Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Dovetails with what you wrote about a desire to hide his true self or try on lots of hats.

Honestly finding one's own voice is incredibly difficult, it's a major artistic achievement I would say, and his insight as to why is eloquent as anyone's

Curious now to see the Jewel piece :)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

At the house, I strip the guest bed of its myriad pillows and leave Jewel alone to talk with her mother in the kitchen. As I lie under the covers flipping, through a glossy color picture book of Alaska, Jewel walks in wearing a green zipper sweatshirt and either sweat pants or cotton pants, I can’t remember which, and gets under the covers with me. She lies on her left side, I on my right. Between our heads is a large pillow, which blocks part of her face. We keep pushing the pillow down as we talk so we can see each other completely and feel more intimate. But we know the pillow can never be removed completely: That would be too intimate.

Holy shit

JEWEL: HOT, READY, AND ALASKAN!

Hahahaha, omg that is so ridiculous

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

She's always crazy like that

“Dear Wenner Forum: I always thought the letters you print were made up, and never believed anything like that would happen to me. Now I’m sure a believer! Last week started out like any other week in my unremarkable job as an interviewer of rock stars and other celebrities…”

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

― tumblin’ dice outro (morrisp),

Yeah, that made me laugh too

that's absurd. but what a great Springsteen interview. I hadn't read that one before. that "other people's fingerprints" thing is amazing, what a phrase.

The funny thing is that Nebraska has fingerprints all over it. Not quite the kind of fingerprints he's talking about here, but Springsteen wears his influences so much on the surface, you can easily listen to it and go "oh, here's Flannery O'Connor, here's Hank Williams, here's Suicide." And yet it doesn't keep the record from sounding like something totally original and distinctive. Of course that's a combo of influences you wouldn't find anywhere else.

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

LMAO

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

That's awesome! Where was this?

Old Town School of Folk Music here.

Man, I miss that place. I used to live in Lincoln Square, my last home in Chicago before I left Illinois.

Ha, I used to live in Lincoln Square, too. I recently saw a Google Maps photo of the Old Town School of Folk Music location, which is now…an empty lot. But then, the 400-square-foot “rear cottage” I used to live in is now a multi-story condo complex, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

It still exists! But now it's a big multi-space complex.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/bruce-springsteen-or-stephen-king

I keep thinking some Christmas season I should write "Bruce Springsteen song or It's a Wonderful Life?" and send it to McSweeney's.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

1. Born to Run
2. BLT
3. Turkey Club
4. Thunder Road
5. Grilled Cheese
6. Atlantic City
7. PBJ
8. The Price You Pay
9. The Promised Land
10. Reuben
11. Rosalita
12. Muffaletta

13. Torta of Love

14. I'm on Rye

That Stephen King one is actually pretty clever - see the key on the bottom, they are all real references (if often vague enough to be easy to generate)

Ha, didn’t have time to study it or even get to the key but yeah.

15. Marbleland

16. Devils and Crust

17. Land of Hope and Pretzels

19. Jungleham

20. Adam Raisin au Pain

21. Used Carbs

incident on foccacia

It's a Wonderful Life or a Bruce Springsteen song, here you go:

1.As a child, you watched your father being humiliated by someone richer and more powerful than him and swore that would never happen to you.

2.You feel a lifelong compulsion to help out your baby brother, even though he never does anything for you.

3.Your brother went off to war. You stayed home.

4.You feel trapped in this miserable little town and you’re going to get out, do great things, and take Mary with you.

5.You and Mary got married too young, and let’s face it, you’re not all that happy anymore.

6.You got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote.

7.You’re basically an honest guy, but when someone close to you commits a crime, you automatically cover for them.

8.The slow death of all your dreams has turned you into a seething mass of barely-controlled rage.

9.Overcome by the general crappiness of your life, you decide to drown yourself. You’re contemplating the water temperature when Clarence shows up and saves your life.*

*Technically this last one is a "Growin' Up" story rather than a song, but close enough.

the answer is...yes?

i love this

as far as I can tell, the answer to every McSweeney's "x or y" list is yes

i see now the conceit

I told my students that Bruce is my favorite singer and showed them a picture of him, bc I thought we'd bond more if they had something to make fun of me about. Mentioned offhand that today is his birthday (I was speaking French and birthday is a word they know) and for some reason they got all excited about that and crowded around one student's computer to look up this info and verify it. Middle schoolers are funny.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I knew any of my teachers' musical tastes up to middle school with the exception of the music teachers: IIRC, they were fans of Lionel Richie and Bobby McFerrin. May help explain why I never got excited about music classes.

ooh la la, la chef

le chef. dammit. i only have the compulsory Canadian 4 years, I'm sorry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDc5j0gpG3I

Thought the thread might enjoy this clip. I caught this on Twitter and started watching the show. It's ok. They could use the capoiera fighting alpaca a bit more.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

very belated xp: omg I just had a business idea so good it probably already exists. Local Hero, a Jersey-based sandwich shop using all ingredients sourced from local farms, including Bruce's.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/04/13/PAPP/e53ad3a8-4bf3-47da-8156-9d1b17f604cd-BruceHotDog.jpg

Do you think if we got Jon Landau's blessing on the name Bruce would show up at our grand opening and pose like that with our signature sandwich?

if we survive the signature sandwich debate

70 year old man eats hot dog: details at 11

Glory Dogs

We go down to the WC

Blew up the men’s room at Subway last night

lol

So despite my Springsteen obsession there are still quite a few of his middle/late albums that I haven't listened to all the way through because the idea of them depresses me. But I listened to the Late Era podcast about Human Touch/Lucky Town - which I really enjoyed - and it inspired me to finally listen to both of them. I knew people thought of Lucky Town as much better than Human Touch, and I think I was sort of dubious about that because I figured they were probably both bad. But yeah, I agree. Human Touch is pretty much trash imo. 57 Channels isn't that bad for what it is, and "Cross My Heart" is listenable, but yeah, this album sucks.

Lucky Town, on the other hand - it's a much better album, but if Bruce had suppressed HT and only released this one, and I had been around to buy it at the time, I think I would still have been intensely disappointed. Because this strikes me as a decent album by the Springsteen that we have now, the artist who's still talented, still works hard, but is just a much lesser artist than the guy who put out the first eight albums. If Springsteen put out an album like Lucky Town right now, it would get nice reviews and everyone would be pretty happy with it, because we don't expect BitUSA from him anymore. Following Tunnel of Love, though? It would have been a huge shock to the system even without Human Touch dragging it down.

Random thoughts:

Local Hero is my favorite song from Lucky Town by a lot. The tone is tricky but I think he gets it just right; it doesn't strike me as self-involved or self-pitying, just as an honest assessment of the pull of fame and the costs of it.

I wish Bruce would stop writing songs that sound exactly like Book of Dreams; it wasn't good the first time.

I know Tracks so much better than this album that I've come to think of the Tracks songs as the "real" versions; it's weird to hear lines from "Gave it a Name" in "The Big Muddy" and realize that at some point Bruce decided "The Big Muddy" was better and more deserving of being on an album than "Gave it a Name."

I probably have more thoughts but I've had a migraine all day and I should go to bed. Migraines muddy my thinking so anything else I wrote would come out garbled anyway.