Gaslight Anthem Explain Springsteen Comparisons

The Gaslight Anthem were still fairly new on the New Jersey punk scene when their second full-length, The '59 Sound, rocketed them beyond scenes and genre limitations.

CHARTattack talked to guitarist Alex Rosamilia about what it means to be punk rock, the shadow of Bruce Springsteen and how sudden acclaim can change your plans.

CHARTattack: Your record wound up on a lot of critics' best-of lists for 2008.
Alex Rosamilia: It was interesting to see that.

When we recorded it, we wanted to write a really good record, possibly one of the best records of the year... but we didn't really think it was going to be considered that by anybody. I didn't see that coming at all.

To get that in one magazine is amazing, but to get that in multiple magazines, internationally, is unreal. Words can't express what I feel about that. On one hand, I'm really excited, but I'm also like, "Uh, you're fucking kidding me, right? I don't believe it."

To what extent do you think your Jersey roots have influenced the band's sound? Some say it must have been important, but these days music is less geographically centred.
There's less of that, definitely, with the internet. To an extent, though, it was there.

Just being from New Jersey, from the east coast. I'm not saying we're not influenced by the music there — that's a big part — but it's harder to hear that kind of east coast sound or west coast sound, a Canadian or American or British thing. Still, I think where you come from has a big part of what you sound like, even if your influences aren't from that area.

People usually cite Springsteen as the most obvious thing they hear.
I know for Brian [Fallon, vocals/gutiar], he was a huge influence. My mom listened to him when I was a kid, but I never started listening to him myself until after I'd started the band. He's more of an influence on some of us and less on others.

I definitely think being who he is, that iconic figure, I knew who he was, and I looked up to him and I thought, "I wouldn't mind doing that one day."

He's definitely got an ethic.
Yeah, definitely. You have to admire a man who can, at his age, still play three-hour sets. It's unreal. I'm definitely a fan now, but, like I said, I didn't listen to him until recently.

Your sound is similar to his — melodically, maybe, and some of the imagery — but you're like the punk version, with less bombast than the E Street Band.
Yeah, we don't have a Clarence [Clemons, saxophone].

People talk about you as being part of the punk scene in Jersey, but you're not really a "punk" band. Did you ever think about that kind of thing when you started?
No, not at all. When we started playing, we didn't really go, "We want to be a 'this' kind of band and do 'this' kind of sound." We didn't even really talk about what kind of music we were into. We just kind of started playing together and wrote what came naturally.

There's obvious punk influences in our stuff, but there's obviously other stuff in there, too, if you listen for it. The punk thing, I think, is based more on our ethics than our sound these days. [2007's] Sink Or Swim was definitely more of a punk rock record.

Of course, the word has been rendered almost meaningless now, in terms of music.
I think so. Definitely punk music as what it was meant to be is no longer what it is. I actually think what we tried to do with The '59 Sound, by doing what we wanted to do and not trying to do something that other people wanted to hear, was probably more punk rock than those people that write "punk rock" records these days.

How displaced did you feel when suddenly you jumped up a level on this last record? Usually, it's tour and record, tour and record, and now there's a lot of talk about a record. I'd imagine you're suddenly headed down a different track.
That happened with this one. We had three releases in a year-and-a-half and we started getting this acclaim for this guy — The '59 Sound being "this guy" — and it was like, "Well, maybe we should tour on this one a little more and worry about writing new stuff a little further on down."

I mean, we're always writing, but we should hold on to it for a bit this time instead of, like, releasing it as soon as we write it like we've done in the past. I don't think we're going back into the studio until 2010.