Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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

yeah, that's partly the stylizing I was talking about.

I was thinking the other day how Springsteen is notorious for his studio perfectionism, and yet literally none of his records would be held up as an exemplar of how records should sound. Meanwhile, the E Street Band is one of the most famous live acts of all time, known for its legendary concerts, and yet recording live as a band is something Springsteen rarely did, even if that approach resulted in his most successful record. So odd. I assume The Seeger Sessions was recorded live, too, and it sounds great, I wish all his records of the past few decades were that raw and raucous. Or, you know, sounded more like the new one.

btw, things you never knew had an answer:

So, yes, the question I've wanted to ask Bruce Springsteen my whole life is why does he refer to a fastball as a "speedball" in "Glory Days." pic.twitter.com/MDgTkd5M8h

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) October 22, 2019

The more I listen to "Burning Train" the more I like it. I think VG is otm about the Born in the USA vibe, but weirdly, it also reminds me of some of the unreleased outtakes from around the same time as BITUSA - stuff like "Unsatisfied Heart" and "Don't Back Down," with that drone in his voice and the even-more-repetitive-than-usual choruses and the semi-buried vocals. But more upbeat and rocking than those. I just love how many different incarnations of Bruce there are side by side in this album, including the ones you only see in outtakes. It's like one of those Doctor Who specials where all the Doctors show up at once.

So I came to Springsteen really late* and didn't even start following his new work in real time until Magic, but this is easily the best thing he's done in that timeframe. As others have noted, this is a good synthesis of "old Bruce" and "new Bruce", in really compelling ways. "If I Was the Priest" being a good example of both, obviously it has it's roots in the early '70s, but it really scans like one of those more narrative types of songs he's been trying, less successfully than he does here imo, in the past decade or so. And something like "Burnin' Train" just feels like some E Street classic that has surely already been played live for decades. The only one that doesn't work for me is "House of Thousand Guitars", otherwise I unreservedly love this entire record.

* - I was 8 when Born in the USA came out and remember really loving all those singles, but by the time Tunnel of Love had come out, I'd pegged him as distinctly uncool and ignored him for the 90s. Then, mostly incorrectly, I wrote off The Rising by lumping it in with all of the jingoistic post-9/11 stuff that was coming out and used that as confirmation bias about why he sucked. Obviously I've since come to grips with how stupid most of that was and really love most of his career (though I still haven't spent any time with his albums between Tunnel of Love and Devils & Dust)

Just listened to the podcast that came out when Letter to You was released, where he's interviewed by Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell. It's a good interview in general, but it would be worth listening to just for his impromptu performance of "Nebraska."

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bruce-springsteen/id1311004083?i=1000496210606

for my money the best springsteen post-joad is this and some songs from devils & dust (“long time comin,” my favorite springsteen song). but maybe i should listen to wrecking ball again

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, September 11, 2020 7:26 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

OMG! Yeah, this song is amazing. This song is the closest song in style to the Lucky Town album. Have you explored that album fully? I’m guessing you did, just throwing it out there, as I think that album has 6 or 7 brilliant songs in this vein.

His name is Timothée…
and he’s Bruce. pic.twitter.com/zIj9diwOvw

— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) December 11, 2020

Garry Tallent is apparently not attending because of "Covid restrictions and concerns," which I suspect just means that Garry said, "Fuck no, I'm not risking my life performing in front of a live audience in a pandemic!"

If Garry still lives in Nashville, and since Tennessee is much more of a hot spot than NY, then I believe the NYC Covid quarantine requirements would make it difficult/impossible for him to adhere to the rehearsal and performance schedule.

Also, would this be the first E Street performance that Garry ever missed?

This morning he tweeted, "I don’t have the Vid and intend to avoid catching it. Stay safe and weigh the risk/benefit for whatever you do. I personally felt that a two song TV appearance was not worth a week long stay in NYC." So I guess it's a combination of both reasons.

Garry consistently strikes me as the E. Street Band member with the least amount of patience for Bruce's bullshit, so this seems in character. He's probably right, imo; I get that they all miss playing with an audience, but this seems like too much of a risk for a band where almost everyone is in their seventies.

And how to stay six feet apart when the stage is tiny and there are, like, 10 of you?

Does this mean Soozie is no longer in the band? That's OK with me.

No, Soozie's still in the band; she's also skipping it for COVID reasons.

So I wonder who is playing bass?

Garry consistently strikes me as the E. Street Band member with the least amount of patience for Bruce's bullshit, so this seems in character.

