Letter To You

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Commercially Released: October 23, 2020
Produced by Ron Aniello and Bruce Springsteen
Recorded by Ron Aniello at Thrill Hill Recording, Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey
Mixed by Bob Clearmountain
Mastered by Bob Ludwig
Design by Michelle Holme
Photography by Danny Clinch

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Table of Contents

Overview

Released

Additional Information

Overview

Letter To You is the twentieth studio album by Bruce Springsteen. Released in October 2020, it was Springsteen's first new studio album with the E Street Band to be released since 2014's High Hopes. The Album was met with widespread critical acclaim; critics responded favorably to the album's treatment of issues of aging and death. The album was a commercial success, topping several international sales charts and was Springsteen's 21st top-10 album in the United States. Since touring was not possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the album was promoted with an online radio station, music videos, and a custom Twitter emoji.

"I love the emotional nature of Letter To You", says Bruce. "And I love the sound of the E Street Band playing completely live in the studio, in a way we've never done before, and with no overdubs. We made the album in only five days, and it turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I've ever had."

Bruce Springsteen fans around the world will get a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic artist's creative process in the documentary feature film, Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You, from Apple Original Films, premiering exclusively on Apple TV+, Friday, October 23. The feature-length documentary arrives the same day as Springsteen's new album Letter To You, and features full performances from The E Street Band, in-studio footage, never-before-seen archival material and a deeper look into Letter To You from Springsteen himself. It captures Springsteen recording Letter To You live with the full E Street Band, and includes final take performances of ten originals from this new record. Written by Springsteen and directed by his frequent collaborator Thom Zimny, the film is a tribute to the E Street Band, to rock music itself and to the role it has played in Springsteen's life. Throughout the documentary, Springsteen shares his thoughts and feelings behind Letter To You and puts the new music into the context of his entire body of work. In that way, it's the next piece in the autobiographical series that began with the memoir Born To Run, continued with Springsteen on Broadway and advanced through his film Western Stars. Apple Original Films' Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You is produced by Jon Landau and Zimny and co-produced by Barbara Carr, with Springsteen serving as executive producer.

Send your own 'Letter To Bruce'.

^{Source: Wikipedia}

Released

#	Song Title	Running Time	Release
1.	ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE	2:54	LETTER
2.	LETTER TO YOU	4:50	LETTER
3.	BURNIN' TRAIN	3:59	LETTER
4.	JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER	6:43	LETTER
5.	LAST MAN STANDING	4:00	LETTER
6.	THE POWER OF PRAYER	3:31	LETTER
7.	HOUSE OF A THOUSAND GUITARS	4:26	LETTER
8.	RAINMAKER	4:47	LETTER
9.	IF I WAS THE PRIEST	6:44	LETTER
10.	GHOSTS	5:49	LETTER
11.	SONG FOR ORPHANS	6:08	LETTER
12.	I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS	3:25	LETTER

^{Total Running Time: 58:00}

#	Song Title	Release
1.	LETTER TO YOU	LETTER: DOC
2.	LAST MAN STANDING	LETTER: DOC
3.	THE POWER OF PRAYER	LETTER: DOC
4.	HOUSE OF A THOUSAND GUITARS	LETTER: DOC
5.	IF I WAS THE PRIEST	LETTER: DOC
6.	GHOSTS	LETTER: DOC
7.	SONG FOR ORPHANS	LETTER: DOC
8.	ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE	LETTER: DOC
9.	I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS	LETTER: DOC
10.	BURNIN' TRAIN	LETTER: DOC
11.	BABY I ^{(After Credits)}	LETTER: DOC

Additional Information

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Song Title	Running Time	Release

BURNIN' TRAIN - V1		uncirculating
BURNIN' TRAIN - V2	3:59	LETTER

Note: The first demo of "Burnin' Train" was recorded at Thrill Hill West, Beverly Hills, CA during December 1993. V2 was completed over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band. Inclusion on a six-CD sampler dated from June 1998 suggests "Burnin' Train" was considered for Tracks. This could be the 1993 recording.

