Considering: The Gaslight Anthem's "Sink or Swim" gets its learner's permit

​It seems impossible that Sink or Swim, the debut album by The Gaslight Anthem – who are ending a seven-year hiatus this fall with a tour and new music, is fifteen years old today. Part of that is because during a listen this morning, the songs sound as fresh and prescient as ever, but also because it seems impossible the concerns of my life at 17 years old were only 15 years ago. Here’s some quick math: I have lived (just about) half my life (so far!) since Sink or Swim came out. Let’s ignore how it troubles the math that I didn’t receive The Gaslight Anthem via Matt’s older brother via Matt until a year after Sink or Swim’s electric release.
 
For now, let’s just focus on the irony that an album concerned with long drives in classic cars on summer nights now has its learner’s permit.

​“We used to drive all night / all over town”

Well, sort of. In 2007 (and 2008, when I did most of my listening to Sink or Swim) I was highly mobile for a high schooler, which is to say all of my friends had cars and I had a bicycle. Being a mooch was built into the dna of my relationships with my friends who would benefit from a few bucks in gas money here or there or an extra hot dog at Sheetz, popcorn at the dollar theater, etc. But one thing I reliably could do myself with the kind of aimless liberty The Gaslight Anthem sings soaring tunes about is ride my bicycle anywhere I wanted in our tiny suburb: the wooded park grandiosely called a “Woods,” around the old parts of town with beautiful, intricate homes, cut-and-paste houses in the newer subdevelopments, and of course, the public library where I worked as a caterer and dishwasher in the eatery and catering front aptly named Chapters Café.
 
Despite having an iPod, I inexplicably used my portable CD player at work; one of those huge anti-shock numbers with the wrist strap that you could wear while jogging, or in my case, affix to the handlebars of my bike and strap to the drying rack next to the sink area at Chapters. Trafficking in nostalgia long before my official adoption of vinyl as my preferred medium, I had a sleeve of blank CDs that were made to look (and feel!) like vinyl. You could scratch your finger nail across the texture of fake grooves, and the Verbatim branding was designed to look like a label on a 7” and like a single vinyl record, there was a hole in the center. This, on the CD-R of course, was for locking into a Walkman, or the front-house CD player, or in any number of the cars I frequently rode it.

​My handwriting scrawled “SINK OR SWIM THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM” across the front of the disc in thin-tip sharpie. Don’t ask me how or why I remember this, but the label was orange (Radiohead’s In Rainbows was red, Phantom Planet’s Raise the Dead was purple). I listened the shit out of this disc on the short 3-5 song ride from my parents’ house to the café, and would spin it on repeat much to the chagrin of the kitchen staff during shifts, especially once the bosses left, I’d go from headphones (again, Tony, you had an iPod dude this could have been so easy for you!) to shitty portable speakers.
 
When Brian Fallon yells: “we were the magnificent dreamers / in secret lamplight hideouts / we swore the world couldn’t break us / even when the world took us down” I felt, in a silly way, spoken to. What the hell did I know about any kind of weariness? I was going to a nice liberal arts college only a handful of hours away from home and a bright, bright future was ahead of me. Still, an ear for melodrama in a 17 year old is almost a given.
 
The music was loud, abrasive in ways none of the other music I was listening to was, and that made it exciting. Even if that dickhead Jared B. in my English class made fun of the band, especially Fallon’s voice, I knew I’d found something special for me. As an aside: Jared B’s band broke up that summer and The Gaslight Anthem continue to make really popular music.
 
While now I’ve come to agree with the consensus fan favorite tracks – the all-in opening track “Boomboxes and Dictionaries” or the sentimental “1930” or the slow-jam to end all rock ballads “The Navesink Banks” – it was the Marlon Brando On the Waterfront name-checking “I Coul’da Been a Contender” that really captured me.

​The song begins soft, just for a few measures, Fallon whispers “I’m broke and I’m hungry / I’m hard up and I’m lonely / I’ve been dancing on this killing floor for years” and concludes the table setting of the first verse with a perfectly Tony dose of melodrama: “I’m the captain of my burden / sorry doll, I could never stop the rain.”
 
Assuming you just listened to the song above, you don’t need me to tell you: Benny Horowitz blasts the lids off his drum kit, Alex and Alex the bass and guitar of the operation roll in like a storm hot off the Atlantic (that’s the only Jersey reference I got in me, sorry folks). The song is explosive like the punk music my friends’ older brothers had been passing down to us, but it was also somber and sensitive like the books, and poems, and more gentle indie music I’d been engaging with on my own. That made The Gaslight Anthem a perfect hybrid of the bombastic shit I enjoyed with friends and the stuff that felt like it was made in a lab just for me.

​When you find something that sounds like that at 17 with literally nothing but the entire world ahead of your bicycle tires it is impossible to not form a life-long bond with the band. Even if my seas were not turbulent, it still mattered that I had an anthem to sing “steady now, steady now / soldier hold fast now / its heads or tails on heart attacks and broken dreams tonight.”
 
Go figure, I go crazy for “Wooderson” now but I did not have a tortured relationship with my little hometown. Poland, Ohio, is not, to quote Fallon, “this town is a prison, with its four walls closing in.” On the contrary as the song fades out Fallon opines to a long lost love: “dance in my moonlight, my old friend the twilight” and what he sings about a Person I feel about a Place. Apocryphal though it may be to reminisce like this was my favorite album by this band, my real entre into The Gaslight Anthem was the forthcoming ’59 Sound that would totally solidify my taste in music. That tour was the first time I saw them and it wouldn’t be until years later I would even own or regularly consume a legitimate copy of the record (permanently branded by my favorite record store in the world) but at that show, the best songs were from Sink or Swim.
 

This album came out when I was too young to appreciate the heavy hearts Fallon’s characters sing from, but my heart was just big enough to understand their perspective: “ain’t nobody got the blues like me,” he sings in “Red at Night,” the ballad closing the album. “1930” gave me an idea of how to be romantic like in a movie. But it was the instance that “we were the very best dancers in town” in “We Came to Dance” that really set me off as a dumb kid with 12 mp3s to a forever fan.
 
And now, on this birthday, I think I’ll “strike up the band with a song that everybody knows.” I’m excited for new music from The Gaslight Anthem this year, but I’m also excited to hear my favorites, maybe you are too? “Come take my hand. Mama, we came to dance.”