Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I can tell my job is getting to me after only a week and a half, because I felt compelled to listen to Nebraska on my commute, and it's never a good sign when work is so stressful I need to spend the day in Nebraska, USA instead. I also have way less time for posting here which is a bummer.

But on my drive in I was thinking about the voice Bruce uses on Nebraska and how much I respond to it with an instant, visceral sense of relief and recognition. I find all his voices interesting, because he seems to have a different one on each album; there's that sort of mushmouthed drawl on The Wild, the Innocent, and then his Roy Orbison-inflected BTR voice, and then the artificially deep voice of Darkness, and it's not until The River that I start to think I might actually be hearing what Bruce's voice sounds like. And then of course he goes all Western twang in the later years, which I sometimes find pretty hard to take.

But on Nebraska, he taps into this voice that you don't hear anywhere else, and yet it doesn't feel artificial to me at all, it doesn't feel like something put on for the album (as his Darkness voice does, for instance); it feels more like something real that he's - I was going to say "pulling out of somewhere inside him," but I'm not sure that's right, it feels more like something he's pulling from somewhere outside himself, like he's tapped into all the ambient sorrow and pity in the world and is channeling its voice. And it's amazing to me that someone with so many voices - some of them grating, most of them varying levels of artificial - was able on this one album to come up with something so real and so essential. There's something about it that I find deeply and calmingly familiar, as if it were a voice from my childhood rather than something I heard for the first time at age 35.

Does anyone else respond in that way to the Nebraska voice or is it just me?

I can’t imagine listening to such a heavy emotional record on a commute. It would make work that much harder

Well, see, what happened was that one day two and a half years ago I was waiting for a bus outside the school where I taught at the time, absolutely crushed under a level of burnout + loneliness and small-town-to-big-city culture shock that I had no idea how to carry (plus the literal weight of a backpack full of textbooks and a bag of grading, so picture me all hunched over in my work clothes), and as I climbed onto the bus for my hour-long commute back to my shitty apartment I looked at my iPod and thought, hmm, I've never heard this song "Reason to Believe," maybe I'll give it a try. And that first verse, with the guy poking the dog with a stick, felt so true to the way I saw the world at that moment that as I listened to it I could feel the coil of tension in myself easing for the first time in months. Like I was down at the bottom of the ocean all by myself, and the pressure was unbearable but I didn't know how to get to the surface, and suddenly here was a decompression chamber and if I hung out in it for long enough I could go back into the world again.

So I curled myself into a window seat and started the album from the beginning, and then I listened to it all weekend, and then for the rest of that shitty, shitty school year I was okay. Because I had somewhere to go in my brain, and I could stand in front of my classroom and smile and speak French, and inside my mind "State Trooper" would be playing. My current job is, I hope, much better, and I'm not a first-year teacher anymore, but there are still days when I feel like a bad teacher and then I find "Nebraska" comforting.

Anyway, that's how I became a Springsteen fan. Classic conversion narrative. I'm just glad it was Bruce that came along at that particular psychological moment, and not, like, Jesus.

Amen

I think for me it was “dancing” on the school bus radio when I was a kid or maybe “freeze out” when rediscovered him in university

I discovered Springsteen twice: first when I moved to a small town and bought a car and started listening to the Greatest Hits cd followed by BitUSA, Darkness and The River, and then again nearly a decade later when I left that small town and was dealing with massive culture shock + burnout and suddenly had to listen to all Springsteen, all the time.

And now I'm embarrassed by those posts because it's like, well, obviously I have this weird emotional connection to Nebraska, naturally I'm going to respond to the Nebraska voice the way I do.

But I'm genuinely curious whether other ppl also hear him as basically doing a different voice for each album?

I can’t imagine listening to such a heavy emotional record on a commute.

Heh, my perpetually upbeat Australian brother in law had "Nebraska" is his truck's player on repeat and as we bounced around the farm doing chores I don't think he ever thought twice about it.

