Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Of course. FWIW, this came up during Tracks, but the mixing engineers went on record at the time saying Springsteen loved bathing his vocal in echo and giving it a humongous sound, something he completely reversed by 1998 when they remixed those recordings and stripped out the reverb per his request as he now wanted a more "personal" sounding mix.

Besides the squashed, far-mic'd drum kit, Lynne likes a lot of acoustic guitars and not much bass, typically compressed to hell, and then you have the way he mixes those distinctive harmonies that are probably the most grating thing about his records. Above all, the key is the way everything is compressed (reportedly done with Universal Audio solid state limiting). Springsteen was making shiny, pop-friendly records in 1987, but they didn't sound nearly as synthetic.

(to be fair, a lot of people probably love that sound - Harrison, Petty et al wouldn't have sold so many records then if they didn't)

I finish with THE RIVER again. Still a bemusing LP, with so much seeming filler, but good songs also, and the title track a masterpiece that could stand for his whole career.

I go on to WORKING ON A DREAM for the first time in years. The quality of this record is so high. Songs like 'life itself' and 'good eye' take the Boss to a different realm. 'This life' with its Beach Boys approach and unusual chords, and lines about looking through a telescope! ... This feels to me like the greatest thing he's done since TUNNEL OF LOVE - save perhaps WESTERN STARS. No-one ever mentions it - maybe because, I always say, Bruce's consistency is just so high, people take it for granted.

October 23rd baybee 😃

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springsteen-letter-to-you-date-1066105/

Reviews are popping up and the ones I've seen have been very positive.

OK, first song is one of the best things he's done since "Tunnel of Love" imo.

Four or five tracks in and I think I'm calling it: barring some sort of precipitous nosedive, this is his best since "The Rising," by a long shot, and probably better. Seems to have finally cracked the production problem, too, because the album even sounds pretty great.

OK, "Power of Prayer" is not necessarily bad, but it's not really my thing, either. Immediately bounces back with "House of a Thousand Guitars," though.

Final (first) reaction. The album's great, but it's also the start-to-finish Bruciest album he's done in a long time, which I can imagine some will find exhausting. Factor in the three old songs and it's really doubling (tripling) down on his own mythology/mortality. There's a sense of self-awareness to this album that finds him finally giving in to the temptation to ... be himself? Rather than asking "what would Bruce/E Street Band do?" and then doing something different, this album is him leaning hard into his strengths from the perspective of an old guy whose friends are all dying and leaving him behind to carry the weight of their souls.

I didn't like "Power of Prayer" either, it's too corny.

But the album starts off great. It got less interesting as it went on, but that's just after one listen. Maybe it'll grow on me, so we'll see. I started listening in the late '90s, and no newly released Springsteen album (not counting archival releases) has ever won me over that quickly. I wound up liking Wrecking Ball, Magic, Devils and Dust and half of The Rising, and it took some time.

Gah, I wasn't planning to try to listen to it before the release date, but the suspense is driving me nuts.

I can't say I'm a fan of "Songs for Orphans" (which I didn't know about - it was written in 1971 and a publishing demo apparently circulates), but except for "Power of Prayer," the other ten track are hanging together pretty well for me.

xpost Do it!

Listening again, those first four songs culminating in a powerhouse like "Janey" are just unstoppable. But "The Power of Prayer" ... I just can't take it, it's too corny, and throws off my listening experience. But then it pretty much bounces back. I still think it's his best band album since "The Rising" - that's the easiest part. Whether it's as good as or better than "The Rising," I'll have to think about it.

Re: "Orphans," several different recordings actually circulate. What's probably the demo does nothing for me, but two live performances are very different and much better IMHO. All with just Springsteen on an acoustic:

From Springsteen's very first radio performances, still the earliest circulating 'live' material with what would become the E Street Band (though again it's just Bruce on this song). From WBCN-FM on January 9, 1973.

