\u201cBig black train comin\u2019 down the track
Blow your whistle long and long
One minute you\u2019re here
Next minute you\u2019re gone\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
Among his many gifts, Bruce Springsteen has a knack for stepping up to meet the moment, whatever that might be. <\/p>\n
The operatic coming-of-age album Born To Run<\/i> hit as the world of rock music was transitioning from free-form artistic playground to big business. The simultaneously shiny and subversive stadium rock of Born In The USA<\/i> arrived as the nation was clawing its way out of the recession he\u2019d chronicled two years before in Nebraska<\/i>. And just when the nation needed it the most, The Boss delivered 2002\u2019s fervent, hopeful hymn to resilience The Rising<\/i>. <\/p>\n
Unlike USA<\/i> or The Rising<\/i>\u2014or even 2012\u2019s Wrecking Ball<\/i>, his most recent full album of originals with the E Street Band\u2014Letter To You<\/i> isn\u2019t at all political on the surface, spending much of its considerable energy celebrating lost friends and the inevitable march of time. Those losses have mounted in recent years. First to depart this mortal coil was Springsteen\u2019s longtime assistant Terry Magovern in 2007, followed soon after by two founding members of the E Street Band, organist Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons. More recently, Springsteen was hit hard by the passing of George Theiss, leader of his high school band The Castiles, whose death left Springsteen as the last living member of that group. <\/p>\n
Still, these grooves feel like they also chart another, larger set of losses experienced over the last four years\u2014a loss of innocence and optimism under the weight of the daily blizzard of lies and cruelty emanating from our nation\u2019s capital. When Springsteen describes a particularly oily and mendacious con man in \u201cRainmaker,\u201d it\u2019s obvious not just who he\u2019s talking about, but how deeply the choice others have made to follow this transparent charlatan wounds him. Through losses of all kinds his savior, as always, is music. A lapsed Catholic, Springsteen the songwriter has frequently drawn on the language of faith, but the spiritual undercurrents of his work have rarely been more explicit than on Letter To You<\/i>, dotted with song titles like \u201cThe Power Of Prayer\u201d and \u201cIf I Was The Priest.\u201d <\/p>\n
In the process of looking back on his life, Springsteen also rescued a trio of tunes from his personal songwriting vault that predate his 1972 debut Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ<\/i>. These three songs from his early \u201cnew Dylan\u201d phase only further the sense of nostalgia and summing-up that permeates Letter To You<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The album opens with the spare and hymn-like \u201cOne Minute You\u2019re Here,\u201d a sort of overture to loss with just acoustic guitar, gentle synthesizer textures, bells and percussion behind Springsteen\u2019s somber lead vocal. Understated as it is, it sets the tone. The title track unleashes the full impact of the eight-strong E Street Band, a sturdy rocker that finds Springsteen drawing together the threads of his artistic life: \u201cI took all the sunshine and rain \/ All my happiness and all my pain \/ The dark evening stars and the morning sky of blue \/ And I sent it in my letter to you.\u201d The lyric feels a bit generic at first, but once you appreciate the scope of what he\u2019s trying to capture here\u2014an entire lifetime spent making music\u2014it\u2019s impressive.<\/p>\n
Batting third, \u201cBurnin\u2019 Train\u201d is a galloping rocker that drummer Max Weinberg drives hard as Stevie Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren, and Springsteen\u2019s guitars wail above, featuring a gorgeous lyric that melds themes of sex, death, and faith into a single elemental moment of transcendence. Next is the first of three songs that date back to Springsteen\u2019s early days as a Dylan acolyte. \u201cJaney Needs A Shooter\u201d assumes a stately pace while leaning on swelling organ and guitar, with a distinct Born To Run<\/i> feel in both its flowery story-song lyrics and its airy, dramatic arrangement.<\/p>\n
