Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

i like how the music gently drops away right before the surge of the chorus

i have long felt that it’s his earnestness/sincerity that is his superpower, even when it’s a bit corny/clunky - like he’s just completely unafraid to say, like, ‘man i just love my friend so much’ in a song and have that be the song, no hiding.

it’s also the thing that repels people too though i think, because it is so out-front with the big neon feels

kinda like how some ppl are repelled by broadway musicals & their similar earnestness, all the emotions are right out there up front, out loud & ppl dont always go for that

Yeah, I think his earnestness repelled me for a while because I mistook it for humorlessness, and as I got older I realized how rare and brave and lovely it is.

I think sometimes - esp. lately - he goes overboard with explicitly stating the message in the song; he used to be more subtle imo and I miss that. But there's a directness and a generosity to the message itself that kind of makes up for it.

Sometimes I think the key (or a key) to Springsteen is in his peak-pop stuff, like "Hungry Heart," "Dancing in the Dark" and "Glory Days." The melodrama of his widescreen cinematic '70s stuff is gone, but the songs are still tinged with this real sadness and regret, disguised so well by his rueful delivery and the arrangements. I mean, "You sit around getting older/there's a joke here somewhere and it's on me." "I met her in a Kingstown bar/We fell in love I knew it had to end/We took what we had and we ripped it apart/Now here I am down in Kingstown again." "My old man worked 20 years on the line/And they let him go/Now everywhere he goes out looking for work/They just tell him that he's too old." If you just saw these snippets you would never guess that these were upbeat pop songs that people sing along with. They scan like they'd pair well with the dark stuff on "Nebraska." Which, yeah, they were written around the same time, but Bruce had gotten savvy enough to know how best to present them. A song like "Pink Cadillac" is big and goofy, but then you hear the "Nebraska" version at it sounds downright spooky. Or "Cadillac Ranch," essentially a giddy party song about the grim reaper.

To me, the key to that particular Bruce is that there's always a balance of opposing forces; the dark stuff that's at the heart of a lot of his work, and then the music actively fighting against it. It's not just him playing a trick on the audience: look, it sounds like pop but it's really dark! It's more like the darkness is the starting point, and then you just push and push and push it until it turns into sheer rock'n'roll fun. That's why I find Born in the USA so fascinating; it's half Nebraska and half something else entirely, and you're watching as the change happens, as he hauls himself bodily out of this bleak, beautiful subterranean world he's created and into the company of other human beings.

wow the springsteen thread has been on fire lately great work y'all

:D

really looking forward to the new album now

I've seen so many shows and heard so many bootlegs so many times that many of them tend to blend together, but one of my favorite fleeting moments came during a performance of "Rosalita," when Bruce delivered the line "Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny," and he kind of pauses and quips (probably to Steve), "you know, it is kinda funny!" I can't remember what show this was, or when, and don't recall hearing him say that more than once, but it really highlights the great self-deprecating side of Bruce, who is one of the few acts (save Leonard Cohen, perhaps?) as capable of self-conscious silliness as ultra-seriousness and giving each of those extremes 100%. And as a performer, man ... I saw him play Wrigley Field two nights a while back, and the second night it was pouring rain. The entire band kept back under cover, but Bruce was out there in the weather, smiling and splashing around like a little kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LRs-nPn1Oo

I remember it being a big surprise to me when I started paying a lot of attention to Bruce and realized how funny he is.

I live in hope that one day someone will quote "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" in my presence so I can respond with "BUT NOW YOU'RE SAD, YOUR MAMA's MAD, AND YOUR PAPA SAYS HE KNOWS THAT I DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY!"

One reason I like Tracks is that a lot of his funnier/sillier/more parodic or self-parodic songs ended up there. I think it was the line "My love is bigger than a Honda/ It's bigger than a Subaru" that first clued me in to what a goofy streak he has.

He is a total goofball, for sure! chock full of dad jokes that crack himself up on the regular <3

i was listening to the Agora show last night and even as a young dude he had such corny Dad humor, it’s VERY endearing

Absolutely. When I started seeing his vintage shows via photographs and bootleg video, I was amazed how much goofy shtick was missed on the audio recordings. Emerging from a coffin on Halloween night, falling off a piano (I think both from the 1978 tours), or having someone in a weird-looking Father Time outfit run out on-stage to strike them down (1984/1985 tour). I also love "Glory Days" for its humor, but I think it's an example of very sharp observational humor. Musically it's supposed to be corny, the kind of bar music the characters in the song would hear on any given night, but it's a cover for what the narrator starts to pick up from his circle friends. The way it unfolds is pretty great and full of surprising depth - the second verse is bleak, but the humor never slips away.

I listened to seven albums in a row today, The Wild, The Innocent... all the way through Tunnel of Love. What an amazing run. Even though I've nit-picked here on the occasional track, I have to say every album flows so well and feels so rock solid in their construction whether it's in the sequencing or the mix. The perfectionism in that respect really comes through and it does indeed pay off - I didn't find myself missing any of the gems that popped up on Tracks.

