Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

He did a guest DJ thing today on E. Street Radio, which is free right now - basically playing his quarantine playlist, talking about how things are going, asking how we're doing. I liked it.

One thing he brought up that I thought was interesting was PTSD - that we're all going to be left with some PTSD from this and it's going to be hard for us to get back to trusting each other and feeling safe in public.

People have been going nuts for the show. You can get a transcript, plus links to songs, here, I think:

https://www.njarts.net/radio/springsteen-makes-sixth-siriusxm-radio-show-a-rock-n-roll-requiem/

This most recent one he played everything from Paul Robeson to Fugazi.

Yeah, I've been listening to them and they've all been good. The first one and the last two are very serious and specifically tailored to what's going on in the country; Episodes 2, 3 and 4 are looser and goofier. I think Episodes 3 and 5 are particularly strong.

Listening to Bruce read out a handful of obituaries is just heartbreaking.

Pardon my ignorance but how does someone listen to these shows?

They're on E. Street Radio on Sirius.xm. When he first started doing them, Sirius was making all its radio free because of the pandemic, but that ended May 31st I think. If you click Listen Online and it takes you to a sign-in page, you may have to do their free trial in order to listen.

I was able to stream it for free here:

https://player.siriusxm.com/collection-carousel/page-name%3Dcollection_details&contextGuid%3Dbf7579c0-d8e3-4b81-b43a-388b4fddd24a

As I understand it you can just clear your cookies and try the free trial multiple times.

(Should say I didn't have to fill out any forms or anything, just pressed play.)

Wish I'd known that two weeks ago! I ended up getting a subscription where they don't charge you for the first four months, and set a reminder to cancel it on October.

in October

it's hard out there for a satellite

beaming through space all day, working your antenna to your hyperbolic reflector

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/bruce-springsteens-playlist/613378/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

He just posted his fifth installment, but Max has been doing a Q&A video series!

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

(The quality gets better in future installments)

Bruce keeps the band on pretty tight radio silence lockdown, but Nils just more or less confirmed the E Street Band was gearing up to tour again at the end of the year, but - but! - I think Nils said Bruce had actually changed his mind and decided he needed a break, and that had the tour been announced it likely would have been postponed even pre-covid. FWIW, Nils also said the new E Street album is as good as anything Bruce has ever done, which ... I mean, I wish!

I think he said it's as good as any record he's heard Bruce make, which is a less extravagant claim but still somewhat promising.

Funny, Nils didn’t mention anything about this when he said Happy Birthday on Ringo’s video the other day.

Springsteen's work since the '90s has been really hit-or-miss for me, so I can see it going either way. Except for a few keepers, "Western Stars," "High Hopes," "Working on a Dream," "We Shall Overcome," "The Ghost of Tom Joad" and "Human Touch" were generally failed experiments or thoroughly mediocre, but "Springsteen on Broadway," "Wrecking Ball," "Magic," "Devils & Dust," half of "The Rising" and "Lucky Town" were surprisingly good, even excellent albums. We'll see.

I disagree on "We Shall Overcome," which I love in its entirety. "Ghost of Tom Joad," its gifts have revealed themselves slowly over time. I agree on those others, though. Well, maybe not "Devils & Dust" as much, it's often pretty dull. That and "Joad" would have really benefitted from a looser approach. I always thought Bob Dylan/Jack Frost would have been a really sympathetic producer.

And then if you exclude solo records and records made with other bands, and narrow it down to albums Nils has personally heard recorded, you end up with what? Maayyybe Tunnel of Love, though it's sort of half a solo album, so who knows if Nils was thinking of it or not. But otherwise The Rising, Magic, High Hopes, Working on a Dream and Wrecking Ball, and I'm not a big fan of any of those, so I'm keeping my expectations low.

Side note: I do like Ghost of Tom Joad a lot, but the more I listen to it the more I think that aside from a couple of really strong songs (Highway 29 in particular) it's one of those albums where the songwriting is iffy and it's saved by really great singing.

To be fair, the tour for "We Shall Overcome" was lots of fun, and that comes through on the DVD where they filled those Dublin performance. But it never did it for me when I put on the album - maybe it's more about the experience? Regardless, totally understand if you love it.

"Ghost of Tom Joad" has good lyrics, and lyrically it's possibly stronger than anything's he written since, but the music's too monochromatic and dull to me. (I say this as a "Nebraska" fan - that's my favorite Springsteen album, and in a way it's a lesson that if you're going to stick to spare arrangements, you need something like atmosphere to make it work across an entire album.) The opening title track is great, but after that, things grow increasingly stale. It kind of works in small doses - if I go back to just one song, any song, it's impressive for the narrative or character it sketches out, but the whole thing never holds together as an album for me.

Anyway, funny that we disagree on which one's the dull one, but it reminds me of Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis's discussion on "Devils & Dust" - DeRogatis has never been a fan, but that's the first time I've ever heard him approve of a Springsteen album. Not completely, but he didn't dislike it because he thought the best stuff like "Long Time Comin'" reminded him of a Fairport Convention album - I don't quite agree with that comparison, but the tracks he referred to did have gorgeous arrangements. (Kot on the other hand thought the album was a little overproduced.)

That would be interesting if Dylan produced those songs, or maybe Joe Boyd, or even Jon Langford (which would never happen, but he'd certainly go for a rawer roots sound).

*filmed not filled

I think Tom Joad would be a much better album if he'd included "Brothers Under the Bridge" and ditched either "Balboa Park" or "The Line" or "Sinaloa Cowboys," or maybe all three. Those are the ones where I feel like he saw an issue, thought it was important, but couldn't really get at it from the inside or come up with a way to make it interesting musically.

