My Life In 35 Songs, Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem

Here in the dark, I cherish the moonlight/I’m in love with the way you’re in love with the night.

It got warm early that spring. I remember that much vividly.

There’s a night from April 2012 that sticks in my head, where my college roommates and I got drunk off beer and long island iced teas and sat out on the deck of our apartment until the wee hours of the morning, so amped up by the alcohol and the unseasonable warmth of the night that we were almost howling at the moon. It felt like summer, and we were absolutely acting like it was, even though it was a Wednesday night and we all had early classes the next morning.

I hadn’t heard a note of The Gaslight Anthem’s Handwritten when that night happened, but for whatever reason, when I think of this album, that’s the night I remember. Maybe it’s because I was already anticipating Handwritten with as much fervor as I’d ever anticipated any album before. Or maybe it was just because that night felt like a Gaslight Anthem song: the friends, the instant nostalgia, the magic in the night. Whatever the reason, I’ve always thought it was funny that my most vivid memory of one of my favorite albums is from a night before that album even existed out in the world.

I’ve already talked in this series about my love for summertime music. Where the music journalism world is hung up on the idea of finding the “song of the summer” every year, though, my thing when I was younger was about anointing the “album of the summer.” What was the one album that I returned to again and again throughout the course of the season, to the point where it took on all the rhythms of the summer? Which albums can I listen to years after the fact and still hear the echoes of the summers they soundtracked? I could probably look back at every summer since the early-2000s and tell you which album fit the bill for each of them.

My favorite bands during my college years were The Dangerous Summer and The Gaslight Anthem, and for all four of those years, those two bands had a shared monopoly on my album-of-the-summer title. In 2009 and 2011, the summers before my freshman and junior years of college, The Dangerous Summer delivered angsty, emotionally raw albums – Reach for the Sun and War Paint, respectively – for seasons when I was feeling a lot of doubts and worries about my future. And in 2010 and 2012, the summers before my sophomore and senior years, The Gaslight Anthem served up big, hopeful, throwback-leaning rock ‘n’ roll albums – American Slang and Handwritten – for summers when I was feeling optimistic and celebratory.

Getting to a celebratory point by the time summer 2012 rolled around felt like a hard-fought victory. If you read last week’s installment, you know that I ended 2011 by flaming out of my college major. When I went back to school at the dawn of 2012, after a much-needed winter break, I had a difficult question that I needed to answer: Can you recalibrate your entire life in the space of six months? It was a new semester, and I needed a new everything else to go along with it: a new major, a new slate of courses, a new life plan. Being a professional singer – at least one with a vocal performance degree from Western Michigan University – was no longer an option. So, what was next?

By the time Handwritten dropped in July, you’d almost never have known that I had started the year amidst something approaching a quarter-life crisis. My decision was to pivot from my music major to an English degree – specifically, the university’s then-brand-new degree path focused on professional writing. In the summer of 2011, amidst growing doubts about my chances in the vocal music program, I’d started a blog to pair my love for music with my latent writing skills. I’d excelled in my high school AP English courses, but I hadn’t written much since I got to college. My AP credits got me out of English-related gen-eds, and there weren’t a whole lot of papers to write in the music school. During the school year, the blog led quickly to other writing opportunities – including for a music website called Rockfreaks, as well as for the Western Herald, WMU’s college newspaper. And once I was back home for the summer in 2012, I started putting out feelers to local news organizations to see if I could land an internship. Soon, I was working for a local business that was part up-and-coming news website and part ad agency. I felt like I’d made more professional headway as a writer in just a couple months than I’d managed in the better part of a decade as a musician.

The Gaslight Anthem dropped “45,” the first single from Handwritten, on May 8, 2012, a week or so after I got home for the summer. The song sounded every bit as invigorated as I felt. The Gaslight Anthem had never lacked for passion or urgency in their music, but there was a hunger in frontman Brian Fallon’s voice on this song that felt new. Add some glossier production and a bigger, more vibrant guitar sound, and this version of The Gaslight Anthem felt like a band on the verge of blowing up into the mainstream. I resonated with the band’s bigger aspirations, because I was suddenly feeling like I had a lot of potential, too. I realized, in retrospect, how much apprehension I’d been carrying around about my odds of actually turning vocal music into a moneymaking proposition. Free of that anchor, I was suddenly so much more optimistic about my future than I’d been in years. Hearing one of my favorite bands swing for the big leagues with absolutely no reservations aligned with that optimism.