GHOSTS - V1

5:49

LETTER / BESTOF / 2020 single

Note: "Ghosts" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

HOUSE OF A THOUSAND GUITARS - V1

4:26

LETTER

Note: "House Of A Thousand Guitars" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V1		uncirculating
IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V2	5:53	US1 / EDR
IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V3		uncirculating
IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V4	5:13	US3 / HDT / EDR
IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V5	5:33	BTF / US4 / DT / EY / MPD / EDR
IF I WAS THE PRIEST - V6	6:44	LETTER

Note: V1 recorded at Pocketful of Tunes, 39 West 55th Street, New York, NY on February 14, 1972, at Bruce's second audition for Mike Appel. V2 recorded at Appel's office, Laurel Canyon, 75 East 55th Street, Suite 706, New York, NY during April, 1972. V3 was performed at John Hammond's office at "the Black Rock" aka CBS Records, 51 West 52nd Street, New York, NY on May 2, 1972. V4 recorded at the John Hammond audition at Studio E Columbia Records, 6th floor, 49 East 52nd Street, New York City on May 3, 1972. V5 recorded at Mediasound Studios, 311 West 57th Street, New York, NY during May–July, 1972, a solo acoustic number. It was never recorded at the Greetings sessions. According to comments by Bruce this was written in late 1970 or early 1971. Performed live at The Student Prince in the fall of 1971. V6 was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS - V1

3:25

LETTER

Note: "I'll See You In My Dreams" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V1	6:02	US6 / EY / ATMF
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V2	4:30	uncirculating
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V3	1:34	LM-8
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V4	2:34	LM-8 / PYP
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V5	6:50	DDO / DO-1 / EC / ATMF
JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER - V6	6:43	LETTER

Note: "Janey Needs A Shooter" has a long, complicated history. V1 was recorded in a solo piano arrangement at 914 Sound Studios, Blauvelt, NY, on January 29, 1973, with additional takes on January 30. The lyrics were written during 1972, although the melody was culled from the mid-1971 Springsteen composition "Talking About My Baby", a recording of which exists, from a show in Richmond, VA in October 1971. "Janey Needs A Shooter" appeared on provisional lists for The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, but did not make the final cut. Also listed on the earliest known album #3 sequence, from spring 1974. Session log documents indicate that a full-band arrangement was recorded at 914 Sound Studios at some point during the Born To Run sessions, but it was bypassed for the album.

V3 and V4 are acoustic demos Bruce recorded around March–April 1979, at Telegraph Hill. V5 is a magnificent full band recording originally attributed to the Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions, and later to the October 1978 rehearsal session at Telegraph Hill, Holmdel, NJ. Given the evidence (including audio not circulating), we can confirm it is a Telegraph Hill rehearsal from May 1979. The quality of the private audio is far superior to that found on the 'Definitive Darkness Outtakes' or 'Iceman' CDs, and includes the count-in and runs at the correct speed. "Janey Needs A Shooter" was also included on a very early tracklist for what became The River, but in all likelihood never seriously considered.

Warren Zevon has said that he became obsessed with the title after Jon Landau mentioned it along with other songs that Springsteen was intending to record. Zevon pestered Bruce, pleading to hear the song. He agreed, and Zevon ended up working on his own version of the song, his interpretation of "Jeannie Needs A Shooter" (he had misheard the name), and played an incomplete version to Bruce sometime in the spring of 1979. Springsteen loved the arrangement, and they wrote the remainder of "Jeannie Needs A Shooter" together. The Zevon/Springsteen version is "a romantic saga of an outlaw pursuing a maiden while her father tries to gun him down," while in Springsteen's original the narrator aims to save Janey from a series of ill-judged (perhaps concurrent) relationships with unlikeable partners who do not truly care for her. Zevon's studio take of "Jeannie Needs A Shooter" from the Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School album was recorded during the summer of 1979 and released in February 1980.

