The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten
In the summer of 2010, I was living in Louisville and my dad and I flew out to L.A. to go to Hootenanny. For those of you unfamiliar, this was a one-day festival in Irvine, CA every summer that hosted, what I would call greaser music. There was rockabilly, punk, but also more straight ahead rock music as well (I saw Shooter Jennings there in 2013). You also had a car show and pin-up girls walking around. You had everyone from car nerds, punks, greasers and 1% outlaw motorcycle members.
This is only important to the story in that, before I got on the airplane in Louisville, I bought a magazine for the flight. Not sure if it was GQ or what, but it was something like that. It had a long feature on the Gaslight Anthem. I’d never heard of them, but it sounded like something I’d like. So, when we got to Amoeba in Hollywood the next day, I picked up a copy of American Slang, which had just come out. I loved it. Then I picked up The ‘59 Sound and loved that more.
Then, on July 20, 2012, Handwritten was released. It represented significant growth in both their music and Brian’s lyric writing. Gone are the endless cultural references, though he was brilliant at using them; here he shoots straight from the heart. While I don’t doubt his previous music was personal, this was more directly personal.
45 - Brian has a knack for taking a cultural reference and using it to his own ends. In the past, you had to have read Great Expectations, or know the music he listens to. Everyone, at least everyone of a certain age, understands, “turn the record over, see you on the flipside”. He’s saying it’s time to make a change. Sometimes it’s hard to let go. For a more in-depth look at this song, check out Brian on Chris Demakes a Podcast.
Handwritten - This one can bring a tear to my eye, because I can relate both as the listener and the writer. Music has the power to connect people in a deeply profound way to people they haven’t met. When someone pours their heart out onto the page, we can feel what they feel. There’s great comfort in that, in being with “someone who’s been cut up the same”. Connecting with others helps us heal, to “sew up the seams after so much defeat”. There’s no one coming to save you, their pain travels to you, “from heart to limb to pen”. That is enough sometimes to pull you out of the hole.
Here Comes My Man - While not as specific as in other places, this seems to be about his feelings about his biological father who wasn’t around. I only suspect this based on listening to podcasts where he has been open about his childhood. Even those of us who had dads who were around can relate to this though, our fathers are not perfect. Ultimately, we, as men in this case, have to decide what kind of man we are going to become. We have to unhitch ourselves from our parents and how we were raised and decide who we are to become. We can decide to keep or discard as much as we want to. We can decide to “grow my hair back out, nevermind what you like”. The father and the son both get to decide how to move forward.
Mulholland Drive - Sometimes looking back on a single moment in time in your life can help you illuminate how you got where you are. I don’t know if the “just out of sight of her” is his significant other or the girl’s mother or what, but it signifies that this relationship started out as something, at least somewhat, illicit. He put everything into this girl who couldn’t get past her own issues. He was obviously looking to her to fill his own emptiness, and she understood that he would not fill hers and she needed to keep looking (for whatever reason). Musically, this starts to give way to the harder edge of some of the other tracks on this record and Get Hurt which would come later. It’s a sound the band does well. It’s still catchy as hell and is anthemic but gives an emotional edge to the music that they’d previously lacked. A definite sign of maturing musically.
Keepsake - Here Brian attempts to make peace with his absent father. Not necessarily with the man himself, but in his own heart. He’s not holding it against his father’s other family, “they were brothers to me, even if we never got to meet”. Brian says all the right things publicly, about how his mom played both parts, and I’m sure she was a great mother, but if she’d truly played both parts, he wouldn’t feel the hole that was left by his missing father. Absent fathers leave decades of ripples the size of tsunamis in their children’s lives.
Too Much Blood - I sometimes wonder how certain people feel about what I write, but I can’t ask them because I can’t give them permission to influence what I write or don’t write. If I allowed someone to have the power to censor what I could say, it would be devastating to me, not just as an artist, but to my soul. I am sure it is difficult that people have me in their life, that I’m so willing to bleed onto the page, about something that might also affect them, so that I might share it with the world. It sounds selfish to say, but the truth of it is, it’s a part of the package with me. As he wrestles with it in this song, it’s part of the package with him too, but our loved ones should at least know that we wrestle with it.
Howl - Named for the Allen Ginsburg song, they’re still giving you the oohs and heys while name dropping poetry. This two-minute banger asks someone if all her personal pursuits fulfill her now that she’s accomplished so much, or whether or not she’s lost the ability and wonder to take pleasure in the simple things in life.
Biloxi Parish - Musically, this might be my favorite Gaslight song. It grooves. Relationships are messy, at least if you’re investing in them. You don’t get love and loyalty without some missteps along the way. The only way people don’t let you down is if they’re “ghosts”, otherwise, they’re “failures”. If you allow someone into your heart, they will let you down. The love of dead people, or fictional characters, they won’t let you down, but they won’t truly love you either. You have to take the good with the bad.
Desire - This is a straight up love song, something Gaslight does well. Nothing complicated, but there’s some great lines here, “and some men spend their lives chasing the accolades of pride, but that never crossed my mind, you were always on my mind”.
Mae - This is Brian following in Bruce’s footsteps. That common man's view on love. Unlike Bruce, the son of the factory’s general manager, Brian grew up with a single mom. He knows this life in a way Bruce can only pretend to. The irony is, when you have everything, you can sometimes gloss over what’s really important in life. When you have little, you cherish the things you have.
National Anthem - Brian and I are the same age. He’s a couple months older. We’re the last of folks who grew up in a different world. We grew into this world of technology, but we weren’t born into it. There’s lots of good things - I’m writing on it now - but anytime you gain something, you lose it. Sometimes the trade is worth it, sometimes it’s really not. He’s not making judgments, he is just pointing it out and asking you to ask yourself.
This record moves me in a way that few records continue to move me through the years. Often, a record will coincide with your life in such a way that it means everything to you in that moment. Then the moment changes. You can enjoy that record, it can make you nostalgic, but it’s not relevant to you anymore. This record, like all Gaslight record, gives me nostalgia, but this record keeps me in the moment when it does it. That is an incredibly rare feat.
If you know this record, listen to it again. If you don’t, you need to, as soon as possible. Preferably, on headphones, or alone in your car. There’s still plenty of things in life to feel wonder for, let’s not forget that.