Brian Fallon was driving his daughter to school just before he was set to hit the road with Gaslight Anthem on their 2024 tour and pondering what fresh song the New Jersey rock band could workshop as a cover. He found a burst of inspiration from something his kid cued up.
“‘What is this beautiful song?’ I asked. And she said, ‘It’s Billie Eilish,’” Fallon says backstage at the Basement East in East Nashville, where he’s getting ready for a gig that night. The song was “Ocean Eyes,” Eilish’s 2016 debut single, and he found it both irresistible and a little bit like an Eighties anthem. “I listened to it the whole way home,” he recalls. “I could hear a little of Skid Row in that song.”
When the Gaslight Anthem frontman got together with his longtime pal Butch Walker, who produced Fallon’s 2016 solo debut Painkillers, to record an acoustic EP for Gaslight to drop before their tour, Fallon decided to put his own spin on Eilish’s dreamy ballad. It ended up having legs far past that recording session.
“I could completely hear now that ‘Ocean Eyes’ might have been where the germ of this album started,” he says.
That album is Not Bad for New Jersey, Fallon’s new solo album out Friday. Produced by Walker, it finds the two men bonding over their shared appreciation of glossy rock & roll, from Tom Petty to Tina Turner, and especially Bryan Adams’ 1984 standout, Reckless. “Songs with a lot of attitude, like early Melissa Etheridge and ‘Missing You’ by John Waite, were really big for me at the time,” Fallon says.
As he looked at the liner notes of those albums, Fallon noticed that many of those songs had additional co-writers. Previously, he’d hunker down and work on material himself. This time, he changed things up and wrote with his friends, including fellow singer-songwriter Donovan Woods (in Toronto), the Killers’ Brandon Flowers (in Utah), and Lori McKenna and Nick Long.
“I’m in this era of letting people into the process,” Fallon says of his changed approach to writing. “I was always so, so rigid with that, and I always felt that if I didn’t write the songs, it somehow made me less valuable.”
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Last December, he headed to Walker’s studio on the outskirts of Nashville and spent three weeks recording the tracks that make up Not Bad for New Jersey. Unlike Fallon’s previous solo effort, 2020’s Local Honey, which saw him looking inward with a sparse set (he was in a “dad role,” he calls it), Not Bad for New Jersey has a bigger, rocking sound. That’s best demonstrated on the Gaslight-adjacent title track, its rollicking counterpart “Nobody Likes You in NYC,” and the bold heart-on-the-sleeve “The Big Sleep,” featuring Woods on backing vocals. “Better Before,” meanwhile, is pure Eighties Bryan Adams.
The collaborative spirit that defined Fallon’s songwriting also extended to the recording. Jamming with Walker and drummer Eric Slick, the trio knocked out 12 songs, with 10 making the cut. Fallon estimates they recorded 90 percent of it live. “That’s how good Eric and Butch are,” Fallon says. “They were incredible partners to have on this.”
According to Slick, the appreciation is mutual.
“His songs paint a real picture of what his life is like, and I think he’s got that Jersey thing deeply embedded in there,” he says. “It makes a lot of sense that Bruce Springsteen and Brandon Flowers love his music — he’s got that innate understanding of the working class, and he writes his lyrics to reflect that.”
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Not Bad for New Jersey features a handful of guest musicians, including Flowers, who just released his own solo album (“I think we come from a lot of the same places and he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard,” Fallon says), McKenna, Marc Ribot, and Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen. A longtime fan of the veteran British hard-rock band, Fallon met Collen through their publisher and his inclusion on Not Bad for New Jersey, on the song “Somewhere You Shouldn’t Be,” was a thrill.
“When I sat down with him, he couldn’t have been cooler,” Fallon says of Collen. “He’s a guy who has not lost an ounce of joy for what he does.”
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As for what’s next, Fallon has a steady slate of touring, with dates in the U.S. and Europe that will take him through the end of 2026. Once that’s wrapped, he plans on getting back to work with Gaslight Anthem at some point next year, and is already putting together song ideas for the group. As he learned with Not Bad for New Jersey, enlisting an outside songwriter could now be an option for Gaslight too.
“I wonder what would happen if I got my punk friends, or guys who came from punk, to write with,” Fallon says. “At this stage in my career, there are enough people who I know who know somebody who knows somebody, so I can get to a lot of people. It would be so cool to see what would come out of that.”