Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

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.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 10 September 2020 15:48

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.

― Lily Dale, Thursday, 10 September 2020 16:05

A pretty spot-on assessment. I didn't listen to Springsteen until the late '90s, and at the time, I remember thinking his lyrics to his newer work were stunning, even beautiful where appropriate, but musically underwhelming. (His singing was also growing more affected with that Dust Bowl accent, but in the wake of The Ghost of Tom Joad, it seemed like an acceptable and temporary conceit.)

The Rising (and maybe 1999's "Land of Hope and Dreams") pretty much set the template of how he would write going forward, where his sense of detail became less incisive and the sentiments more generic. I still think he's made very good music - and I think half of The Rising adds up to a pretty good album on its own - but compared to his 1973-1987 run of classics, you can see what's lyrically missing.

I agree with Josh's take on the Broadway show, and his speeches, eulogies and press statements over the past decade and a half have been consistently strong too - more than any other rock star I can think of, he's become a true statesman. The oratorical ability that come with that work beautifully in any given speech or piece of non-fiction, but it doesn't necessarily translate into better art, and that may be the direction he's been heading for a while now whenever he puts words of any kind to paper. (The more I think about it, I'd say his best and most recent songs are essentially eulogies - "The Last Carnival," "We Are Alive," "The Wall," "Moonlight Motel"...)

Nothing against the E Street Band, but Nebraska is still the apex of his work (and my personal favorite) partly because his singing, lyrics and music had all reached a stunning peak while enriching the other elements immeasurably. Again, he's made plenty of good music since then (the next two studio LP's are rightfully considered classics), but not with that same sense of balance.

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.

he shoulda brought 'em back just for the three songs on this album that actually date from that era!

birdistheword, this is very well put:

his sense of detail became less incisive and the sentiments more generic. I still think he's made very good music - and I think half of The Rising adds up to a pretty good album on its own - but compared to his 1973-1987 run of classics, you can see what's lyrically missing

Yes.

Compare: "screen door slams, Mary's dress waves" vs. "I see Mary in the garden, the garden of a thousand sighs." One is vivid and rooted; the other symbolic and abstract.

Viewed in the most charitable light, he might say that the sentiments are more universal. He tends to front like he's in tune with some mystical shit and the spirits of the primordial ether. So of course he's no longer constrained to the role of specific exits of the New Jersey Turnpike in the mid-1970s.

But through a more cynical lens one might say that the lyrics are informed by comfortable late-middle age, global fame, and vast wealth. His lack of connection to a specific place and time bespeaks a bubble of privilege, in this view.

big thing for me is he lost a lot of that playfulness, the humor he had....was just listening to Darlington County

Driving out of Darlington County
My eyes seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
Driving out of Darlington County
Seen Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford

just little stuff like that "or the RE-CORD COMPANY ROSIE JUST GAVE ME A BIIIG ADVANCE" little asides like that I miss

Agree with this: But through a more cynical lens one might say that the lyrics are informed by comfortable late-middle age, global fame, and vast wealth.

and this: big thing for me is he lost a lot of that playfulness, the humor he had

And Darlington County is a good example because it also has a kind of subtle dramatic irony that he's pretty much lost the knack of; the way these guys think they're on a super-cool road trip and have no idea they're actually starring in an existentialist shaggy-dog story, and the song grounds us so fully in their POV that it takes us a while to figure that out as well.

I've been lucky enough to see all of his post-reunion tours multiple times, and I want to say "Working on the Dream" (which sounds like a euphemism for taking a dump or something) is the only one where even live performance couldn't really save the songs. "Wrecking Ball," though, was pretty inspired throughout, and something like the title track in particular, despite hinging on the titular cliche, is full of funny stuff even as a rousing anthem.

Yeah, I like the title track of Wrecking Ball. It's one of the few post-Joad songs I do like.

lol Working on a Dream. No difference, I don't remember much about that album (or High Hopes) at all.

Wrecking Ball was better than expected, it may be my favorite studio album post-Tunnel of Love. (There's only two or three others that I like, not counting archival releases.)

Between "Queen of the Supermarket" and "Outlaw Pete," Working on a Dream was virtually self-parody. It may be his worst album, but I like the final track "The Last Carnival" and the hidden bonus "The Wrestler." High Hopes feels like mishmash, and even a great song like "41 Shots" is pretty inferior to the live version they released in 1999. But I do like "Hunter of Invisible Game" and "The Wall."

He's operating in an entirely different gear than when he made those classic albums. Back then the music was EVERYTHING. Once he allowed himself to be a human with a family, everything changed. I think the massive success kind of fucked with him too. He stopped giving 100% and that's okay.

Wrecking Ball and the Seeger sessions are the ones that I've enjoyed the most after TOL. Tom Joad is probably better than those but I really wish it had a little more variety in its sound.

Tunnel had a really nice cover too. His covers have gone straight to hell. Ugly fonts, blergh.

Still, I love him deeply. When my mom and dad split up she developed a big Bruce crush. I remember being 9 or 10 years old, laying on the floor of her studio while she painted, reading the lyric sheet to BITUSA. She took me to the TOL show which was my first concert. I stopped keeping up with his new stuff after Working on a Dream, but I adore that classic run.

He's operating in an entirely different gear than when he made those classic albums. Back then the music was EVERYTHING. Once he allowed himself to be a human with a family, everything changed.

Same with Paul McCartney. Moral of the story: if you want to be a great artist, never get married, never have children.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/74/7c/bc/747cbc2ad5d3da2063e6415a9dca424d.jpg

Joking aside, for literal "dad" rock, I actually think that was part of Springsteen's appeal for a short while. Before he slipped into domestic life, I didn't get the feeling that there was huge untapped wells that could only be explored as a bachelor dedicated to his craft. Tunnel of Love is not only a great album but it has much of his best writing, and it's all about taking that first huge step into family life - maybe it was a reflection of a failing marriage, but if your marriage is crumbling, that alone is probably absorbing most of your day-to-day focus. Lucky Town is no masterpiece, but it's not a bad album and everything good about it taps into his new life of settling down and raising a family. I think his autobiography mentions that he wrote more songs in that mold but ultimately shelved them because he didn't want to put out a fourth album exploring the same themes.

FWIW these comments, though made with expertise, are very harsh on Bruce.

I think his late LPs, like MAGIC, WORKING ON A DREAM, WRECKING BALL, WESTERN STARS, are all good in some way or other - sometimes terrific. They may not have what BORN TO RUN or NEBRASKA have, but those are around 40 years ago. The fact that he can still keep delivering at the standard he does, is the truly remarkable thing.

I don't believe that any other major pop artist has kept up to the same standard - let's say, even, minimal or average standard - over such a long time (about 50 years!) - that Bruce Springsteen has.

People who are more talented and important - McCartney, Dylan, Townshend - still haven't kept their standard up so consistently over such a period.

I can probably accept some of the criticism of WESTERN STARS above, but then I also find much of that LP inspiring - 'hitchhikin', 'road runner', 'sundown' - wonderful.

Basically I think once you think how long he's been around, how he's kept at it, he's a living miracle.

'Janey Needs a Shooter'

'House of a Thousand Guitars'

sound good titles to me (even if they might be from the 1970s).

Is it the same Janey as in the other song?

Lol at the photo, birdistheword, it took me a nanosecond.