True to my memories of that unseasonably warm spring, the summer of 2012 ended up being the hottest summer I can ever remember in my hometown. Handwritten dropped during the most sweltering week of all, and I recall having to leave my parents’ air-conditioned house to properly enjoy the songs. Up in my bedroom, with its one west-facing window, the sweltering weather got to be almost torturous. In the car with the windows down, though, or down at the beach with the cool water just steps away, the weather was glorious. The songs sounded glorious, too – big, epic rock songs in the classic tradition, just made for a season like this.

I’d always loved summer nights, but that summer made me love them more, almost out of necessity. When the sun went down, the temperature dipped, too, usually enough to reach bearable levels. My girlfriend spent much of that summer off at a grad school course out west, which meant I was spending more time on my own than I had during the two previous summers. I burned that time writing, trying to build my blog into something that could garner a broader reader base, and maybe even get me noticed by a bigger music site. “We only write by the moon/Every word handwritten,” Brian Fallon sings on Handwritten’s big, bold title track. I loved the romanticism of that notion, and I related to it, too. I wasn’t writing by hand, but I was doing a lot of my writing late at night, after work, when the temperature would drop and the songs would sound like a million bucks. I found I could let my mind wander into more profound places after everyone else had gone to bed, and I hoped that profundity would result in better music writing.

I suppose it worked, because shortly after I posted a review about Handwritten on my blog, I got a message from the team at AbsolutePunk.net, saying that they wanted to bring me aboard as a contributing writer. Handwritten had already gotten a proper AP.net review – a 98% rave from one Thomas Nassiff. But that summer was serving up plenty of other albums I was interested in writing about, and soon, I’d posted my first review, of Glen Hansard’s solo debut, Rhythm & Repose. I’d end up writing exactly 200 album reviews for AbsolutePunk before the site sunsetted in 2016. My 200th and final review, poetically enough, was for Brian Fallon’s first solo album, that year’s Painkillers.

My brother and I saw The Gaslight Anthem for the first time later that fall, and it was one of the most electric shows I’d ever experienced. On a night off from a tour opening for Rise Against, Gaslight played a double-set, no-openers, one-off show in Detroit. The setlist spanned an epic 29 songs, including almost all of Handwritten and almost all of the 2008 masterpiece The ’59 Sound, plus a bunch of deep cuts from other albums and a few crowd-pleasing covers. It was one of the best shows I’d ever been to, and it set the tone for what has turned out to be one of the most consistently satisfying relationships I’ve had with a band’s live music output. I’ve seen The Gaslight Anthem three times since they reunited in 2022 following a lengthy hiatus, and all three shows blew the roof off the joint. I’ve seen Brian Fallon twice solo, as well, once each on the tours for Painkillers and its follow-up Sleepwalkers, and both were surprisingly sing-along-heavy shows.

My favorite Gaslight show – and one of my five favorite concerts I’ve ever been to, period – was seeing the band reunite in 2018 for the ’59 Sound 10-year tour. I’d never seen such a fired-up crowd before. It was a Saturday night show in Chicago, which already set things up for the type of reckless abandon you’re not going to get at weeknight shows. Add the adoration for the album being celebrated and the pent-up demand for a band that had been dormant for more than three years at that point, and the result was truly unhinged. The sing-alongs and crowd cheers were loud as hell, the mosh pit lasted the entire show, and the energy never dipped once, even during the ballads. From the very first words of the very first song it was a perfect live music experience. Those words, it just so happened, were the first words of “Handwritten”:

“Pull it out, turn it up, what’s your favorite song?/That’s mine, I’ve been crying to it since I was young.”

When I look back at the summer of 2012 – the Handwritten summer – it really does feel like the season where I figured out my life. My hope at that point was to make a living from music journalism, which never ended up happening. But writing for AbsolutePunk, and continuing to write for Chorus.fm these past nine years, has been a huge labor of love, and has taught me so much about writing and music. If you’d have told me back then that I’d eventually interview and/or podcast with three of the four members of The Gaslight Anthem, I don’t think I would have believed you, but that’s been one of the most fun twists of fate to come out of this whole thing. Oh, and another bonus: My internship that summer, with the aforementioned news organization, ended up evolving into a long-running freelance writing engagement, and eventually, into the full-time job I still have today.

I guess the answer to my initial question, the one about recalibrating your entire life in the space of six months, was “yes.” And I can’t help but think that a lot of the success I found had to do with that summer and all those nights staying up way too late, listening to music, and writing by the light of the moon.

Past Installments: