You can tell more about a man from his shoes than his handshake, because they tell where you're going.

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

When you're a musician, a lot of time people help you out; they take pity on you. Family members will kind of come around and are like, 'Listen, I bought you a bunch of groceries because I know that you're a screwup.'

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.

You can't staple me to the Brooklyn hipster. I don't buy skinny jeans and $50 T-shirts. I wear the same clothes I've always worn, from Target.

I learn tons of John Frusciante's licks from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I'm never going to play like the Chili Peppers, but I might use that if I've got a dub beat or reggae thing mixed with a soul thing.

It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.

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

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.

My friend Danny Clinch, who's a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It's hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They're all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, 'Don't sell out!'

One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.