"The ’59 Sound" by The Gaslight Anthem

The text that I will be analyzing is the song “The ’59 Sound,” by The Gaslight Anthem. The Gaslight Anthem is a punk rock band that comes from New Brunswick. Many of their songs have tangled, cryptic lyrics which makes it difficult to determine what they are about exactly, but they always tend to be melancholy. The music sounds just like a pretty normal energetic rock song. The illusion of life perspective will provide the lens to find underlying meaning in this particular song.

I expect to find that the music and the lyrics will take the listener in different directions with the song.

This song always evokes emotion regardless of this fact. The lyrics of the song when you first listen sound like Brian Fallon, the front man for The Gaslight Anthem, is reminiscing for the past. However when you truly listen to them and begin to pick them apart, the listener can begin to piece together their intended meaning as well as find several pop cultural references.

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The first verse talks about the song that will be played at our respective funerals and how he hopes he doesn’t hear Marley’s chains.

This first reference is about the character Jacob Marley from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Marley appears as a ghost wrapped in chains to his former business partner to warn him not to mistreat people and obsess over money as he once did because he is paying for it now. Marley shakes his chains to get his partner’s attention when he tried to reduce him to a figment of his imagination.

The reference infers that Brian Fallon hasn’t been living, as he should because he hears them figuratively.

The chorus of the song asks several questions and speaks of “the ’59 sound coming through you grandmother’s radio. ” The ’59 sound is the second reference. It goes back to a plane crash in 1959 that killed three promising rock and roll artists- Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. It was “the day that music died” that Don McLean wrote about in his song “American Pie. ” It asks if you heard the chains in the hospital walls. This to me means that someone in a hospital may not have lived or been living a perfect life.

The next verse has lines that suggest someone was killed in a car accident that prove this. The lines that lead us to believe this is true are “were you scared when the metal hit the glass” and “when your spirit left your body. ” At first I thought that the music was not in tandem with these lyrics at all. The lyrics have such depression in them at first while the music itself is so peppy and upbeat. I could not understand how they worked together. That for me was the site of struggle. Hegemonic norms tell us that songs about death and sadness should be slow and heavy.

This song has such energy to it and resists hegemonic norms so that it couldn’t possibly fall into the category of death. I listened to the song a few more times and I realized that the song was not just a sad retelling of a story, but it is a memorial of sorts. The person that died was Zach Finch, Brian Fallon’s friend who was killed in a car accident on Route 18 in 2007. They were both active in the New Brunswick punk rock scene. Fallon really was playing a show when they took Finch to Robert Wood Johnson Hospital.

He equates the loss of his friend and fellow artist to the plane crash of 1959 in that the rock world lost talent way too soon. The “young boys, young girls” part at the end of the song refers to the two survivors of the crash and how they were only having a good time as twenty-somethings. They were not supposed to go yet. Fallon was trying to get across his sadness in losing a friend as well as frustration of not being able to be there. He may have even asked himself that if he would have been in the car would he have be lost too.

He is writing the song as a lesson like Marley warned Scrooge. Fallon is trying to celebrate life in a way that Finch would have wanted. This is why the music and the lyrics of the song work together. The Marley reference is so subtle but it makes all the difference in the meaning behind the song. This is something that we can take away from pop culture. By taking a closer look you can pick up on the littlest thing that can very well change the perception of something in it’s entirety.