I think Bruce, for myriad complicated reasons, long suffered from low esteem, or imposter syndrome or whatever. ("I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.") I think a result of this was perhaps a desire to hide his true self, or at least try on lots of (literal and figurative) hats until he was able to define his true self. So you get the early Bruce and its novel mish-mash of Dylan and Van Morrison and early rock and roll or, as someone once astutely put it once, the '50s plus the '60s. He records "Born to Run" and ... sits on it for 6 months, because he's sure he ripped it off. Then Landau turns him on to a bunch of books and movies and suddenly Bruce shifts gears and scope. He's not singing about himself so much or what was once a conception of himself and/or New Jersey, he's singing about some bigger picture of America, and sometimes his place in it. He's also still fussing over song selection and working in the studio, second-guessing track lists all the way up to "BitUSA," worried about sounding contemporary and agnostic about being commercial, unsure which direction to go in.

"Nebraska," recorded by himself, is in a way an even further distillation of this American portrait, but this time a really reduced, really dark portrait of dark cloud America, on a much smaller scale. You get the sense Bruce thought it almost too intimate. That's what the demo captured, the sound of a guy going darker than he maybe wanted to go and, in the process, capturing a side of himself he maybe didn't like to see (or even that he knew was there and long tried to disguise). Maybe that explains the less than full (or full-voiced) commitment of Bruce on that record; he's singing things to himself that maybe make him feel uncomfortable, like he's cut to a deeper truth he'd more artfully couched in the past. This might be what so many Bruce neophytes are responding to when they claim they don't like Bruce, except for "Nebraska."

I think, getting to the point (too late), that in some ways "Tunnel of Love" gets his voice best. It's personal and dark, still, but Bruce (like "Nebraska," again working mostly by himself) is maybe more confident and comfortable with what he his projecting out into the world. He's successful in every sense so has the strength to bear its emotional honesty. The downside of that I think is that, having achieved this internal goal, he never really does it again. Everything since then, with a few exceptions, has been some degree of cautious or conservative, more or less, perhaps with the biggest exception of the "Seeger Sessions," where he is clearly having a blast.

https://books.google.com/books?id=nRTHPE2gZ0QC&pg=PA191&lpg=PA191&dq=bruce+springsteen+human+touch+guitar+world&source=bl&ots=FWuMU1hpR-&sig=ACfU3U1eauyqto0ihNdiLPjOpGE6sav_2Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFhLCFpPfyAhWFMlkFHU0JBAIQ6AF6BAgkEAI#v=onepage&q=bruce%20springsteen%20human%20touch%20guitar%20world&f=false

See p. 196-197, re: "other people's fingerprints on their mind".

Really one of the best interviews given by any musician that I've read

Yeah, I think I have that one in a collection called "Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen."

Man, Neil Strauss. He's one of those writers that used to impress me, or at least I was impressed by his output, but then he just fell off a cliff. It began with his infamous Rolling Stone profile of Jewel that I actually clipped and saved, since it was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever read.

Dovetails with what you wrote about a desire to hide his true self or try on lots of hats.

Honestly finding one's own voice is incredibly difficult, it's a major artistic achievement I would say, and his insight as to why is eloquent as anyone's

Curious now to see the Jewel piece :)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

At the house, I strip the guest bed of its myriad pillows and leave Jewel alone to talk with her mother in the kitchen. As I lie under the covers flipping, through a glossy color picture book of Alaska, Jewel walks in wearing a green zipper sweatshirt and either sweat pants or cotton pants, I can’t remember which, and gets under the covers with me. She lies on her left side, I on my right. Between our heads is a large pillow, which blocks part of her face. We keep pushing the pillow down as we talk so we can see each other completely and feel more intimate. But we know the pillow can never be removed completely: That would be too intimate.

Holy shit

JEWEL: HOT, READY, AND ALASKAN!