V6 was the earliest track recorded for Letter To You, and was initially intended for release on Record Store Day, as Bruce confirmed during a phone call to E Street Radio on October 23, 2020. Springsteen changed "Janey needs a shooter Jack" to "Janey needs a shooter now" for the official release. "Janey" was finally premiered live on July 5, 2024 in Hannover, Germany, some 52 years after it was written. It may have been played in 1972 or 1973, but there is no record.

LAST MAN STANDING - V1

4:00

LETTER

Note: "Last Man Standing" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

LETTER TO YOU - V1	4:50	LETTER / BESTOF / 2020 single
LETTER TO YOU - V2	4:00	videoclip

Note: "Letter To You" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band. The difference between V1 and V2 is another intro, middle section and ending.

ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE - V1		uncirculating
ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE - V2		uncirculating
ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE - V3	2:54	LETTER

Note: "One Minute You're Here" V1 and V2 were recorded at 40 Bellevue Studio, Rumson, New Jersey, during September 2004, two takes in alternate keys. V3 was possibly recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

RAINMAKER - V1		uncirculating
RAINMAKER - V2		uncirculating
RAINMAKER - V3	4:47	LETTER

Note: "Rainmaker" was first recorded in November 2003, at 40 Bellevue Studio, Rumson, New Jersey, with two finished takes. V3 was possibly completed over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

SONG TO THE ORPHANS - V1		uncirculating
SONG TO THE ORPHANS - V2		uncirculating
SONG FOR ORPHANS - V3	6:34	BTF / UNE / PS / EY / US4 / DT / ATMF
SONG FOR ORPHANS - V4	6:08	LETTER

Note: Occasionally listed as "Song To Orphans", "Song To The Orphans", and variations thereof, the official title is "Song For Orphans". According to several authors, including Peter Ames Carlin (Bruce!) and Ryan White (Springsteen Album by Album), "Song To The Orphans", was one of the songs Bruce Springsteen played for Mike Appel at their first meeting on November 4, 1971, at Pocketful of Tunes, 39 West 55th Street, New York, NY. It should also be noted neither Springsteen or Appel have confirmed or denied this in their writings to date. We have listed this performance as V1, although it was most likely not recorded. V2 represents any number of recordings made at Mediasound Studios, 311 West 57th Street, New York in June and July of 1972. V3 was one of a number of takes that were recorded at 914 Sound Studios on February 19-20, 1973 in a solo acoustic arrangement.

"Song For Orphans" can be found on a proposed track-listing document for the Springsteen's first album. The first known live performance of "Song For Orphans" was on August 10, 1972 at Max's Kansas City, New York City, NY, and it was an occasional inclusion in Bruce’s opening solo segment during the first three months of the Greetings Tour. A couple of live audio performances from that period are circulating. Although not known to have been considered for album #2, in 1974 Springsteen composed several lists of songs that were candidates for inclusion on his third album, and "Song For Orphans" made several. While this makes it possible that "Song For Orphans" was recorded during the Born To Run sessions there is currently no supporting evidence. V4 was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, NJ, with the E Street Band and issued on Letter To You in October 2020.

SONG TO THE ORPHANS - V1		uncirculating
SONG TO THE ORPHANS - V2		uncirculating
SONG FOR ORPHANS - V3	6:34	BTF / UNE / PS / EY / US4 / DT / ATMF
SONG FOR ORPHANS - V4	6:08	LETTER

THE POWER OF PRAYER - V1

3:31

LETTER

Note: "The Power Of Prayer" was recorded over a five-day period in November 2019 at Stone Hill Studio, Colts Neck, New Jersey, with the E Street Band.

^{Studio Sessions: Letter To You}

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Photoshoots

Bruce Springsteen's Powerful Return to Rock

‘Letter to You’ is a high-octane ride through love, loss and the richness of a long life

September, 2020, Colts Neck, NJ

Part 1: The Gift
Bruce Springsteen, looking fit, tan and perfectly at ease in jeans and a T-shirt, greets me with an elbow bump as we sit down to talk on the porch of his New Jersey farmhouse. The view from here, a rolling vista of 378 acres of beautiful horse country, is perhaps the most visible reward for his lifetime of hard work and outsize success as a rock musician and writer. But it's still a working farm. The busy recording studio is just down the hill, and the 100-year-old barn is a multipurpose venue — the ground floor, home to his family's six horses; the hayloft, a place for local gatherings and even a bit of filmmaking.

