The Gaslight Anthem Return To Australia For Good Things

Since coming together in 2007, The Gaslight Anthem has forged its own powerful, populist sound, marrying their punk roots with rich craft and raw emotional power to create a soulful, exhilarating, and utterly unique vision of American rock ‘n’ roll. Their album THE ’59 SOUND officially saw the New Jersey-based band break out on a global scale, fueled by heroic hooks, huge choruses, and wildly triumphant energy.

2010’s AMERICAN SLANG earned epic critical applause while making historic chart entries worldwide, including a #1 debut on Billboard’s “Independent Albums”, while 2012’s HANDWRITTEN proved the apogee for The Gaslight Anthem’s anthemic approach, scoring top 10 chart debuts in eight countries. Having climbed the mountaintop, The Gaslight Anthem chose to call it a day in 2015, making what they thought was their last-ever live appearance at the UK’s Reading Festival. However, 2018 saw the band reunite for the tenth anniversary of THE ’59 SOUND with a very special series of shows across North America and Europe performing the album in its entirety.

Now, The Gaslight Anthem’s sixth full-length and first new album together in almost a decade, HISTORY BOOKS once again brings their soulful breed of life-affirming punk to explore everything from mortality to mental illness. Hailed by the Associated Press as “big-hearted freeway rock,” the title track, History Books, features vocals from longtime band champion and fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen. The Gaslight Anthem marked HISTORY BOOKS with worldwide headline dates and festival appearances including a co-headline set at Chicago’s Riot Fest. Hi Fi Way spoke to Alex Levine about their return to Australia.

Counting down to Good Things festival, are you looking forward to returning to Australia?
Oh, yeah, I was just thinking about a couple days ago. We haven’t been there in eight years, nine years. It’s been a while. I always say in Australia it’s the hardest and easiest work being in a touring band because it takes a lot out of you to get there, obviously. But it’s one of the most amazing places,

A lot has happened in eight years and throw in a global pandemic are you still making up for lost time?
A hundred percent. I think this past year at least touring and live performing, I think the, the energy of fans has kind of gotten a bit back to normal. That first year of touring after the pandemic was pretty rough.

Does it seem like a real fitting way to top off your touring year in Australia, finishing with Good Things and a couple of sideshows as well?
Yeah, it’s beautiful that, especially the time of year, it’s perfect. We leave the day after Thanksgiving over here and then we get back right in the middle of the holiday season and we get a little break for the Australian summer in the middle. It’s great.

What do you love and what do you miss about touring Australia?
I have a lot of friends in Australia, but touring in Australia is a different animal than anywhere else. I tell friends that it’s the most organised things, especially when you’re on the festivals, everybody’s traveling together and there’s no tour buses. You fly in, you get to the hotel, there are the beautiful hotels. There’s always so much downtime, there’s a lot of activities that they have planned for you. It’s almost like a summer vacation rather than over here where youget on a tour bus and you get go from city to city to city to city for about six weeks.

Are you focusing mostly on History Books this time around?
We haven’t been there in a long time and especially now since we have a decent catalogue that we try to think, especially with the set list, we try to think as a fan, and how we enjoy going to shows. Unless it is something that is promoted or geared towards playing a record from front to back, we always try to maintain a bit of every record and a couple of the core songs that we really enjoy playing. It’ll be a mix of everything.

Given the amount of time between albums are you stoked with how it was received by fans?
I think there was a couple hiccups that we take responsibility from, we weren’t very happy with the way certain things came about when our record came out on our side as a band. We went back to the drawing board and we were like, you know what? I think it may benefit us and our fans if we are able to remaster and remix the record and make it sound more like us on a digital format. I think the fans were very receptive to that because they knew that we were listening to their concerns and it made us sit back and look at the situation. We were maybe a little too much in our own zone, and we weren’t able to see what was going on from the outside. Now looking back, I think we’re glad that we were able to do that.

