"Get Hurt" Is Good Actually

I wrote this one a couple weeks ago, and was going to let it simmer, but in honor of The Gaslight Anthem’s reunion, I feel it’s only right to declare my allegiance now.

A car hit me while I was listening to The Gaslight Anthem’s American Slang, so perhaps unfairly, it is my least favorite of their albums. I will contend, however, that there are no bad TGA records. Not even Get Hurt.

Brian Fallon is the songwriter Brandon Flowers imagines himself to be. Both have a flair for the dramatic and penchant for The Boss. They eulogize small towns, nice girls, and themselves. Critics bend over backwards to praise Las Vegas’ bard-in-chief, no matter how embarrassing his compositions become—2019’s “Land of the Free” trumpeting “We got a problem with guns” like that was profound. This coupled with a Spike Lee video that makes Rise Against’s filmography look subtle.

Fallon and The Gaslight Anthem’s deeply personal Get Hurt, however, was apparently a bridge too far.

The reviews take sinister glee in their cruelty, bemoaning the album’s overblown guitars and maudlin lyrics, getting weirdly personal about the word “baby.” Fallon teased that the album would be unlike anything the band had done before, which to the casual listener wasn’t really true. TGA’s sound has always been consistent, and suddenly critics were sick of it, lambasting Get Hurt to high heaven.

Fans were vicious too. I heard how bad the album supposedly was before I even heard a note of it. I was so scared it would suck. My first attempt to listen was through a YouTube video with shitty wifi in a small town on the German border. When techno-sounding keyboards burbled into my headphones I gasped and closed my laptop. The new album did suck! Afraid of tarnishing my idyllic impression of the band, I didn’t bother trying to listen again for months. That car hit me soon after.

When I finally listened for real, and “Stay Vicious” freight-trained its way through my skull, I was so relieved. The YouTube video I originally tried had its sound replaced with royalty-free music to avoid copyright infringement—those synths weren’t part of the album at all.

It’s about divorce, in case you couldn’t guess from the cover art, which people also hated. I, of course, adore it. The heart is still whole, forget the comfort of the cliché. It’s turned upside down. Straight to the point. That’s the promise of Get Hurt. In the long tradition of breakup albums, it perhaps doesn’t tread a lot of new ground, but I’m pretty sure no one going through a divorce gives two shits if they sound cliché. It’s a low bar, but Fallon never descends into prurient mudslinging or petulant pissing contests. (The only name-calling self-inflicted, in lead single “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”: “I heard that they’ve been calling me the Great Depression.”) The album is introspective and self-flagellating, which might cause some listeners to cringe.

There is a self-awareness however, I think critics don’t acknowledge. Listening to a divorce album should be a little uncomfortable. I’ll even credit the so-slick-it’s-static production with a claustrophobia that really sells some of the songs. You’re trapped in a room with Brian Fallon and his sadness, and the only way out is through. At the outset of performing the entire album on a livestreamed show from his home, Fallon smirked at the camera and said, “Welcome to the torture dungeon.”

If it’s a divorce record it’s also an apology record. There’s a quiet epiphany buried in the standard release’s final track that’s just perfect, “I became the dark in the places where you live.” Such a simple image free of the sentimentality reviewers ascribed.

Fallon took the backlash hard; the band went on hiatus. He has since put out several sterling solo records and admitted some dissatisfaction with the last TGA release. His whole interview with the Independent is worth the read, and I’ll try not to just regurgitate it all here. The important point for today: “[Fallon] calls Get Hurt a reaction, but one where he wasn’t fully healed. If it had been a physical injury, he says, he would have still been in the hospital – not trying to work out those issues on the record.”

The title track was not my favorite on the first few spins. For TGA it’s pretty reserved, and at nineteen I wanted songs that felt like being hit by a car. It’s grown on me though. A plaintive slow burn. The refrain comes in, “I came to get hurt,” and eventually asks the subject and their audience, “Have you come here to get hurt?” On the surface these are painful things to acknowledge and ask of oneself and romantic partner—do we drive ourselves headlong into self-sabotage? Probably. The “here” is the relationship and its end.

The “here” is also the song itself, and by extension, music. What did the listener expect when they dropped the needle on TGA’s latest work? Did they come looking for a piece of another’s pain to put their mind and heart at ease? If Mitski was going to write a Gaslight Anthem song, this would be the one. Don’t we demand some tragedy from our artists? Remember people only half-joking that the death of Trent Reznor’s dog would improve his musical output? “He’s best when he’s sad.” Let him suffer. That’s the key to great art, right?

In another song, “Halloween”, Fallon sings,

I think Fallon knew the recording studio was not the best place to work on himself, but he had seen so many of his idols supposedly find solace in their art. If listening to a sad song helps us cope with pain, then writing a sad song must have the same effect manifold. Hell, it worked for him before. This is where artists lose themselves though, as he notes, “Once I could tell all the hurt apart from myself, now all I can see is the need, the need that I came to get hurt.” Art can be therapeutic, but it is not therapy.

In “Underneath the Ground”:

That one must suffer for their art has always been bullshit propagated by assholes and hacks who have an interest in devaluing the lives of artists. Struggling? Starving? Good, it’ll make your work honest. Capitalism at its finest—if people believe their suffering makes them good, they won’t do a great deal to alleviate it. TGA even summed it up on a prophetic track off their 2007 debut, “We’re Getting A Divorce, You Keep The Diner”:

Hunger is far more pleasant when it’s metaphorical.

The refrain in “Get Hurt” is punctuated with an odd sound effect. It’s bassist Alex Levine’s voice thrown way up falsetto, and then draped in reverb. The effect is like a drop of water echoing inside an underground cavern. It jars the ear every time, a musical sigh of sorts. For years I thought it was a harp or something—now I know it’s a voice warped and shaped into something alien and unsettling.

The finale seals the deal. Intensity creeps up, climbs towards a major lift. Benny Horowitz’s drum fills are excellent, like a heart fluttering with some sudden hope. Fallon rises into a sort of acceptance, not triumphant, but understanding.

The last two notes imitate that unique sound from the chorus. The moment of escape and transformation stunted, regression. This is the key moment of the song and album for me. How one can come so close to progressing past heartbreak, only to fall apart at the slightest sad thought. He’s singing “maybe” when we know it’s true: “you and I” are not the same. He can’t quite admit it. “No,” the music says, the wound says, “I’m not done with you yet.” How easily the heartbroken slip back into that song. We came here to get hurt, because there’s comfort in the familiar.

Why should we expect an artist to write something new and exciting about heartbreak? About pain? Neither of these things are new and exciting. Are we full up as a species on this type of work? Artists do not create solely from a need for something new. That the product of coping feels familiar is not a sin. To look on another’s pain and be unmoved—well, it’s not a reaction I would brag about.

To tell the truth, when I got hit by that car, I was fine. It crushed my bike’s front wheel, and stopped me short, but I stayed upright. The driver pulled over to ask if I was ok. Offered me a ride home. In shock, I insisted no, no, I was unharmed, and tried to pedal my bent bike back. Eventually, I gave up and accepted help.

Maybe it’s a Far Side comic, or maybe I’m Mandela-effecting myself, but I have this picture in my head of a couple birds watching another one sing. One onlooker says, “Derivative.”

What other misunderstood masterpieces are out there? What articles of clothing have you made in honor of your favorite artists? Can I see?