Perhaps touched by the pandemic that has taken so many lives as well as his own advancing years, Bruce Springsteen’s new album Letter to You begins and ends with songs contemplating life’s end. In between those two songs, in an album that serves as a live rousing concert for homebound fans, Springsteen and the E Street Band send a roaring message about what can save America. It is the same message they have been preaching since the 1970s: rock and roll can save our souls. Maybe it is a cliché. But in the hellhole that is 2020, Springsteen and the E Street Band preach, giving us faith and hope. We may not deserve Letter to You after what we have created in 2020, but it is the album we need.
The album begins with the warning of a “Big black train comin’ down the track” followed by the truth that “One minute you’re here / Next minute you’re gone.” It is this statement in the opening track, “One Minute You’re Here,” that permeates through the album and its energy. The album is of a man of advancing years contemplating death and what it means for his life and his art.
Consistent with this theme, the album cover photo by Danny Clinch captures Springsteen in winter. He stands near the location where John Lennon, one of his rock and roll heroes, lost his life at the Dakota. Springsteen’s eyes look into the camera with the determination he brings to facing mortality throughout the album.
For example, on “Ghosts,” Springsteen seems to be recalling the musicians he has known and has lost, perhaps including Clarence Clemons and Danny Frederici. But in the face of the losses, Springsteen shouts against his own impending darkness. “I’m alive!” he bellows. A similar theme runs through “Last Man Standing.”
The album includes three songs Springsteen wrote decades ago, now polished with the help of the band: “Janey Needs a Shooter,” “Song for Orphans,” and “If I Was the Priest.” These songs go back to early in his career, with the latter song famously being played acoustically in 1972 by Springsteen when he was seeking a record contract.
These old songs fit with the new ones perfectly, with Springsteen perhaps realizing he is running out of time to give these early songs a proper release. He also has commented on how it was just plain fun to revisit these old songs written when his lyric writing was much more wordy than in later years.
Whatever the reason, the new version of “If I Was the Priest” rushes forth as one of the highlights on the album, ending with a rare album guitar solo from Stevie Van Zandt. Although I’d heard the acoustic bootlegs many times before, I never realized what a wonderful song it was until this new version (and it’s not just because I like that older wiser Bruce now mostly uses the more grammatically proper “If I were. . . “).
Springsteen wrote most of the songs during a short period of time this year, and based on Roy Bittan’s advice, he avoided creating demos for the songs. Instead, he brought the songs to the full E Street Band, so they all could work out the arrangements together.
Thus, you may notice an energy in Letter to You, a Springsteen record recorded through this process for the first time since the 1980s with Born in the U.S.A. I first noticed the powerful sound of this album subconsciously when I started hearing the opening chords of “Letter to You” and “Ghosts” on the radio when I was not expecting them. If nothing else, give this album time to take you by surprise.
Springsteen seems to be speaking directly to his fans with the lyrics. In the title track, Springsteen tells us that through his music he has been communicating with us all these years, sharing his feelings and thoughts. He reveals that all along he has just been talking with us, as if writing a “Letter to You.”
But current events run through the songs on Letter to You too. “Rainmaker” was partially written three years before Donald Trump became president. And the image of the rainmaker has appeared throughout American culture including in Burt Lancaster’s amazing performance in the 1956 film The Rainmaker, in Tanya Tucker’s “Lizzie and the Rain Man,” and in Steve Martin’s starring role in Leap of Faith. But it is hard not to think Springsteen is thinking of President Trump in invoking the con men of the West who used to promise rain.
Rainmaker, a little faith for hire;
Rainmaker, the house is on fire;
Rainmaker, take everything you have;
Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad,
They’ll hire a rainmaker.
A possible reference to Trump also arises in what may be the best song on the album, “House of A Thousand Guitars.” The song begins with references to a “criminal clown” who “has stolen the throne.”
But, like the album, “House of A Thousand Guitars” is ultimately about hope, reminiscent of “Mary’s Place” on Springsteen’s post 9/11 The Rising album. Also harkening back to one of Springsteen’s greatest songs “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the new song takes us not on a train but to someplace here in the (hopefully) near future. Perhaps it is a reference to the pandemic someday ending, when we can all come together to find community in the music at the local bars and the stadiums.
Well it’s alright yeah it’s alright;
Meet me darling come Saturday night;
Brother and sister wherever you are,
We’ll meet in the house of a thousand guitars.
Springsteen told Rolling Stone about how important “House of A Thousand Guitars” is to him : “It’s about this entire spiritual world that I wanted to build for myself,” he says, “and give to my audience and experience with my band. It’s like that gospel song ‘I’m Working on a Building.’ That’s the building we’ve been working on all these years. It also speaks somewhat to the spiritual life of the nation. It may be one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. It draws on everything I’ve been trying to do for the past 50 years.”
Similarly in singing about “The Power of Prayer,” heaven is found from entering a bar and hearing the voice of Ben E. King.
Yet, as the album began with a slow song contemplating death, the final song “I’ll See You In My Dreams” contemplates a lost friend: “And though you’re gone / And my heart’s been emptied it seems / I’ll see you in my dreams.” Springsteen notes that our human connections live on, through such things as shared memories (records, guitars, books, etc.). And that we will all meet again, if not in another world, then in our dreams and memories of one another, as he asserts, “For death is not the end.”
In the book Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote about how humans deal with the inevitability of death. He advised that the best way to live was to confront the fears openly, so that whatever humans do “on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.”
As he sings in the title track here, Springsteen has always tried to reveal what his “heart finds true.” And for decades, he has been bringing together fans in life-affirming bars, concert halls, and stadiums. Now that the pandemic has tried to take that live human connection from us, Springsteen’s new (and possibly last?) album Letter to You faces the rumble of our terrors and panic. And he comes out preaching. And what he preaches is the power of truth, joy, memories, togetherness, and rock and roll.
What do you think of the Letter to You? Leave your two cents in the comments.
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