Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

? that is my favorite song on this record

It might be my favorite as well, along with Ghosts. How funny that it's so polarizing.

i love that it swells very patiently out of a very quiet two-chord drone

i already said this when "ghosts" came out but the dynamics! wow!

I lack the vocab to talk about what the music is doing, but it sounds good to me. But the lyrics and the singing also click for me. I think it's partly, as I said upthread a bit, because this song reaches back to one of my favorite Bruce themes, the way despair makes you vulnerable to people who offer false hope. I've often felt that if you want to explain the election of Trump you can't do much better than "Atlantic City." If you have to believe that everything that dies someday comes back, that there's something you can do to bring it back, that's when you can fall prey to any con man who comes along and wants you to do a little favor for him. So to get an actual Trump-era anthem from Bruce that makes the same point explicitly makes me very happy.

And I think the lyrics have more bite and vividness to them than a lot of his recent stuff. "Go to sleep now/ I'll be in a burning field unloading buckshot into low clouds," with that classic Bruce thing of too many syllables for the line, so that "buckshot into low clouds" emerges suddenly from a jumble of crammed-together words - that's some solid Bruce lyric-writing imo.

I think the "Wrecking Ball" album was both really good and contained lots of vivid bite. This one just feels less ... stylized? Academic?

oh god yeah the buckshot line is so great

Wrecking Ball felt more - outside-in, I guess, to me. Except for the title track, which I love, it felt like every song had Bruce trying to write about something he thought was important but writing about it as an issue, not an experience.

Too much telling, not enough showing, on Wrecking Ball, I think.

Like, one of the things that makes the early albums so powerful as representations of working-class life, imo, is the way he shows you what people actually spend their time and attention on - whether it's their car, or going out after work, or what have you - and the very smallness of those stories, the smallness of their experience, shows you something essential about the limitations they have to live with. There's a reason the narrator in "The River" tells you about the river in every verse and only mentions the economy once. The river is part of his lived experience. The economy is something much bigger and outside of him that he thinks about when he has to explain why he doesn't have a job right now. (Kind of like - and I can't believe I'm comparing Bruce to Jane Austen, but what the hell - the way Jane Austen's novels convey so much about the smallness of women's lives & the power of the patriarchy by packing so much emotional intensity into such a small and stylized space.)

In Wrecking Ball he seemed to lose that sense of detail and lived experience. You get a sense that this is what the recession looks like to Bruce Springsteen, wealthy liberal guy who reads the newspapers, rather than what it looks like to someone actually trapped inside it. The anger of Wrecking Ball is still powerful, imo, but anger without real insight isn't enough.

For the record, I love the lyrics and music on "Rainmaker" - it's just that forced cowpoke affectation ("uhhrRAINMAKUHHHRR") that he's been increasingly employing since the early oughts that grates on me.

the production also gets in the way of wrecking ball imo