The Gaslight Anthem – Get Hurt

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When an album breaks a band you love, it gets saddled with a lot of baggage. Most albums are just a chapter in a band’s existence; there were albums before and there will be albums after. But the elephant in the room that music fans like to ignore is that there will always, eventually, be a last album, and a lot of “last albums” aren’t conceived or built to serve that role. When careers cut short because of death, or petty disagreements, or a simple exhaustion of ideas, it’s not usually the poetic ride-off-into-the-sunset conclusion we’d hope for. And yet, despite the randomness that often plays into the endings of musical careers, us music fans obsess over the lore and mythology of our favorite artists so much that we end up conferring significance that isn’t there on albums that just so happen to come at the end of the story.

Such was the case, for years, with Get Hurt, the fifth LP from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem. Released in August 2014, Get Hurt had the distinction for nearly a decade of being the final album that The Gaslight Anthem ever made. And for me at least, it collected all the baggage, lore, and extra fascination such a distinction entails. A part of me hated the album for breaking up a band I loved, for wasting the boundless potential I’d heard in their music just two years earlier. Another part of me loved it for the mystique of it all – the question of what it was about this particular set of songs that drove these four guys to the brink and forced them to pull the ripcord. To this day, when I listen to Get Hurt, those two parts of me are still in the room together, coexisting – even though, now, the album has been freed from most of the weight it was once tasked with carrying.

Let’s rewind for a minute: The first time I heard The Gaslight Anthem was in December 2008. In my typical perusal of end-of-the-year lists, I kept seeing mentions of this New Jersey quartet and their superb sophomore album. At the time, I was just at the beginning of a burgeoning obsession with Bruce Springsteen, and The Boss was the go-to reference point in every end-of-the-year write-up for The ’59 Sound. When I gave the album a listen, I could hear why – especially on the epic closing track “The Backseat.” I didn’t love that album immediately: I found the retro-leaning production a tad gimmicky – ditto for the reference-heavy lyrics – and frontman Brian Fallon didn’t have a voice that I gravitated to right away. But there was something about “The Backseat” that kept drawing me back in.

It took me a few years to fully appreciate The ’59 Sound and all of the joy and fear and insecurity that colors its nostalgic songs. The band’s next album, the more rollicking American Slang, helped me crack the code, and I spent much of the summer of 2010 driving around with that album blaring through the speakers. Fallon’s 2011 side project Elsie, made under the moniker of The Horrible Crowes, was even more of a skeleton key, stripping the full-throated frontman’s songs down to their barest and most haunting essentials. But it was 2012’s Handwritten that took me from Gaslight Anthem casual to Gaslight Anthem die-hard. To me, that album was the sound of a promising band cashing in all their chips and calling in every favor they’d ever been owed to make a true go-for-broke classic. Why couldn’t a band of punks from New Jersey make the Great American Rock Album? Handwritten had all the massive hooks, ringing guitar riffs, and heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics to prove that they could.

With Handwritten, it briefly felt like a band we all loved on the AbsolutePunk.net forums was breaking big. The first single, “45,” was a bona-fide radio rock smash, in a time where radio rock smashes had mostly stopped existing. And while the response wasn’t always strong – Pitchfork, for instance, didn’t seem to feel much kinship with Handwritten – the album got a lot of attention from music journalists and a lot of buzz that reached far beyond the fanbase they’d been cultivating for years. I remember wondering, briefly, if Handwritten would be the album that elevated these guys from clubs to arenas, or maybe even to stadiums. The songs certainly sounded big enough to get there. As far as I was concerned, the sky was the limit for The Gaslight Anthem.

Then Get Hurt happened. I remember the interviews and press releases hitting first – particularly Brian’s promises that this album was going to be “different,” and that he’d made a list of Gaslight Anthem tropes he wasn’t allowed to use in the lyrics. No mentions of Maria, he said, or the radio. The implication was that we were headed toward an Achtung Baby-style reinvention – a band chopping down the Joshua Tree of Handwritten and building something radical and new in its place.

