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When Brian Fallon fans turn up to one of his shows these days, they get to see a new side of the erstwhile Gaslight Anthem frontman. Or, at least, they see him doing something that’s still new even to him.

Reached by phone somewhere around the Lonsdale area of North Vancouver, where he’s visiting his wife’s parents, Fallon tells the Straight that he started taking piano lessons.

“I would read these interviews with Tom Waits, because he creates such unique music, and he would say, ‘I don’t write on a guitar or even a piano anymore, because my hands go to the comfortable positions,’ ” Fallon explains. “He would say he would pick up a drum and just start banging on it because it would make a new sound. And for me, sitting down at a piano, I was like, ‘This is not at all familiar to me, and doing these chords is opening my mind up.’ ”

That, Fallon notes, makes every concert he plays a unique experience. “It kind of gave everything a new life, because I can transfer songs, even from night to night,” he says. “There are some nights I play a song on guitar and some nights I play it on piano.”

Fallon’s sets span his entire catalogue, including selections from his bands the Gaslight Anthem and Molly and the Zombies, plus tracks from his two solo LPs, 2016’s Painkillers and this year’s Sleepwalkers.

The latter sees the tunesmith stretching out sonically, infusing an earnest heartland approach to songwriting with elements of stomping gospel and after-midnight soul. Lyrically speaking, Fallon spends much of the album meditating on mortality, exploring the theme on “Forget Me Not” (“Would you put your black dress on and visit my bones?”) and “See You on the Other Side” (“I loved you more, I loved you more/But a clock keeps ticking down”).

It’s not a new topic for Fallon; the Gaslight Anthem’s 2008 breakthrough single, “The ’59 Sound”, was also about death, with the singer belting out such truisms as “Young boys, young girls/Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night.”

“It [dying] is something that everyone deals with and no one understands,” Fallon says, “so it’s one of those unexplored things that you’ll never find out the truth of until you get there.”

Fallon plays “The ’59 Sound” as part of his solo shows, and, yes, some nights he accompanies himself on piano. Don’t expect to hear him singing it with his old bandmates anytime soon, though. The Gaslight Anthem played a few reunion shows earlier this year, but Fallon insists the group is creatively defunct.

“The original reason that we stopped doing anything is that we felt like we had filled up the book that we had to write, you know, and didn’t really have anything to say anymore, and that that was kind of the best place to stop,” he says. “Because if you keep going after that, I’m not so sure what that means. If you’re not doing it for the reason that you started—which is that you have something to say, or that you have something to continue searching for—I don’t know if that’s a great idea for a band.”

Brian Fallon plays the Vogue Theatre on Friday (October 19).