Hahahaha, omg that is so ridiculous

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

She's always crazy like that

“Dear Wenner Forum: I always thought the letters you print were made up, and never believed anything like that would happen to me. Now I’m sure a believer! Last week started out like any other week in my unremarkable job as an interviewer of rock stars and other celebrities…”

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!

― tumblin’ dice outro (morrisp),

Yeah, that made me laugh too

that's absurd. but what a great Springsteen interview. I hadn't read that one before. that "other people's fingerprints" thing is amazing, what a phrase.

The funny thing is that Nebraska has fingerprints all over it. Not quite the kind of fingerprints he's talking about here, but Springsteen wears his influences so much on the surface, you can easily listen to it and go "oh, here's Flannery O'Connor, here's Hank Williams, here's Suicide." And yet it doesn't keep the record from sounding like something totally original and distinctive. Of course that's a combo of influences you wouldn't find anywhere else.

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

LMAO

I think I've mentioned it before, but I once audited a lecture/class taught by Steve Earle that, over the course of a week, tracked the progression of Hank Williams to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen and, ultimately, to Earle himself.

That's awesome! Where was this?

Old Town School of Folk Music here.

Man, I miss that place. I used to live in Lincoln Square, my last home in Chicago before I left Illinois.

Ha, I used to live in Lincoln Square, too. I recently saw a Google Maps photo of the Old Town School of Folk Music location, which is now…an empty lot. But then, the 400-square-foot “rear cottage” I used to live in is now a multi-story condo complex, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

It still exists! But now it's a big multi-space complex.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/bruce-springsteen-or-stephen-king

I keep thinking some Christmas season I should write "Bruce Springsteen song or It's a Wonderful Life?" and send it to McSweeney's.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

1. Born to Run
2. BLT
3. Turkey Club
4. Thunder Road
5. Grilled Cheese
6. Atlantic City
7. PBJ
8. The Price You Pay
9. The Promised Land
10. Reuben
11. Rosalita
12. Muffaletta

13. Torta of Love

14. I'm on Rye

That Stephen King one is actually pretty clever - see the key on the bottom, they are all real references (if often vague enough to be easy to generate)

Ha, didn’t have time to study it or even get to the key but yeah.

15. Marbleland

16. Devils and Crust

17. Land of Hope and Pretzels

19. Jungleham

20. Adam Raisin au Pain

21. Used Carbs

incident on foccacia

It's a Wonderful Life or a Bruce Springsteen song, here you go:

1.As a child, you watched your father being humiliated by someone richer and more powerful than him and swore that would never happen to you.

2.You feel a lifelong compulsion to help out your baby brother, even though he never does anything for you.

3.Your brother went off to war. You stayed home.

4.You feel trapped in this miserable little town and you’re going to get out, do great things, and take Mary with you.

5.You and Mary got married too young, and let’s face it, you’re not all that happy anymore.

6.You got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote.

7.You’re basically an honest guy, but when someone close to you commits a crime, you automatically cover for them.

8.The slow death of all your dreams has turned you into a seething mass of barely-controlled rage.

9.Overcome by the general crappiness of your life, you decide to drown yourself. You’re contemplating the water temperature when Clarence shows up and saves your life.*

*Technically this last one is a "Growin' Up" story rather than a song, but close enough.

the answer is...yes?

i love this

as far as I can tell, the answer to every McSweeney's "x or y" list is yes

i see now the conceit

I told my students that Bruce is my favorite singer and showed them a picture of him, bc I thought we'd bond more if they had something to make fun of me about. Mentioned offhand that today is his birthday (I was speaking French and birthday is a word they know) and for some reason they got all excited about that and crowded around one student's computer to look up this info and verify it. Middle schoolers are funny.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I knew any of my teachers' musical tastes up to middle school with the exception of the music teachers: IIRC, they were fans of Lionel Richie and Bobby McFerrin. May help explain why I never got excited about music classes.

ooh la la, la chef

le chef. dammit. i only have the compulsory Canadian 4 years, I'm sorry