Ron Gallo left Philly to make a name for himself. Now he’s back, with a new album and a new musical direction.
Philly songwriter Ron Gallo moved to Nashville and caught fire with 'Heavy Meta,' but the pandemic brought him home to Philadelphia.
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Five years ago, Ron Gallo packed up his guitars and headed to Nashville.
The South Jersey native and Temple University grad was looking for a restart after struggling unsuccessfully to break through with his Philadelphia band Toy Soldiers.
It worked. Gallo’s brand of disruptive rock and roll immediately attracted attention. He signed to the New West label, which released his raucous and provocative debut, Heavy Meta, in 2017.
That garage-rock salvo was followed by the punkier Stardust Birthday Party. Gallo toured the world, and in Italy met musician Chiara D’Anzieri. The couple got married in Mount Laurel last year.
But spending a pandemic year marooned in Music City made Gallo pine for Philadelphia. He and D’Anzieri moved to Fishtown in January. She collaborated with him on his new art-pop album Peacemeal and inspired the spooky love song “Please Don’t Die.”
On Thursday, May 6, Gallo and band will perform at Sunflower Philly in Kensington as part of the outdoor concert series presented by Human Robot Brewing Co. The 33-year-old guitarist recently sat for a Zoom interview in the Fishtown home studio he called “my favorite place on Earth” to discuss his new musical direction and being back in his hometown.
What brought you back to Philly?
There was a lot to put into perspective over the last year. Chiara, my now wife, moved from Italy to here. Last January, we did the wedding thing, and we got back to Nashville.
Enter pandemic. So it was just us in the house for the whole year, sitting around. And I think for her, being an Italian coming to the United States and going to the American South was way too jarring.
How so?
There was a lot of ‘What the [heck] is going on?’ A lot of reflection back about our culture and our society that I’m so normalized to. Because where she comes from, there’s more of a sense of collectivism. The priorities are family, and then work, and then everything else.
Here we’re so individualistic, especially the way that people handled the pandemic. It’s a total free-for-all, and then being in the South, you see Confederate flags and Trump flags, and all this crazy chaos going on ...
There’s [also] such an overemphasis on work pursuits, and productivity. Who am I? What do I need to become? Everything else is secondary. She made all that very clear to me, and I was like “Oh, I just thought that’s just the way it was.”
That said, there’s a satiric thread in your work about solipsism. In “All of the Punks Are Domesticated” on Heavy Meta, you’re mocking self-involved people: “Tell me about yourself, tell me about yourself!”
Yeah, I’ve always been trying to challenge that, trying to figure out what is the common thread amongst all of us. I like to talk about the human experience more than just my own, and challenge this ego-driven society we live in because I feel like it doesn’t really serve us. And we’re seeing that pretty clearly now.
So I’m sitting in Nashville and I’m like, there’s like nothing to do if you remove the shows. She loves Philly, I miss Philly, Philly’s home. So we went for it, and it’s so much better being back here.
The irony is you needed to leave Philly to make your name. You arrived in Nashville, and your career went to a different place.
I got really lucky; I went down there and things caught fire. When I was in Philly before that, I would just sit in my apartment and feel stuck. ... When I moved to Nashville, it all just kind of clicked. When you relocate somewhere where you can start from scratch, it allows you to be yourself. It was really freeing in that way, and that reflected in my creative and musical life. It was great for me all around.
» READ MORE: 'Heavy Meta' Philly rocker Ron Gallo makes good in Nashville, takes SXSW by storm
Is it now easier to upend things, from project to project? This record sounds a lot different than the last record.
Life for me has always been a constant chase of what’s the most honest version of myself in any given moment. That’s what keeps me engaged. What do you really like right now? Forget about before. What music are you into, what do you want to say? And create from that.
Does that risk confusing people? Or do you wind up with an audience that is open to being confused?
It’s a mix. I feel like my audience is people that know like one song.
Which one?
Probably “Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me.” That got a lot of traction unexpectedly. So people see me as some rock and roll guy. [”Young Lady” is a rumbling, Link Wray-style rocker.] And then there’s a more in-depth audience that know I’ve always been pretty eclectic.
A big part of this is me realizing the first two records are like 3% of who I am. I do love garage punk, but I’m also letting more modern stuff in. I grew up on ’90s hip-hop. I’m a big Tyler, the Creator fan — productionwise but also aesthetically, the world he’s built. He’s kind of a weirdo with his own little niche.
The Peacemeal songs were written before the pandemic, right?
Yeah, I wrote them all summer of ’19, when I was at my house by myself apart from Chiara for three months and I had nothing else to do. It was an isolated time, so I think the themes were pretty parallel to now versus then. I wasn’t allowed to be there and she wasn’t allowed to be here [due to visa issues] so we had to part ways for three months.
The songs are almost agoraphobic.
It’s pretty insular. It’s basically someone being alone probably too much, trying to distract themselves from constant self-reflection. And you can go too far. We’re social beings. Being in your house for too long, you can go a little nuts.
“Wunday (Crazy After Dark)” sounds cheerful, but you’re singing: “All I want to do is go to the store and not see anyone I know.”
Nashville is a very small town. Too small. So you go to Kroger and run into somebody in a band and get to small-talk conversations about just like, “What’s going on in the biz?” ... There’s a lot of that, and it’s exhausting.
“All of the Punks are Domesticated” mourns the loss of rebelliousness in rock and roll. “Now every room is sterilized, all risk is paralyzed.” Why did you rerecord it?
A couple of months into quarantine, I was paying attention to the words, and I was like ‘Holy ... all this stuff came true this year!” I wrote that song back in 2015, foreshadowing a dystopian future. Then I realized it’s more relevant now.
Is there anything you’ll miss about being stuck at home?
This room. The key is for when things resume and we can tour again to make enough time for creativity. One of the most amazing things about this time is realizing that I can make records from anywhere in the world.
Before the pandemic I always had the mentality that I need my band in a studio. But now I’ve taught myself how to do it, to learn how to make stuff. And that’s just what I’m going to keep on doing. There’s a beauty to the slowness of this.