The more I see the goofy stuff in the shows, the more I realize how much conscious self-mockery and self-parody there is threaded through his song lyrics. I think one of my favorite examples of this is Sherry Darling, which uses a classic Springsteen "hey girl, let's get in this car and DRIVE" anthemic chorus to tell a hilariously small story about a douchebro bitching about his mother-in-law. There are moments in it that are startlingly beautiful but completely - and deliberately - out of place, and I can only think of it as Springsteen parodying his own Born to Run style for comedic effect.

(I'm having a hard time concisely explaining what I mean, but I'm thinking of "Let there be sunlight, let there be rain," which would be a transcendent moment if the speaker hadn't just been telling his girlfriend how much he hates her mom, and which in any case is immediately undercut by him giving a shout-out to the girls down at Sacred Heart.)

yeah it def feels like a BTR parody! that is great way to put it.

dying to bust loose from this town you and me girl in this car speeding down the highway oh except that i have to drive yr mom everywhere & she wont shut the fuck up & we’re stuck in traffic

the ineffectual rebel

so good

I live in hope that one day someone will quote "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" in my presence so I can respond with "BUT NOW YOU'RE SAD, YOUR MAMA's MAD, AND YOUR PAPA SAYS HE KNOWS THAT I DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY!"

― Lily Dale, Thursday, September 24, 2020

I don't understand. Can you explain?

It's the very rare Latin gag (that I had to look up):

In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas tells his men during a time of hardship, “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” which idiomatically translates to, “Maybe we’ll be laughing about even these things in the future.

Though I do like the idea of "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit!" being what guttural Bruce sounds like live to a neophyte on one of those shakier boots. A la "Counting with Springsteen."

I think I understand this now - it's a reference to Bruce's song 'Rosalita'? The truth is I don't really remember how that song goes, though I have played the live version many times.

I don't think I will ever hear anyone quote those Latin words, and if they did, I wouldn't know they were doing it.

Just a little Latin class joke, sorry I confused you. Josh in Chicago mentioned the line "Some day we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny," which is both a famous Bruce line and a famous Virgil line.

I enjoyed it <3

Oh good! I'm glad someone did.

I like your posts a lot, Lily Dale, I just don't have quite your erudition.

The more I listen to "Ghosts" the more I like it.

I was thinking about what you said upthread, VG, about Bruce not being afraid to just write a song about how much he loves his friend, and realizing that one reason this feels so much like classic Bruce to me is that he's doing that thing he used to do all the time where he just refuses to make any distinction between the language of romantic love and the language of friendship. "Your love and I'm alive" is so Bruce and I love it.

And I like that he includes himself as one of the ghosts. Makes me think about how odd it must be to live with all these reminders of what he used to look and sound like when he was young, and what it must feel like to try to inhabit songs that he wrote as a very young man. I think writing about old age works well for Bruce; he's always been so good at writing about his anxieties, which are also our anxieties, and while he's been shielded by fame and money from a lot of the stresses of everyday life, the stress of aging and loss and trying to make your peace with it all is something he shares with the rest of us.

thanks lily, this reminded me to listen to "ghosts"

it's fuckin great??

the posts on it here have been really thoughtful, and hearing it made me realize that, even if it's not my favorite recent vintage bruce song, it feels like classic bruce in the way it tells a story both through its lyrics and through its arrangement. "count the band in and kick in the overdrive / [music cuts out] by the end of the set we leave no one alive" is EXTREMELY effective

lily otm about bruce’s refusal to distinguish between romantic love vs friendship love, it is probably the thing I love most about this song! and what I love about his older songwriting in general too.

also after listening a few more times I love how triumphant “ghosts” is
it’s very GHOSTS: MOUNT UP lol

it feels like classic bruce in the way it tells a story both through its lyrics and through its arrangement.

Agree, and I was thinking: it's also classic Bruce in that it adds to the ongoing origin story he started telling at least as early as Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out and has been returning to ever since - the one where he starts out as a lonely rootless alien thing drifting alone through cities at night and then puts a band together and meets Clarence and makes his band into a family and himself into a human being. It could be a bookend to Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out: from "I'm on my own/ and I can't go home" all the way to "I'm out here on my own/ and I'm coming home" - the Big Man is gone and he's on his own again but the sense of belonging remains.

I'm back at THE RIVER.

'Wreck on the Highway': I like the ending, how he (so predictably and characteristically) describes 'watching my baby as she sleeps', then doesn't rhyme it, singing that he's thinking about ... 'a wreck on the highway'.

And then the false ending or extra outro.

I don't think I have the love for 'Drive All Night' that others do.