Springsteen turned 71 in September, a freaky mile marker for many of us who have grown up with him. Though it shouldn't be close to shocking. We have been along for the ride through his many and varied lives: the ‘70s soul rocker and Boss of the mighty E Street Band, the pumped-up stadium showstopper, the writer of iconic, decade-defining songs like “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart” and “The Rising.” And, more recently, the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, which he transmuted into a one-man show called Springsteen on Broadway. His directorial debut, a concert film for his 2019 album, Western Stars, whetted his appetite to direct again. Oh, and during this pandemic spring and summer, he seized the airwaves to try to raise our spirits and preach mask-wearing and patience ("stay strong, and stay home, and stay together") on his fortnightly radio show, From My Home to Yours, on Sirius XM.

But I am here to talk to him about something quite remarkable for a musical artist of his vintage. His new record, Letter to You, an album of powerful, moving and elegiac rock music, takes up the great mysteries of life and death as only an earnest pilgrim of three-score-and-ten-plus-one could hope to pull off. With the full E Street Band — big drums, bass, lead guitars and keys — the record rocks, and it is age appropriate.

Letter to You is an album about carrying on in the face of loss. The loss of old friends such as George Theiss, who sang and played with a teenage Springsteen in his first band, the Castiles. The loss of two beloved E Street bandmates — organist Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons; the passing of Springsteen's father; the slow decline of his mother due to Alzheimer's disease. The shedding of lives past, the passage of time itself — the preoccupations of all art that aims for greatness — are at the center of this work. It's a summing up, too, an offering from an old friend. But to whom is it addressed?

"Is it a letter to your younger self?” I ask. “Is it to your children? Your wife? Your fans? To me?"

Springsteen chuckles at the question: “It's to you! It's a letter to you! Whoever is listening. And, yeah, it is a summing up of what I've tried to do over the course of my 45, 50 years now, working."

The project began with a measure of self-doubt. “I hadn't written rock music for the E Street Band in about seven years,” he says. “I was thinking, Well, maybe I don't have any more rock music in me."

True, rock was in the Boss's rearview mirror for a while, as he embraced other musical styles, covered other writers’ songs, traveled wherever his muse set the GPS. For his previous record, Western Stars, the project was a visit to 1960s-era Los Angeles, to the days of Glen Campbell–style folk-pop with lush orchestration. Before that, he recorded and toured with a modern jug band of 17 or more musicians and a repertoire of traditional folk standards and spirituals made popular by Pete Seeger. And whoosh, just like that, seven years had passed, leaving Springsteen with nagging uncertainty: Could he still write great rock ‘n’ roll?

"You never really know,” he says. “It's part of the anxiety and mystery of the job that I do — which is a magic trick, because you take something out of the air that isn't there. There is no existence of it whatsoever, and you make it physical — literally. You can go for long periods without picking up anything significant. Or you'll just pick up different things. It's like you're in a mine and one vein has gone dry, so you tap into another. A pop vein or a folk vein, and so you start working there, and you discover a whole new rich vein of gold that you can draw from. It's not rock ‘n’ roll; it's just something else.

"But because I am primarily a rock ‘n’ roll musician when I'm operating sort of at my peak — in other words, in front of my largest audience with my favorite band — I like to … every once in a while, come up with some rock songs.”

Come up with some rock songs. … Ho ho ho. Just so you know, that last line, spun out to its understated to-do-list punch line by a virtuoso storyteller, was also delivered with a self-deprecating chuckle. Springsteen is funny in person. He's also fully present, generous with his attention and, to my surprise, as still as an Easter Island statue when he's not talking. I ask if we can avoid politics today. “Fine with me,” he says from the opposite end of a family-size table in front of this pretty fieldstone house. The day has brightened after a morning storm, and Bruce's wife of 29 years, Patti Scialfa, a tall redheaded singer-songwriter of considerable gifts herself, comes out to check on us — offering drinks and monitoring the social distance protocols at her home. Then the screen door closes, and she disappears back into the house.