I, for one, was excited at the prospect. For one thing, I adore Achtung Baby and how it offers up a whole new version of a band that was already unfathomably great beforehand. For another, I understood why continuing down the path that had led to Handwritten would be difficult. Up until now, The Gaslight Anthem had forged forward by making every new album bigger than the last. I couldn’t see how they would make anything that sounded more massive than Handwritten, so a swerve made sense.

The first time I heard Get Hurt, I remember stifling my disappointment. I was on my honeymoon and the advance had just dropped in my inbox. I listened to the album for the first time on a beautiful July hike while my wife was at the spa. I loved some of it right away – particularly the big, summer-sounding rocker “1,000 Years,” which could have fit on Handwritten pretty easily. For the most part, though, I was confused about what I was listening to. Get Hurt was neither the exciting Achtung Baby-style left turn the band had promised, nor another sterling collections of wheelhouse Gaslight Anthem rockers. There were a few moments that felt like new territory: The National-esque opener “Stay Vicious,” for instance, or the Waits-ian “Underneath the Floor.” But a lot of the album, to me, felt like Gaslight Anthem but without the usual energy or enthusiasm. “Stay Paper”; “Helter Skeleton”; “Red Violins”; “Ain’t That a Shame.” These songs didn’t sound so far afield from things the band had already done better on Handwritten or American Slang. Two years previous, these guys had sounded like they were ready to take on the world; now, they didn’t even sound like they were ready to take on the day.

I came to love other pieces of the record, like the way “Selected Poems” retraced the quiet-loud dynamics that had made Elsie so effective, or how “Break Your Heart” served up the prettiest Tom Petty tribute this band of Petty die-hards had even concocted. But much of the album – including most of the widely praised b-sides and bonus tracks – remained at arm’s length for me. Then, a few things happened to make me understand it better. First, I learned that Fallon had written much of Get Hurt while going through a divorce, a revelation that deepened the emotional hues of the album for me. Second, it became increasingly clear as the tour for this album raged on that the four guys in The Gaslight Anthem were incredibly exhausted. They’d released five albums in seven years – six for Fallon, if you count Elsie – and they’d toured their butts off in the interim. They were burned out and in desperate need of a break. Soon, they’d get one.

“I have pills for this, tabs for that/And something that used to resemble a soul.” “Once upon a time, I lived a perfect night.” “I heard that they’ve been calling me the Great Depression.” “I want to thank you all for watching us bleed.” “All my love is a plague/Ain’t that a shame?” “I spent all of my money on secondhand love.” “If I thought it would help, I would drive this car into the sea.” “I came to get hurt/Might as well do your worst to me.” Over and over again on Get Hurt, Brian Fallon slips in jagged little one-liners so packed with pain and disenchantment that they are almost shocking to hear. There was darkness creeping around the edges of past Gaslight albums, and especially in the songs on Elsie. But Get Hurt was something a whole lot bloodier, and those differences were especially evident in the album’s two best songs.

I’ve often thought over the years that part of the issue with Get Hurt is the sequencing. The title track, one of the most upsetting songs in the band’s entire catalog, simply comes too early in the album to hit as hard as it should, and its impact is dulled further by the two duds (“Stray Paper” and “Helter Skeleton”) that play immediately after it. In a perfect world, I think “Get Hurt” would be a side A closer, where its brutal, bruising lyrics could really land their punches. In the second verse, Fallon – this celebrated native son of Jersey – muses about packing up his life and moving to California, because he’s heard folks down there “never bleed/Not like we bleed.” And on the bridge, he’s lost in the midst of a late night on some highway. He’s so far from home that the radio stations have changed, but the pain and the dissatisfaction are still in the car with him. By the time he sings “Maybe you needed a change/And maybe I was in the way” in the song’s outro, he hasn’t found a shred of the peace or acceptance that breakup songs often wind their way around to. He just sounds lost.

