From The Editor's Floor: The Gaslight Anthem

The following was cut from the final draft of THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM’s current cover story due to space constraints, but we felt we needed to share it with you.



While the Gaslight Anthem’s music is upbeat and energetic on the surface, The ’59 Sound’s lyric sheet is littered with repeated references to death and the afterlife (“Miles Davis & The Cool”), sin and redemption (“Meet Me By The River’s Edge”). But no song carries more weight than the title track. When first questioned about the somber nature of the song’s lyrics, frontman Brian Fallon says “The ’59 Sound” is about “10 different people,” as well as “growing older” and “carrying on.” But the lyrics are uncomfortably specific at times: “And I wonder, were you scared when the metal hit the glass?/See, I was playing a show down the road when your spirit left your body.” The price for writing songs this good is having to relive the painful memories that created them.



Fallon pauses and takes a deep breath. “I was about 17, and I used to go to the Time Still Café, off the highway, for their open-mic nights,” he begins. “There was one night I was playing, and [afterward] I found out my friend had gotten in a car accident and died literally maybe 200 feet away from the Café on the highway. I was playing that night and had no idea.”



Fallon isn’t the only member of the Gaslight Anthem who has suffered loss. Death has seemingly followed the quartet for the better part of two years. In 2007, a close friend of drummer Benny Horowitz and guitarist Alex Rosamilia’s passed away in Richmond, Virginia. That July, the band lost their friend and fellow New Jersey musician Zack Finch in a one-car accident. (The phrase “Live fast, die awesome,” which adorned Horowitz’s bass drum head for a year, was a tribute to Finch.) This past January, bassist Alex Levine’s grandmother passed away. The funeral was the day after Gaslight’s performance on The Late Show With David Letterman aired; the band boarded a plane to the U.K. immediately following the service. But the roughest few months for Gaslight came in October and November 2008 while they were on tour with Rise Against. Horowitz’s 96-year-old grandfather passed away during the first week of the tour, and a high school friend of Levine’s committed suicide in the tour’s final days.



After leaving Portsmouth, England’s Wedgewood Rooms and checking into the band’s modest hotel for the night, Rosamilia plops onto a bright red fold-out couch with an open bottle of Stella Artois in one hand and three more unopened just an arm’s reach away. The 27-year-old guitarist discusses influences (the Cure, the Smiths and “anything that involves more than five effects pedals”) and his motivation for playing music (“I’m too socially awkward to communicate with people otherwise”) before the topic of his grandfather’s death comes up. It’s painfully clear he took his loss the hardest.



“A year ago, he was diagnosed with cancer,” Rosamilia explains. “His response to that was, ‘I’ve had a full head of hair for 86 years, I’m not going to lose it now.’ Meaning, ‘I’m not going to do the chemo.’” He succumbed to cancer while the band were in Orlando, Florida. “It was weird, because I woke up at 5 o’clock in the morning that day, for no reason. Then later on, I found out that’s when he died,” he says. The band had an in-store performance that afternoon, which caused his loss to hit home. “Pictures of all four [sets] of our grandparents are on the inside [of the Señor And The Queen EP],” he says, tears forming in his eyes, “and the first kid who comes up to me gives me the EP to sign. I lost [my composure] right there, and it was the only thing I signed that day.” Since his grandfather’s passing, he has worn black onstage as a memorial gesture.
Scott Heisel

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