Brian Fallon

Having recently turned 40, the New Jersey legend has left more than his youth in his rearview. His former outfit, The Gaslight Anthem, reunited for a string of reunion shows in 2018 but now only exists in that murky grey area known as “indefinite hiatus.” He released two well-received solo albums in the past four years, 2016’s Painkillers and 2018’s Sleepwalkers, but even those records dwell more in the rock genre than anywhere else.

Now, with his new solo album, Local Honey, and a partnership for his own label with the venerated, artist-friendly outpost Thirty Tigers (Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell), Fallon has made the record he has always wanted to make and has put himself in a place to release it exactly as he pleases. Its acoustic-leaning, introspective, singer-songwriter artistry is a benchmark of a time and place, a heartfelt and grown-up sound that has been in his mind and in his heart for a long while. Unique amongst his output, Local Honey is a snapshot of Fallon’s current existence and a masterstroke from an artist whose songwriting talent is boiling over.

“I want people to see where I am now,” Fallon says. “I’m 40, I’ve got two kids, a wife, a house —that’s who I am. I’m not really trying to do any thing, I’m trying to step away from that. I just want to tell stories and write songs that mean something to me. And if you’re aging the same way I am then hopefully they mean something to you, too.”

Following the release of Sleepwalkers, Fallon spent the next year-plus demoing a series of stripped-back songs inspired by the simplicity and struggles of his day-to-day life. With a goal to write as truthfully as possible, he experienced a more difficult road than he had faced ever before in his career. Only when he tapped into the intimate feeling of connection he shares with a live audience was he able to reach his desired levels, and the resulting songs mirror that profound, earned intimacy.

“Being truthful in songs is so hard because you have so many insecurities that you want to cover up,” he says. “There are so many layers of self-manipulation, especially when you know you’re going to be examined. The only way I could find to deal was to place myself onstage, looking at an audience, and ask myself, OK, what are you gonna say? I know my audience and I trust them, and I think they trust me to deliver whatever this thing is that we share, and there’s a definite back-and-forth that happens. We’re comforted by each other. So I would close my eyes and see myself onstage and ask what I wanted to play next, and that’s how I wrote the album.”

Armed with the batch of his most introspective songs to date, Fallon sought to avoid an attempt to make “the classic Americana solo album” as so many other frontmen-turned-solo-artists before him have tried. Instead, he partnered with the producer Peter Katis (The National, Interpol, The War on Drugs) in an effort to challenge himself in a variety of new ways and to expand the songs’ sonic horizons. Together, the duo pushed the material to places Fallon would not have attempted on his own, pulling back when necessary but collaborating like a true production partnership. Katis injected the music with an overarching sense of “sadness” that lingers over the work like a blanket, a concept to which Fallon has always been drawn. “That was Peter’s bar—if it made you feel sad, then it was good. I totally relate to that; it’s what I love about all the music I like, in mood more than theme. I subscribed to that right away.”

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