From the Devils and Dust tour, Nov. 22, 2005, this is an official upload from nugs.net and it's actually the first official release of this song ever (dated March 1, 2019). The whole show is up on nugs.net for purchase. Reportedly the 1st (and only) time he's played it in concert since the early 70's

*release dated March 1, 2019, performance is again from 2005

To be fair, Springsteen's albums tend to be longer than usual in the digital era, so even when I take out the ones I don't want to hear again, there's still more than enough for a standard LP.

Wrecking Ball without "Jack of All Trades" is over 45 minutes, Magic without "Terry's Song" is over 43 minutes, and even the leanest cut of The Rising comes out to 38 minutes for me (a more generous version I sometimes listen to would be 49 minutes). Without the new version of "Orphans" and "The Power of Prayer," this one's well over 48 minutes, and at the moment I don't find myself wanting to skip through any of these remaining ten cuts. Even "Ghosts" sounds better following the eight preceding and remaining tracks - it didn't feel like a great single, but it works well in this context, feeding off of everything that's been building up to it.

Yeah, for the sake of brevity I would have been cool with them cutting Prayer and relegating Priest to a bonus track.

I think WORKING ON A DREAM and WESTERN STARS are better than THE RISING. Maybe.

Haven't heard the new record.

Think I'll wait till it comes out; hopefully you guys don't get sick of talking about it before then.

I'm listening to his most recent radio show, and so far it's awesome. He just made my whole day by playing Sir Mix-a-Lot's "My Hooptie" and giving a detailed nine-point explanation of what qualifies as a hooptie.

<3

Nice interview in Forbes with Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/10/18/qa-e-streets-steve-van-zandt-and-nils-lofgren-on-the-making-of-the-new-bruce-springsteen-masterpiece-letter-to-you/#2b56c56e77e3

Van Zandt: Bruce has performed the brilliant artistic task of being extremely personal, extremely detailed and nuanced in his personal explanation and descriptions and insights, and the more personal he gets the more universal the message becomes. And I learned from that... But it was Bruce really that said, "We don't need to generalize, we don't need to say let me explain the whole world to you as an artist. You don't have to do that. Just tell the truth about your own life, what you're experiencing, what you're seeing and dig into it. Don't be afraid of it, confront it. Let's see where it comes out. Let's describe our most intimate relationships with the hopes that other people can see themselves in our work." That's the great thing about art. Art can pass along inspiration, motivation, insights, even information. But the main thing art does is it lets you know you're not alone and I think that's what Bruce's gift has always been.

"House of a Thousand Guitars" wound up being a little corny for me too, but that still leaves nine tracks/44 minutes that add up to a good album. "Orphans" still ain't bad but I much prefer his previous renditions from 2005 and of course the early '70s without a full band.

Just listened to it! On my laptop while lying in bed with a migraine, so I'll have to give it another listen under better circumstances before I come out with any actual opinions. But I can confidently say I like it, and I'm very pleasantly surprised.

Apple+ releasing a making-of doc tomorrow too apparently

The intensity of the focus on his old bandmate from the Castiles is sort of unexpected but very reassuringly Bruce, at the same time. The years go by, the seasons change, the shadows come and go, but Bruce Springsteen will never run out of old friends to write sad love letters to, and I take comfort in that continuity.

predictably great interview with him on NPR right now.

This seems good so far...love the gallop of "Burnin' Train"

best since magic for sure

and his most consistent since i don't know what

i love "house of a thousand guitars" it fuckin rules

I'll have more thoughts after I've actually listened to the whole thing, but this version of "Janey Needs a Shooter" is not near as good as Zevon's.

Well, Zevon's is definitely much more ... Zevon-y. Like a lot of his stuff, it's spry, got a spring in its step. Bruce's is more intentionally plodding, with those prominent minor chords to beef up its epic ness.

Yeah, I'm afraid "intentionally plodding" kind of sums up my feelings after a full listen. It doesn't bother me, but not much jumped out. I can imagine some of them sounding good live.

I really like the double-exposed, now-you-see-old-Bruce, now-you-see-young-Bruce quality of the record.

oh man I love all of this but “If I Was The Priest” is the one for me. Fucking stellar.

Cool that I'm listening to Nebraska on this chilly, grey day, and I open ILX and the Boss is at the top of sna

#1 in our hearts

otm!