“Life goes by quickly but slowly. I heard something of mine from 1975 on a record the other day, and I said, ‘That was about seven or eight lives ago.'"

Springsteen is the great empath of the rock world. He shows up for causes, big and small: hunger, poverty, Vietnam vets, 9/11 first responders, hurricane relief and many more, right down to Asbury Park local. But since our time today is not unlimited, I am very curious about how, after 50 years on the job, Springsteen still finds inspiration for his songwriting. He answers not as a rock star but as a member of a tribe, the humble representative of anyone who makes art for a living.
"You have your antenna out,” he says. “You're just walking through the world and you're picking up these signals of emotions and spirit and history and events, today's events and past remembrances. These things you divine from the air are all intangible elements: spirit, emotion, history. These are the tools of the songwriter's trade before he even picks up the pen.

"People who are very attuned to that atmosphere usually end up being artists of some sort. Because they're so attuned to it, they have a desire to record it. If that desire to record it is strong enough, you learn a language to do so. Whether it's paintings, films, songs, poetry …

"My antenna is picking up so much information, I need to find a way to disperse it. So, I needed to learn a language that does that. And the languages of art, film, records, whatever you want to call it — all those languages do that. And you get to pass it on to your listeners or fans. That's how it begins."

Part 2: What Are Songs but Dreams?
Bruce Springsteen's famous New Jersey beginnings came full circle long ago. After the breakthrough success of his 1975 album, Born to Run, he traveled the world, married actress Julianne Phillips, got divorced four years later, started a family with Scialfa and married her in Los Angeles. In 1998 the family came home to New Jersey and stayed. Being tethered to his old stomping grounds has been good for Springsteen, boosted his creative output. Although in his Broadway show, he points out the irony that he, Mr. Born to Run — “It's a death trap! It's a suicide rap!" — now lives happily just 10 minutes from his place of birth, Freehold, New Jersey.

That means he is still physically tied to the landmarks of his youth and young manhood — his family home, church, the places where he played as a young musician, the Knights of Columbus hall, the VFW hall, the beach bars, even the ShopRite on Route 79 in Freehold, where he and the Castiles set up their amps to play in the parking lot in 1965 for a “Midnight Madness” opening ceremony. During the summer months of the current pandemic, he would take long drives ("to get me out of Patti's hair"), noting with despair the emptiness of his boyhood towns, beaches and boardwalks. But when he drove by the ShopRite, he says, “where I was 55 years ago at midnight. … It was the only parking lot that was full of cars, and it almost brought me to tears.”

And it was the 2018 death of the handsome, charismatic Theiss, who was there with Springsteen, singing and playing in the parking lot 55 years ago, that sparked this new record into being. When Theiss died after a long struggle with cancer, Springsteen says, “this left me as the last living member of my first band — this very significant and meaningful group of young men with whom I had this enormous experience as a teenager.”

Shortly after Theiss’ death, something quite extraordinary happened. Springsteen explains: “I was coming out of my play on Broadway. There was an Italian kid there. He hands me a guitar. ‘Hey, Bruce, this is for you. We had this built for you. It's very special.’ An acoustic guitar … no case. I just put it in the car and take off. You know [I told him], ‘Thanks. Appreciate it.’ “

Slowly, the power of that gift revealed itself. “When I went to write, I picked it up and ‘Last Man Standing’ came out, along with most of the rest of the record. Sometimes instruments have some magic in them. The songs for the album were in the guitar that the kid gave me,” he says, still marveling at it. “You try for seven years and you write an album in a week."

The recording happened fast, too, he adds. “We spent one week in the studio — five days — and cut the entire record. It was all live, no overdub vocals and just a few overdub instruments. It's the first truly live, in-the-studio record of the band we've ever made.” Fans will get to see how it all came together in a Springsteen-directed companion documentary.

“I hadn’t written rock music for the E Street Band in about seven years. I was thinking, Well, maybe I don’t have any more rock music in me.”

