220. Song No. 3,351: “Film Noir,” The Gaslight Anthem
The ’59 Sound, 2008

Something about (Jersey’s own!) Gaslight Anthem always sounds like beautiful melancholia, which probably has more to do with me than the band and its music. I’d wager it’s the consequence of sharing a band with someone you equal parts desperately and secretly wanted to nurture more between you than freakishly aligned musical tastes and a deeper bond than swapping album recs and favorite tracks, but there sure is an undeniable undercurrent of regret intrinsically coloring my favorite Gaslight Anthem tunes that exists beyond my own heartsick associations.

I feel so lazy drawing the easy comparison between Jersey’s Favorite Musical Son and any rollicking rock outfit that effortlessly combines punk, blues and Americana to create something that radiates soulful introspection and a kick-ass instrumental accompaniment all set against Brian Fallon’s evocatively raspy vocals (plus a host of unexpectedly endearing Counting Crows references—more on that when it’s time for “High Lonesome” to shine). But when the cliché is less trite and more right, you go with the most readily understood comparison.

The ’59 Sound, their sophomore album, starts off with the vaguely literary scorcher that is “Great Expectations,” which you’re damn right I’ll be diving into when the latter half of the G-songs roll around because that song is an absolute gutpunch with a side of heartache and heaps of Springsteenesque rock ‘n’ roll and a wistfulness that’s not so much bitter regret as a proudly brandished half-healed scar that I just find magnetic in ways that sucked me right into this album.

“Film Noir,” however, is one of those slow-burners that took its sweet time introducing itself to me but once it got its hooks in, it was game over. “I lit a fire that wouldn’t go out / Until it consumed the walls and roof of this house” is…. just a painfully relatable lyric that suits so many of the feelings this band is wrapped up in, especially in terms of ill-fated crushes that were always meant to go nowhere but up in smoke.

The titular genre invocation and the old-school cool that any given Gaslight Anthem track smacks of just make this song in particular feel like a fittingly gritty post-mortem retrospective on a relationship that actually had the chance to play out before spectacularly sputtering into a fiery end as anything worth salvaging burned irretrievably away, leaving behind nothing but permanent wounds and such a long healing process that it makes never having gotten the opportunity to love someone who, honestly, would have been just another love story with a bitter end seem like maybe forever wondering about what might have been is actually the better fate after all.