XP Little Steven's bass player. Gettin' Called Up To The Majors!

Re: Garry, I figured he wasn't going to risk getting sick. A relative of mine actually drove to Nashville last month to see a mutual friend. He was stunned by how much more lax everyone seemed to be and claimed a few bars he walked by (and didn't go into) were more or less packed. Our friend is an administrator at Vanderbilt and I think he told us that the ICU was near capacity, and I doubt it's gotten better.

Nashville's a trash fire downtown. People mask up at my local grocery store the hardware store on the West side. Hospitals are in trouble not just from the flareups in town but the surrounding counties. The state as a whole is completely fucked because the only mask orders are on a local level.

I thought the SNL performances were decent enough, though I would really have loved for the second song to have been a classic like "10th Avenue Freeze Out" or something.

In other Springsteen news, I'm listening to The Rising in full, for the first time ever. It's a lot better than I'd feared, I blame WXRT for ruining this album for me. Hearing them play "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" four times a day for years after this came out, back when I worked in an office that always had the station on, always gave me a skewed impression of what to expect.

That said, the COVID era had me cringing every time Bruce and Little Steven got close on the mic.

I thought the SNL performances were decent enough, though I would really have loved for the second song to have been a classic like "10th Avenue Freeze Out" or something.

I thought the second song would be "Santa Clause Is Coming To Town." I was actually surprised that it wasn't.

*Claus, even.

That would have been appropriate too, maybe a medley that went into that.

In other Springsteen news, I'm listening to The Rising in full, for the first time ever. It's a lot better than I'd feared, I blame WXRT for ruining this album for me. Hearing them play "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" four times a day for years after this came out, back when I worked in an office that always had the station on, always gave me a skewed impression of what to expect.

I actually put this on from start-to-finish a few weeks ago, the first time I've done that since maybe the beginning. "Let's Be Friends" just kills the momentum, I really wish he had left that off. But "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" wasn't as bad as I remembered it, the humor came through more this time around. Overall it still felt too long and flowed pretty awkwardly - it's just not as sequenced or crafted as well as Springsteen's better albums. Other lesser parts like "Further On (Up the Road)," "The Fuse," "Countin' on a Miracle," "Worlds Apart" and "Mary's Place" weren't bad, but some of them played like good outtakes rather than essential building blocks to a better album. That is, they could be enjoyable, they had their charms, but there were already much better songs covering the same ground and without adding anything more vital to the album, they sounded repetitive. ("Worlds Apart" is an exception. It's not one of the most memorable tracks on the album, but it's not bad, it does pull off its modest experimentation and without it, the album becomes a little too myopic.)

Overall it still felt too long and flowed pretty awkwardly - it's just not as sequenced or crafted as well as Springsteen's better albums.

In fairness, that sentence now looks awkward, but whatever.

The two songs that stood out the most were "Worlds Apart" and "Paradise", I was surprised by how well the former worked. I would definitely start by cutting "Mary's Place" and "Let's Be Friends".

That said, the COVID era had me cringing every time Bruce and Little Steven got close on the mic.

I felt the same way! Def. weird but inevitable to see him with, yeah, no original members on stage with him, but he's been pretty subtle about the way he's handled that over the years. For that matter as used to I am at seeing him with a bunch of people on stage, it's easy to forget that for most of his career it's just been him and five or six other guys, and wild to think that during his formative years it was just him on guitar.

I also played The Rising not too many months ago and found it overstuffed, but no more than it's always felt that way to me. I've never minded Sunny Day, and actually found that song a strange salve in the post 9/11 times. I also listened to the new one on headphones for the first time, and it sounds great that way. (Midway through "Janey" I kind of guiltily wished the current band and producer would re-record "Darkness," as apocryphal as that would be.)

I've been in big Bruce space because I also got around to his book, which was a lot better than I expected.

still releasing legendary shows too - https://live.brucespringsteen.net/live-music/0,25780/bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-hammersmith-odeon-london-uk-11-24-1975-mp3-flac-or-online-music-streaming.html

ohhh i love that Hammersmith show

they're mostly the same set as the first Hammersmith Odeon release (6 days earlier) but this one is so much more... triumphant?

I blame WXRT for ruining this album for me.

It always drove me nuts when the XRT DJs would talk about their legendarily huge library and still overplay the same songs over and over.

I think I'm going to take the plunge and buy myself the '75-'85 live box next. Don't think I've heard it since my parents played their original copy back when it came out. I used to be fascinated by that box.