Last year, the Gaslight Anthem returned after a lengthy hiatus and has toured extensively ever since. The New Jersey-based rock outfit also promised new music would arrive, and on the heels of the spring single “Positive Charge,” it has now announced its sixth album and first in nine years, History Books. The title track features fellow Garden State native and longtime Gaslight fan Bruce Springsteen.
The artists first performed together at the U.K.’s Glastonbury festival in 2009 and have remained close ever since. Last year, when Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon was mulling the band’s future, he met up with Springsteen at a New Jersey pizza joint. Fallon told The Associated Press that afterwards, the Boss suggested he write a duet for the two of them to sing.
“When Bruce Springsteen said I should write a duet for us, I think my head exploded,” says Fallon of the collaboration. “It will never get old to me that one of the greatest songwriters in the world, and one of my hero’s voices, will forever be captured in a song I wrote at a small wooden desk, in October, in New Jersey.
Due Oct. 27 via Rich Mahogany Recordings/Thirty Tigers, History Books was produced by the Grammy-winning Peter Katis (the National, Kurt Vile) at his Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Ct.
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“None of us wanted to make a very somber or serious record showing how much we’ve matured,” Fallon says History Books. “We’ve all changed and grown and learned so much, but the overall mood was a feeling of excitement to be back together and making music that means something to us.”
After one-off shows on July 29 in Richmond, Va., and Aug. 13 in Pittsburgh, Pa., the Gaslight Anthem will embark on a fall tour beginning Sept. 15 at the Bourbon and Beyond festival in Louisville, Ky.
The Gaslight Anthem History Books tracklisting:
1. Spider Bites
2. History Books (feat. Bruce Springsteen)
3. Autumn
4. Positive Charge
5. Michigan, 1975
6. Little Fires
7. The Weatherman
8. Empires
9. I Live in the Room Above Her
10. A Lifetime of Preludes