The specter of death takes center stage again in the nostalgic rocker \u201cLast Man Standing,\u201d which rides a chiming piano line that\u2019s doubled on guitar and punctuated at the climax by a brief, passionate sax solo, with Jake Clemons channeling his Uncle Clarence beautifully. The lyric features Springsteen restating his belief in music as a means of salvation\u2014\u201cRock of ages lift me somehow \/ Somewhere high and hard and loud \/ Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd\u201d\u2014before making the point even more explicitly in \u201cThe Power Of Prayer.\u201d\u00a0 More chiming piano, again doubled on guitar, again punctuated by lyrical sax, is featured as Springsteen sings of music as faith and salvation: \u201cLast call, the bouncer shuts the door \/ \u2018This Magic Moment\u2019 drifts across the floor \/ As Ben E. King\u2019s voice fills the air \/ Baby, that\u2019s the power of prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curiously, the track with the powerhouse title\u2014\u201cHouse Of A Thousand Guitars\u201d\u2014feels like the weakest link here, a sing-songy, pensive number with almost no guitar; it\u2019s all piano and organ and gospel-tinged vocals as Springsteen recasts live music venues as houses of faith. After that trio of earnest spirituals, \u201cRainmaker\u201d is a bit of a left turn, reminiscent of \u201cMagic\u201d in its dark suckered-by-a-con-man lyric and Wrecking Ball<\/i> in its big, airy, fiddle- and organ-heavy sound. The second salvaged early composition, \u201cIf I Was The Priest,\u201d features some of Springsteen\u2019s most Dylanesque writing and singing, dense, wordy verses giving way to rolling\/tumbling choruses, heavy on the organ and punctuated by ringing guitar chords, building up a healthy head of steam along the way. <\/p>\n
The thundering heart of Letter To You<\/i> is \u201cGhosts,\u201d an urgent, moving anthem and elegy to all those bandmates and brothers who\u2019ve gone on ahead. \u201cIt\u2019s just your ghost \/ Moving through the night \/ Your spirit filled with light \/ I need, need you by my side,\u201d he sings, before putting everything he has into the punchline: \u201cYour love and I\u2019m alive.\u201d It\u2019s one of those songs that makes me ache to hear live music again, if only to experience an entire arena singing along to that chorus. Here music becomes not just a spiritual experience, but a way to commune with his missing comrades: \u201cI shoulder your Les Paul and finger the fretboard \/ I make my vows to those who\u2019ve come before \/ I turn up the volume, let the spirits be my guide \/ Meet you brother and sister on the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n
Near the close Springsteen pulls one more tune out of the pre-Greetings<\/i> vaults. The out-and-out Dylan pastiche \u201cSong For Orphans\u201d feels like coming full circle and features resonant guitar work\u2014and if it feels like a bit of a letdown after \u201cGhosts,\u201d what wouldn\u2019t? Springsteen finishes up with a complement to \u201cGhosts,\u201d the ringing, elegiac \u201cI\u2019ll See You In My Dreams,\u201d an ode to the end of the road we will all face one day: \u201cI\u2019ll see you in my dreams \/ When all our summers have come to an end \/ I\u2019ll see you in my dreams \/ We\u2019ll meet and live and laugh again \/ I\u2019ll see you in my dreams \/ Up around the riverbend \/ For death is not the end \/ And I\u2019ll see you in my dreams.\u201d <\/p>\n
Rather than shying away from the reality that any album made at this stage of life could be his last, the 71-year-old Springsteen leans into the moment and rages beautifully against the dying of the light. While it can\u2019t match the sheer intensity of classics like Born To Run<\/i> or Darkness On The Edge Of Town<\/i>, Letter To You<\/i> is as vibrant and powerful an album as anyone could have hoped for from The Boss in 2020, a capstone that looks both all the way back to the beginning and up the road ahead to the legacy that he\u2019s long since earned. Perhaps most remarkably, despite its focus on the weight of loss and the inevitability of death, Letter To You<\/i>\u2019s ultimate message is one of comfort and hope\u2014and hope is a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5832],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-46010","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bruce-springsteen","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46010"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46010"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}