When Brian Fallon was young, he sounded like an old soul. “In my head there’s all these classic cars and outlaw cowboy bands / I always kinda sorta wished I was someone else,” Fallon sings wistfully in “High Lonesome,” a rousing highlight from his 2008 breakthrough LP with the Gaslight Anthem, The ’59 Sound. While he was only in his late twenties at the time, Fallon’s voice was already weathered and roomy, like an old Cadillac that’s rough around the edges. Inevitably, the New Jersey native came to the attention of Bruce Springsteen, to whom Fallon was endlessly compared, and the Boss offered his implicit endorsement by appearing several times with the Gaslight Anthem on stage. “Where do you put that in your life?” Fallon wondered aloud when I phoned him earlier this month. “What are you supposed to do after that? How can you live up to that?” For Fallon, now 37, life after The ’59 Sound has occasionally been fraught with self-doubt and crises over his artistic identity. While The Gaslight Anthem went on to have a successful career, eventually signing with Mercury Records in the early 2010s and releasing three top 20 albums (including two LPs, 2012’s Handwritten and 2014’s Get Hurt, that debuted in the top five), the band was eventually ground down by an endless album-tour cycle that necessitated an indefinite hiatus in 2015. The following year, Fallon released a solo debut, Painkillers, rebooting himself as Americana-style singer-songwriter and dramatically dialing down the arena-punk bombast of the late-period Gaslight Anthem albums. Judging by his sophomore solo LP Sleepwalkers, out Feb. 9, Fallon seems to have finally found his groove outside of the Gaslight Anthem. Retaining the rootsiness of Painkillers and adding a heavy dose of R&B and heartland rock — both of which were latent influences on his writing for the Gaslight Anthem but largely obscured by the band’s punk posturing — Fallon manages to both evoke the charming classic-rock worship of The ’59 Sound while also seeming more assured in the guise of the “mature solo artist.” In conversation, Fallon is refreshingly candid about the peaks and valleys of his carer, as well as his (mostly positive) feelings about The ’59 Sound, which The Gaslight Anthem will celebrate with a 10th anniversary show at Governors Ball in New York City in June, the band’s first gig in three years. (Other anniversary shows will also be announced soon.) At this point, he’s grateful to have survived a bumpy, sometimes tumultuous decade in the spotlight. How do you feel about The ’59 Sound 10 years later? Well, I always liked that record. I don’t think I ever went through a period where I didn’t like that record. I wouldn’t be talking to you here about Sleepwalkers if I didn’t do that record. I don’t think any of us would be talking to anybody about anything if it wasn’t for that record.

We had a call, and we were just like, ‘Hey, are we gonna just ignore this?’ I know we’re on hiatus — we’re not doing anything, everybody’s off doing their own thing, and everybody’s fine. But if we let this go, that says something. That would come across as apathetic to me. I was like, ‘I don’t feel apathetic about this. How do you guys feel?’ They didn’t feel apathetic at all. They felt like, yeah, we should probably do something. Then we thought, ‘if we play some shows, what happens? Do we have to start the whole thing up again?’ What realized, well, no, because of this record, we can do what we did in the beginning, which is [anything] we wanted. We just did what was fun, and if it wasn’t fun we didn’t do it. Later on it became more confusing. So we just said, ‘hey, we could go play some shows and play the record,’ We’ve never played the record front to back. Your initial response to my question was interesting: ‘I always liked that record.’ It’s somewhat defensive. I sense that while you liked The ’59 Sound you also felt overwhelmed by the response. Oh yeah. The record came out and got the highest attention it can attain when you’re a citizen of the great state of New Jersey. You’re referring to Bruce Springsteen. That’s it. You got bestowed upon by the king, and what are you going to do when your 28 years old or 29 years old and you’re just floating around in this punk band and you’re playing DIY punk houses and all of a sudden Bruce Springsteen is like, ‘Hey man, I learned your song in my spare time, being the Boss, in my Bossly duties.’ Where do you put that in your life? What are you supposed to do after that? How can you live up to that? Since you’re still here making music 10 years later, you must have figured it out. Well yeah, because you don’t have to live up to it. That’s the thing. I thought you had to. I thought you had to beat it or compete with it, because I was young and kind of dumb. But now I see that it’s not a competition, it’s the next thing. Eventually it’s a story. I’m 37 now. It took me 37 years to get it. I think a lot of artists go through those growing pains when they experience success early on. If you ever have a record enter the Billboard top twenty, they should hand you a book that says, ‘This is what you need to deal with, and here’s the stuff that you grew up with that’s going to rear it’s ugly head.’ [Laughs.]

The last three albums you’ve written are called Get Hurt, Painkillers, and now Sleepwalkers. Is there some sort of thematic connection here? It seems like you’ve slowly moved from turmoil to maybe a more relaxed kind of turmoil. [Laughs.] Your subconscious, it will be heard. I can tell you that with Painkillers, I’m talking about how music is usually used as some sort of painkiller for people. Aanywhere you go, people will turn to music to console them, even more sometimes than friends or family. It’s a unique thing, and it doesn’t divide people like other things do. That’s kind of what I meant by that. Sleepwalkers came from more of a dream state, kind of like the person that you present to the world. You know, you go to work and you’re whoever you are and you’re part of you, but you’re not the whole you. Because you don’t go to work and say, ‘You know what I really want in life?’ You keep that to yourself. The whole idea behind Sleepwalkers was about that world. With Get Hurt, we just named it that because I think we were all getting hurt in some way or another. We were pretty banged up at that point. The band was real banged up. We were beyond the scope of our own cognitive awareness. It’s funny, because you listen to people talk about being successful and how it doesn’t give you what you want and all that stuff. I never had any expectations like that of success. I never thought it was going to fill this void in my life. I don’t think any of us did. We were banged up in a different way. That thing went like a rocket, really. It was Sink Or Swim to [playing with] Bruce Springsteen, in a year and a half. And you’re just like, ‘What happened?’ I don’t think we ever had time to catch our breath. There was no minute to catch our breath. We were sort of swatting away any kind of flies that would come in the ointment at the time. We were just like, ‘Well, we have to deflect this.’ It feels like you’re running and swatting and being chased by bees. We were just looking at each other like, ‘This used to be fun, this is not fun, this is the opposite of fun right now.’ The band went on hiatus shortly after that. The easy thing would have been for it to be like, ‘I hate you,’ or like the other guys to be like, ‘We want more money,’ or somebody to say ‘I’m the one that really is the band’s leader,’ something like that. Then we would have a blow up and then we break up. That would have been the easiest thing to happen. The more complicated and convoluted thing to happen was, ‘We’re still friends and we like this band and we like this music, but we hate doing it right now because it’s so, so hard.’ I can’t tell you even why now. It’s been three or four years. I can’t tell you why. You seem to have more perspective on that period that perhaps you did as it was happening. Is that common for you? Do you often write songs that mean one thing in the moment, and then something else later on?