I like this album. Not sure I like it more than Western Stars on the whole (which I love mainly because of Sundown and Stones; I'm not sure there's anything on the new album as good as those songs).

I love that there are callbacks to so many different eras of Bruce. "Rainmaker" is one that I connect to Nebraska. Not because of the lyrical or musical style, both of which are very different from Nebraska, but because its theme - of people letting themselves be deluded because false hope is better than no hope at all - reaches all the way back to "Atlantic City" and "Reason to Believe."

So far, the sense I'm getting of this album is that I like it very much as an album - that it coheres enough for even the lesser tracks to seem like valuable parts of a whole. That's something I look for in Bruce's work and have missed in it recently. (I did think Western Stars cohered and had some great songs on it, but on that album, there was a much clearer divide between the songs I liked and the ones I didn't. And the overwhelming end-of-the-road bummer vibes got to me after a while. This one has more of a balance of light and dark.)

So far, I'm inclined to skip the title track but nothing else (though the extreme "My Back Pages"-ness of "Song for Orphans" may get to me after a while). Standout songs for me so far are "One Minute You're Here," "Burnin' Train," "Janie Needs a Shooter," "Rainmaker," "If I Was the Priest," and "Ghosts."

I love "One Minute You're Here." "On the muddy banks I lay my body down, this body down" gives me chills. To take a line that he's had kicking around since "Stolen Car" - a line we think we know - and give it that tiny, unexpected twist so that now it's about old age and weariness - that's the kind of thing I didn't think Bruce could DO anymore.

Burning Train reminds me a little of a Born In The USA song maybe... or just has the vibe of the more rockin tracks on that album idk

It's pretty good for something that sounds like it came out of a Bruce Springsteen song title generator.

haha otm

Listened to this album again and realized I'm completely incapable of telling whether it's good or not; I'm so relieved that it's not bad, and so surprised and delighted to hear Bruce sounding like himself again, that I'm going to like it no matter what.

It makes me think of that Jimmy Fallon story about Bruce coming on his show to do Whip My Hair - how Bruce got into costume as his BTR self, complete with wig and floppy hat, and went trotting off to show Jon Landau, and Landau took one look at 25-year-old Bruce standing in front of him and started to cry.

I liked Bruce's admission on NPR that he moved away from the Dylan-y stuff on purpose, but also that he wished he had stuck with it for just a little bit longer. It's kind of an interesting thing to consider, for a songwriter. Say you know you've got the goods, but some of those goods just happen to be heavily indebted if not outright comparable to Bob Dylan, and because of that there's a whole side to your songwriting you just have to abandon and leave behind. Obviously plenty of acts have no problem imitating or at least sounding like other people, but Bruce was too ambitious (or proud?) to settle for that.

The same thing happened to John Prine iirc. Something about his record label deliberately promoting one of his albums (Common Sense, maybe?) by comparing him to Dylan, and the backlash being such that from then on he steered clear of anything that could reasonably be compared to Dylan. And he wasn't nearly as Dylany as early Bruce.

Some stunning stuff on here; easily my favorite of his since "Magic". It's so good to hear the E Street Band playing live. I have a nearly Pavlovian response to hearing Roy Bittan's piano + glockenspiel over that rhythm section.

Also, the movie accompaniment is *highly* recommended. I misted up more than once.

Immediate keepers for me include the opening song, "Burning Train" (comment above comparing it to BITUSA is spot on), "The Power of Prayer" (despite unbelievably corny lyrics, even for the Boss), and "I'll See You In My Dreams", which is an all-time Bruce album closer for me. And I'm mostly blown away by the demo-era tracks, especially "If I Was the Priest".

I must admit that the nu-Bruce vocal twang that he *still* occasionally lapses into damn near ruins a few songs for me - the chorus of "Rainmaker" is sorta unlistenable to me as a result.

But dang, overall - what a loving, generous return to form. Nicely done, Boss.

Rainmaker is possibly the first Springsteen song I've ever actively been repulsed by. There are a few through the years I just shrug off, but Rainmaker is like being poked in the eye.