He loosely based all the album's songs on the themes of “Last Man Standing,” he says: “of death, life, past, future.” Covering all that ground are a dozen songs, all original, including three written in the early 1970s that are released here for the first time (and on which you can hear Springsteen's early influences, especially Bob Dylan). Letter to You begins with a song titled “One Minute You're Here” and closes with “I'll See You in My Dreams,” a quiet folk elegy of hope in the face of mortality. It contains the lines “Death is not the end / I'll see you in my dreams."
"Yeah, well, I'm 70, so it's what you write about,” Springsteen says. “These things — the mysteries of life — become more interesting. Life goes by quickly but slowly. I heard something of mine from 1975 on a record the other day, and I said, ‘That was about seven or eight lives ago. It was a full and entire life of its own.’ And I lived that one, and it was a great one, and now I'm living another one.

"I lived a life where we raised our children. That life is gone now. [Evan, Jessica and Sam Springsteen are 30, 28 and 26, respectively.] Now Patti and I are living another life. So, you live a lot of lives over the course of your one life. And ‘One Minute You're Here’ uses metaphors for that experience. Whether it's the train whooshing by you in an instant or the end of a summer … whether it's a carnival that comes through town for a week and then it's gone. Whether it's the sound of your feet on a gravel road and you look up and the stars are there, and then they've disappeared. About the swiftness of death, I suppose, but also the richness of living.

"I wrote a song called ‘Death Is Not the End’ a couple of years ago, and I never finished it. But I liked the idea, because I guess I don't believe that it is the end. I carry so many ancestors with me on a daily basis. I experience my father regularly. I experience Clarence. I experience my old assistant, Terry Magovern. They visit me in my dreams quite often — I may see them, you know, several times a year.

"So, this idea is you don't lose everything when someone dies. You do lose their physical presence, but their physical presence is not all of them, and it never was all of them, even when they were alive. Spirit is very strong. Emotion is very strong. Their energy is very strong. And a lot of this, particularly for people who are very powerful, really carries over after death.

"It's like my friend George passes away and leaves me with all of these songs. Clarence passes away and leaves me with these songs. Danny passes away, leaves me with these songs. And what are songs but dreams, at the end of the day? It really is all my dreams that I put down on paper and on tape."

So, I say, it must be nice when your dreams connect with so many other human beings on the planet.

"It is."

Part 3: Ten Personal Questions

Do you feel more at peace now than in decades past?
Springsteen: Oh, yes. My children are grown up. They're citizens. Patti and I are just at some wonderful, wonderful place in our life together, and things are very, very good. I just got all of this brand-new and very lively and exciting music. The film [of Letter to You] is very good. So, it's all of these wonderful things creatively. Personally, things are great. It couldn't be any better.

Do you still see a therapist?
A: Once in a while, yeah — the talking cure — it works. But you've got to commit yourself to a process. And I was pretty good at doing that. I enjoyed the investigative examination of issues in my life that I didn't understand. I learned a lot and therefore was able to exploit what I had learned and turn it into a real life.

Do you think our dreams are the forerunner of life on the other side, when we will be reunited with those we knew here?
A: It's a nice idea. I wouldn't count on it.

Is the new record part of an ongoing memory project that is related to the memoir and the Broadway show and Western Stars and also looking forward to the future?
A: I've never thought of it like that, but that is how it appears. I reach 70 and I want to include sort of looking back. It's natural as a springboard and a way to look forward — to look into the future and to experience the time you have left. I wanted to richly experience my past, contextualize it, and then it would contextualize the time that I have left and what I want to do with it.… So, all of these projects have been ways of making sense of my own life, my own identity, what I want to do, where I want to go, how I want to spend my time.

You seem to have extremely good recall of your younger years. So, you're not running out of material, it seems.
A: A writer has got to have a pretty good — a reasonably attuned — memory of his past. And the stuff that I can't remember, I just make up.