I love Wreck on the Highway. So restrained, and so devastating. Something very powerful about that idea of just casually crossing paths with someone else's tragedy, and it leaving a mark on you even though it's not really part of your life. Also the only Bruce song I've made my dad listen to that got an actual "that's good" out of him as opposed to polite tolerance.

Excellent!

Think he sings about a 'state trooper knocking on the door' - ahead of his song 'State Trooper'. I love Bruce's specific references to the authorities, police, etc.

Listening today, I also thought this song was as Country (& Western) as that LP gets.

There are several fatalistic "it could have been me" sort of death fantasies in Bruce's catalog, especially that era and some of those aforementioned songs. State Trooper, Stolen Car, Wreck on the Highway...

I like how indirect the storytelling is. All you know at first is that there was an accident, you don't know how much time passed or what happened in between the man asking for help and the ambulance arriving. And then the narrator starts thinking about the man's wife getting the news, and you realize for the first time just how bad it was.

"Ghosts" is great. First thing from him I've heard in a long time that has that big emotional "lift" in the chorus that to me is sort of key to Springsteen.

I could even see it sticking around in the setlist (if tours still exist) in subsequent tours.

Like the details - Les Paul, Fender Twin etc he's lost that over the years.

Only thing I don't like is the intro drums, feels very "100 Royalty Free Big Rock Drum Loops" but i'm not a big fan of Max in general.

production as always in late period is grey, flat, "professional" in the way that modern rock records sound like shit. a windmill i can't stop tilting at, but the ship has sailed, anyway 10th Avenue Freeze Out autoplayed after and sounded like the world opened up in my headphones in comparison.

How many times in Bruce's work does a man sit up at night while his woman sleeps, and the moonlight shines through the window, and he thinks about [betrayal / love / being a cautious man / God's grace / Elvis Presley / a wreck on the highway] ?

Variant: he runs out of the house at night, through the woods, across the highway, and collapses, his shirt soaked from sweat, and finds himself outside his old house, and looks up, with a realisation about [betrayal / loss / his father / God's grace / a downbound train]

fwiw I heard Letter to You on the radio the other day and it sounded great.

xpost you left out the part where he puts on/takes off his jacket - a key moment in all Bruce's dream sequences and midnight epiphanies.

How many times in Bruce's work does a man sit up at night while his woman sleeps, and the moonlight shines through the window, and he thinks about [betrayal / love / being a cautious man / God's grace / Elvis Presley / a wreck on the highway] ?

Heh, now I'm imagining a Bruce song where he thinks about all of these at once.

One of the many great things about Dylan's Springsteen parody is that it totally ends this way: "Sometimes I think of Tweeter/ sometimes I think of Jan/ sometimes I don't think about nothin' / but the Monkeyman."

I think I read in Michael Gray's BOB DYLAN ENCYLOPEDIA that that was a Boss parody!

I don't think I would have realised otherwise.

Well, It's tricky, because the music doesn't sound at all like Bruce. It sounds, of course, like the Traveling Wilburys. But the lyrics are hilarious. Bruce and Bob are friends, or at least as friendly as anybody can be with Dylan. I wonder what Bruce thought of that? I've always wondered why he's never performed it, which would be hilarious too.

Sometimes I wonder if it makes Bruce sad that Tom Petty got to be in the Traveling Wilburys and he didn't.

I agree, that song doesn't sound like Bruce. In a way, it feels less like a straight parody and more more like a complicated in-joke for Springsteen fans. He bypasses the really obvious jokes - cars, girls, factory jobs, dads - and goes straight to the more obscure stuff, like the trans character, the sister, the "lonely guy thinkin' baout things" ending, and all those b-side song titles.

Sometimes I wonder if it makes Bruce sad that Tom Petty got to be in the Traveling Wilburys and he didn't.
I'm not sure I'd want to hear Jeff Lynne's signature on Springsteen's music. To be fair, it worked very well on (most of) Petty's Full Moon Fever where, on a modest scale, it fit the whimsical and occasionally wistful nature of those songs. Otherwise, his sound is usually way too glossy for my tastes.

no room for a gruff voice in the traveling wilburys, though that would have been a funny addition.

Yeah I don't think Bruce would have meshed well w/the Wilburys at all, for many reasons. But it is kind of funny that three of his musical heroes formed a group with another heartland rocker and then made fun of him on their first album.

handle me with CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRE ohhhh aaaa ohhhhhhh oooooo

unrelated: I love all the footage of Bruce in Roy Orbison’s “Black and White Night”
He looks so genuinely excited to be there & to be playing the songs, like he’s turn & grin at whoever’s standing next to him with a “can you BELIEVE this shit?” look on his face
he looks like a little kid at times <3

Absolutely. My friend and I find it hilarious that he was ever in a guitar duel with James Burton, but you can tell that Bruce truly understands and relishes his role on that stage.

I'm not sure I'd want to hear Jeff Lynne's signature on Springsteen's music.

Yeah, I can't even imagine what a gated snare would sound like on a Springsteen song.