Yeah, Nebraska is my favorite too, but spare as the arrangements are, there's a lot more variation to them than you get on Tom Joad. One of my favorite things about Nebraska is the sequencing; somehow songs that I wouldn't listen to on their own, like Used Cars, seem perfect and right in their place in the album. There's a whole arc to Nebraska, and Tom Joad doesn't really have an arc, just a mood.

That's a good point about "Nebraska" too - it feels apiece, like you're floating through the same movie, and the characters don't necessarily have to be the same from one song to the next (although they could be for some), they all feel like a solid part of the same narrative.

"Brothers Under the Bridge" is a good outtake. That last, fourth disc of TRACKS gets knocked for being the least essential one by a good margin - that's generally true, but there are some keepers and the best of that fourth disc is probably that song, the only recording drawn from the TOM JOAD sessions.

"Tom Joad" is sort of the songwriter equivalent of the singer who suddenly starts taking singing lessons. It's like he exited a writer's workshop and went straight for his guitar.

LOL, that description kind of brings to mind an old "In Living Color" sketch - if you want to be uncharitable, I'd say it's more like Springsteen sat down with a stack of newspapers, acoustic guitar in hand, and wrote the whole album in one sitting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPOb0TeAm4o

See, this is where I think Balboa Park, Sinaloa Cowboys and The Line are really dragging down the album. Take them out, and you've got a couple of classic noirs, a couple of sad countryish ballads, an angry out-of-work song, some songs about abandoning your family to hang out with dudes under bridges, - all in all, a pretty standard Bruce assortment. (Galveston Bay also sounds like Bruce has been reading the paper, but I'll keep it because it makes me cry, even if he does rhyme "water" with "water.")

every time i revisit magic i think it's really remarkable on a songwriting level. on a production level it's like very squashed but y'know whatever that's the brendan o'brien touch

His Pearl Jam albums sound ok, though, so I think I blame Bruce.

That's probably right. Springsteen loves that excessive brickwall, headache inducing compression. Most of his live archive releases are plagued with it too, and even though people post complaints about it all the time, little has changed (though they're starting to ease off on it just a touch).

I read an interview with Bob Clearmountain in TapeOp, and he said the BitUSA drum sound, among other aspects of that album, was all Bruce's doing.

New E Street Album imminent:

Bruce’s new studio album with the E Street Band, Letter To You, will be released on October 23. A rock album fueled by the band's heart-stopping, house-rocking signature sound, the 12 track Letter To You is Bruce’s 20th studio album, and was recorded at his home studio in New Jersey.

Listen to the album's title track and watch the new video here.

“I love the emotional nature of Letter To You,” says Bruce. “And I love the sound of the E Street Band playing completely live in the studio, in a way we’ve never done before, and with no overdubs. We made the album in only five days, and it turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.”

Letter to You includes nine recently written Springsteen songs, as well as new recordings of three of his legendary, but previously unreleased, compositions from the 1970s. Produced by Ron Aniello with Bruce Springsteen, Letter To You is Bruce’s first time performing with the E Street Band since The River 2016 tour.

Tracklist
One Minute You’re Here
Letter To You
Burnin’ Train
Janey Needs A Shooter
Last Man Standing
The Power Of Prayer
House Of A Thousand Guitars
Rainmaker
If I Was The Priest
Ghosts
Song For Orphans
I’ll See You In My Dreams

Single sounds great: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911376769/listen-bruce-springsteen-returns-with-letter-to-you

Kinda "Lucky Town"-y if Bruce and band recorded it live in the studio (which is honestly something I wish he had tried more often; I always thought Bob Dylan's approach to his last several albums was a good fit for Bruce).

I like the sound but not the lyrics. I don't know if it's the therapy or the meds or age or what, but he just seems to have lost all his lyrical sharpness a long time ago.

I think his lyrics have gotten kind of ... pat? Generic? Not terrible, per se, but missing some sort of spark and poetry. It kind of worked with "Western Stars" (which I was not generally a fan of), but, like, even the titles - "Western Stars," "Letter to You" - they're kind of placeholder-y. Which is weird, because the prose of the book and Broadway show were so inspired. I just glanced at what I posted and briefly thought "Tracklist" was the name of the first song and thought, well, *that* sounds interesting.

Generic is the word, I think. The sort of thing where you hear the word "rain" and you patiently wait for "pain" to come trotting along to rhyme with it. It's hard to believe this is the guy who used to write lines like "Early north Jersey industrial skyline, I'm an all-set cobra-jet creepin' through the nighttime."

My impression is that he more or less lost his lyric-writing chops in the late nineties, there was a brief semi-resurgence in 2012 or whenever it was that he wrote Wrecking Ball and Western Stars, and now it's all gone.

Both the sound and the lyrics on that new one sound kinda formulaic to me.

He abandoned his Dylanesque approach to lyrics long ago

always have my fingers crossed that bruce will release another record of originals as good as magic. new song is nice but i hope the album is meatier

We're not talking a change from the Dylanesque, though; that stage was very brief. We're talking about losing stuff like "take a knife and cut this pain from my heart."

Anyway, the song (literally) sounds good to me. It's the most E Street sounding thing since ... "Magic?"

If he could go back to the E Street band sound of his second album, that would be something. Bring back Sancious, and the guest horn & conga player from that one too.

fire max bring back vini lopez

Max ain't the problem, but maybe Mad Dog would help shake things up a bit.

they got a lot more stiff with max imo

Sure, but that's because Mad Dog was loose, lol. Still, that change was made 45 years ago. It's been Bruce himself that hasn't always been up to snuff since reuniting the band, but then again, he set the bar pretty high.

I miss the Bruce whose lyrics were so strong I didn't really care whether the music was interesting or not.

fire max bring back vini lopez Ernest "Boom" Carter

Agreed that the new one sounds good and ain't up to much. Fun to see the band goofing around in the video, tho.