Do you feel that you've been able to create the family that you longed for as a boy and young man?
A: Yeah, I do. But it doesn't come out the way you dream. It comes out much richer than you dreamed as a young man. You know, there's much more richness in the experience and in the lives of the people that you've gotten involved with than you could have ever imagined, pre-family. I can't tell someone what it's like to have a child. I can try. But that's an experience you have to have yourself.

What is it like living with a fellow artist — a wife who is in the family business?
A: We just drift around each other and create as it happens. I mean, because I wrote some of the songs [for the new album] in the family room here where Patti's lying on a couch and just reading, and I'm over there just strumming the guitar and writing little notes down. I wrote some in the bedroom. I wrote some in the studio. I'll drift around the house and write in different rooms to get different feelings at different times. And Patti will do the same. I'll go up to get into bed at night, and she's humming, you know, writing a song. It's a part of how we live. It's not separate from our daily life. The process of creating is a part of and is completely integrated with how we live.

You've spoken so lovingly about your mom, who is still suffering from Alzheimer's disease. And you've written very sweetly of your memories of her in your book Born to Run. And how she loves music and loves to dance. How is your family coping during the COVID-19 crisis?
A: We do the best we can. I'm very lucky that my mother remains in very, very good spirits. She can't really speak, but you know when you see her, she still moves to rhythm if you create rhythm or put music on, and she's happy. She's always got a smile. Always got a kiss or a hug. She can't name you now or anything, but she can recognize you and is excited when you come over. And it's been 10 years, so it's been a long time. And her progress was very slow, so I consider us quite lucky with the disease.

What music do you play for her?
A: Generally, 1940s swing band, but she also likes rock ‘n’ roll, and I'll play her some of mine because she knows some of my music. She likes ‘50s music, too — Bill Haley, “Rock Around the Clock,” stuff she remembers from when she had the radio on in the ‘50s, and she was only 30 years old herself.

In your book you talked a bit about having had no interest in burning out quickly or dying young. AARP's founder called growing older a privilege. Is it even truer for artists?
A: I've found it to be so. I've continued to make some exciting and interesting work. And I continue to take my story and move it along further. And you don't know when wonderful things are going to happen … that I would write this record at this late date for the E Street Band. And that the band would be at the top of their performing powers — which is why it is frustrating not to be able to perform at this moment — but it'll come around when it comes around.

Age has bestowed patience on Springsteen. And the pandemic, which he has called “frightening and heartbreaking,” has taught him to value the most simple pleasures. “When this is over,” he says, “I want to get an ice cream cone at the Jersey Freeze — to walk inside, step up to the counter and say, ‘Soft vanilla dipped in chocolate, please.’ “ When that day comes, the singer has even bigger plans: “All I can tell you is, when this experience is over, I am going to throw the wildest party you've ever seen. And you, my friends, are all invited.”

^{By Robert Love via AARP.org.}

Ghosts, Guitars, and the E Street Shuffle

How Bruce Springsteen confronted death, saw Clarence in his dreams, and knocked out a raw and rocking new album with the world's greatest bar band

August 4, 2020, Colts Neck, NJ

Bruce Springsteen is standing on a gravel driveway outside his house, squinting up at the sky. This morning, an early-August thunderstorm straight out of one of his own metaphors rumbled through New Jersey's Monmouth County, soaking Asbury Park, buffeting Freehold, leaving muddy ground here in the horsey acres of Colts Neck. It's afternoon now, and above Springsteen's farm, the clouds are scattering, with sunshine breaking through. "It ended up being a halfway decent day," he says, with real gratitude. (The more time he spends in semi-isolation here, the more he ends up focusing on the weather: "What else is there?")

His hair is silver and black, cropped short, and on his still-lean torso is a thin white undershirt not unlike the one he wore on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a low, ribbed neck and a tiny hole on the side. On his sockless feet — incredibly! — are a pair of leather sandals. He's in jeans, needless to say, but they're light blue, in a loose carpenter cut. We are six months deep into a global pandemic, and even Bruce Springsteen has been working from home for a long while.