“Get Hurt” would be an ideal side A capper in part because it pairs so perfectly with the album’s grand finale, “Dark Places.” On that song, amidst offers to drive his car into the sea or carve his ex-lover’s name on his heart, Fallon repeatedly mentions something inside him breaking, even though he can’t quite find the words to explain it. He’s mortally wounded, but he can’t point to where it hurts. And then, suddenly, he’s a ghost, haunting everything around him: “I became the dark in the places where you live.” Like “Get Hurt,” “Dark Places” is a truly devastating song, because it’s a breakup anthem with no answers. We’re used to hearing breakup songs that cry or plead or rage or regret, but that’s not what these breakup songs do. Instead, they are both so fraught with helplessness and confusion that they can’t even muster up the hallmark emotions of a heartbreak. “We were living proof, one by one we drifted away,” Fallon offers up as Get Hurt’s closing thought, as if there was nothing that could have been done to divert the catastrophe.

That line is ostensibly about Fallon’s divorce, but for me, it came to be about The Gaslight Anthem. After Get Hurt, the band drifted apart in what initially felt like a typical between-albums hiatus and then eventually started to seem like a permanent breakup. Fallon went and made a solo album in 2016, and another one in 2018. The band got back together in 2018 for a gangbusters tour to celebrate 10 years of The ’59 Sound, but Fallon later admitted that his heart wasn’t in it. Another Brian Fallon solo album in 2020, plus a global pandemic, seemed to put the final nails in the coffin of this band I loved – this band I’d held as living proof that rock ‘n’ roll could still thrive in the 2010s.

Slowly, Get Hurt took on that mythical status of being the band’s de-facto swansong, and I became so much more fascinated with it because of that fact. It never became an album I loved, but it definitely became one I loved to think about and talk about. It captivated me that there were so many signs in the songs of the burnout and brokenness that Fallon, especially, was feeling at the time – signs that probably could have told us what was coming if we’d been paying attention. Sometimes, I resented the album, because I wondered if things would have been different if the band had just taken a break after Handwritten and never made Get Hurt at all. Other times, though, I’d listen to “Dark Places” and be incredibly grateful that it existed as a final transmission, even though it felt to me like maybe the saddest “final song on a final album” I’d ever heard.

I gave up on expecting another Gaslight Anthem album, which made last year’s History Books a minor miracle. Made by the original four-man lineup of the band, who got back together after realizing during the pandemic how much they missed making music together, History Books is just about the direct opposite of Get Hurt. Where this album exudes desperation and frustration and disenchantment, History Books is all about gratitude, about sucking all the marrow out of life while you still can. It is an extremely satisfying reset for the band, but it also leaves Get Hurt in a slightly odd position as that album celebrates its 10-year anniversary. It was once the album that proved so tumultuous it broke up the band. Now, it’s just part five in a (so-far) six-act journey. The shift pulls away some of the mystique that the album came to hold for me – that “last album” lore that perhaps made me a bit fonder of it than I otherwise would have been. At the same time, though, it’s nice to listen to Get Hurt again and not feel all the weight and baggage it built up between 2015 and 2022. This album, in many ways, is a tragedy, but it’s a better album knowing that the broader story doesn’t end in such a dark place.

An alternate Get Hurt tracklist, for your listening pleasure:

1. Have Mercy
2. Stay Vicious
3. 1,000 Years
4. Rollin’ and Tumblin’
5. Red Violins
6. Get Hurt
7. Ain’t That a Shame
8. Underneath the Ground
9. Selected Poems
10. Break Your Heart
11. Dark Places

Author’s Note: This version of the album, I think, would have been better received. The slow-burn intro of “Have Mercy” and how it fades into the pounding drums of “Stay Vicious” makes for an extremely satisfying 1-2 punch. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” the lead single, gets bumped up in the track order, while the title track takes the position it deserves as the emotional fulcrum of the album. I find this tracklist also gives songs like “Red Violins” and “Ain’t That a Shame,” both of which I probably underrated even in this writeup, more room to breathe. The two most Elsie-like tracks (“Underneath the Ground” and “Selected Poems”) are paired in a mini duology on side B as a haunting lead-in to the already-great closing duo of “Break Your Heart” and “Dark Places.”

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