After the hiatus, did you feel like you had come back even more reinvigorated?
For sure, a hundred percent. I think when you put time in between anything, any relationship, any, any art form, anything that you do that you have passion for, there’s ebbs and flows to it. I think when we were able to get through Covid and come together and really talk about for the first time what we want out of our career, what we want out of our band, and what we plan to do, you know, we never really had time to ever plan things. We kind of went on tour and never went home back in the day. So, now to have that time and to also have a bit more wisdom with age and to understand what we really want out of all of this.

Does that put a different emphasis now on enjoying the shows which probably mean more now than perhaps in the earlier stages of your career?
Of course, you definitely don’t take anything for granted as you get older, especially this. This is such a unique thing when you’re able to really look out and you see however many people have come to a show in any given city, especially in the climate of the music industry now, streaming and social media, there’s so many different options. If you’re able to break through the noise and to have a fan base, like our fan base, that’s one thing we’ll never take for granted is the amount of love, respect and gratitude we have towards our fan base, unbelievably loyal, especially throughout all of those years that we were dormant. It’s great to reconnect with fans that we haven’t seen in many years, and we’re excited to get down to Australia and reconnect with a lot of fans that we have out there that we have stayed in contact with and friends that are in other bands that we’ve worked with in the past. It’s going to be great.

The expanded edition of the album is really, really cool. Did a lot of those bonus songs come out of the sessions that you did for History Books, or did that come later on?
Yeah, it came later on. We decided to have a bit of a different take on things and go about it like an MTV Unplugged aspect. We went back into the studio probably about four months after the record came out, we never rehearsed actually any of that, including the Billie Eilish cover that we did. We were in the studio for about two or three days, we recorded everything live and we were like, hey, let’s just bring it all down and see what it sounds like. I think it came out cool. I was excited about the finished product.

I love the Billie Eilish cover. What was your thoughts behind covering that one?
Yeah, the story with that, it’s pretty cool. We were looking to do a song that was a bit different, and Brian was telling us that one day he was driving his daughter to school and she kept playing the Billie Eilish tune, and he was like, this is amazing. This is great and he hits us up, he’s like, guys, what if we did a Billie Eilish song, check this song out? I was like, oh, I know that song. My kids like it as well. We didn’t really talk about it, about how we were going to approach it, and we went into the studio, it has a very simple chord progression, it doesn’t change much. So we learned the chords and we were like, let’s see where this goes. Naturally it went into that pocket that I think we like to live in, which is that driving straightforward, punk rock, aggressive but also keeping it melodic. I think it was cool and was interesting for sure.

Working with Emily Wolf, that must have been really cool as well.
Yeah, Emily’s a really good friend of us collectively. We did some extensive touring with her last year and she’s incredible, man. She’s one of those people you look at and ask why aren’t you the biggest artist on the planet? You’re standing there with a double neck guitar, a three-piece band, and you sound as big as Iron Maiden with this beautiful voice. But yeah, she’s awesome. Karina Rykman, she’s an incredible artist as well, she came in and she did some guest vocals on that Billie Eilish song as well.

Are covers and collabs something you are likely to do more of in future?
I think you have to look at how the landscape of the industry is always changing. I think the positive side is of it is you have the ability to write and record music all day long, every day and you could put it out throughout your own channels, whether it be YouTube or Spotify or social media. It doesn’t have to be surrounded with a big push of a record or single or anything. You could just record something that you want to record and put it out, give it to your fans, put it out digitally, put it out on a vinyl, whatever it may be. So, there’s a lot of options and I think that’s really good for us because we love writing music. We love recording music and we love covering songs. If anybody’s been a fan of us, they know to expect a different cover every single tour. We try not to recycle cover songs, and we try to keep it as fresh as possible.

Might have to throw some Australian covers in when you’re here?
Oh yeah! Get some AC/DC going!

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Gaslight Anthem at Good Things Festivals on the following dates, tickets HERE…

And the following headline shows, tickets HERE…