It is, as always, mildly jarring to be standing next to him, as though one of the heads from Mount Rushmore peeled itself off the cliff to hang out. When you've hardly spoken with anyone else face-to-face for months, it's even odder. I grew up around here, too, so as we head to a covered porch, there's some local small talk — we mourn a mutually beloved Carvel store, mentioned in his book, that's morphed into a Dunkin' Donuts. We settle into wicker chairs, six feet apart, across a table of white stone that overlooks a tree-lined field, where leaves are swaying in what's left of the morning's wind. For a man who's born to run but more or less stuck in place, there are worse spots to be.

So, how's he doing? "Hangin' in there, like everybody else," Springsteen says, sinking further into his chair. "As far as my own plans, you know, I think you're concerned about ever playing again." (He says this lightly enough, and later takes pains to clarify that he's far more concerned about "working musicians who go week to week, and all your back-line people in the crew.") "So that weighs on your mind a little bit because, well, it was fun. Some of the uncertainty that the virus has brought with it is something everybody's got to live with. But in general, I'm OK."

It doesn't hurt that Springsteen, who has been open about his struggles with depression, is still taking meds. "I'm on drugs!" he says later. "So my mood is good!"

On a snowy day last November, just a few yards from where we're sitting, in the light-splashed, blond-wood studio he shares with his wife, Patti Scialfa, Springsteen gathered the E Street Band for five days of recording. They managed to lay down an entire album. "We were doing a song every three hours," says Steve Van Zandt, who compares the pace to the Beatles' early sessions. "We basically cut the album in four days. We booked five days and on the fifth day we had nothin' to do, so we just listened to it."

In the studio, they all toasted to the tour they were sure would follow. Now, there's "no touring in sight," as Springsteen puts it, but Letter to You is still coming out October 23rd. There was no point, he decided, in holding it back. "When I make music," he says, "I'm going to put it out."

Were it not for the intervention of a once-in-a-century global catastrophe, Springsteen — who turns 71 on September 23rd — would right now be preparing for that world tour with the E Street Band. It was supposed to start, he reveals, in the spring of 2021. Instead, he says, "My antenna tells me, at best, 2022. And I would consider the concert industry lucky if it happens then.… I'm going to consider myself lucky if I lose just a year of touring life. Once you hit 70, there's a finite amount of tours and a finite amount of years that you have. And so you lose one or two, that's not so great. Particularly because I feel the band is capable of playing at the very, very, very top, or better than, of its game right now. And I feel as vital as I've ever felt in my life.… It's not being able to do something that is a fundamental life force, something I've lived for since I was 16 years old."

And livestreamed sets? For a guy who crowd-surfed into his seventh decade, who would no doubt leap into any available sweaty mass of concertgoers at this very moment if he could, it's just not the same. He did an acoustic set with Scialfa from their studio for a Jersey Covid-19 benefit, and jammed remotely with the Dropkick Murphys in May, beaming onto a screen in Boston's Fenway Park. But he found it deeply weird to work himself into an approximation of his usual performance frenzy for two songs, only to land back in an empty room. "Those are some of my favorite guys," says Springsteen. "It's always fun. But it was very strange to put yourself in a room with a band and then stop. So it's not something I'd want to make a career out of."

There may be no bringing together the E Street Band right now, a group almost big enough to constitute a mass gathering in its own right. But Letter to You sounds live enough to make you feel a little guilty listening to it, as if you're violating quarantine. That makes the album feel all the more precious, and the lack of a tour all the more painful. Letter to You is the first time since Born in the U.S.A. that Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded live in the studio to this extent, and possibly the rawest album they've ever made, with close to zero overdubs. "It's the only album where it's the entire band playing at one time," says Springsteen, "with all the vocals and everything completely live." (A few of Springsteen's twangy guitar leads, played on a Gretsch, are among the only exceptions.)

"It was really like the old days," says drummer Max Weinberg. "Just pure musical energy, with the hard-earned musical and professional wisdom of guys in their 70s, or close to 70." It also happens to be the most classically, unabashedly E Street-sounding album since at least The River. It's a late-period rebirth of sorts, and it started with thoughts of death.

In the early days of Springsteen's first real band, an assemblage of teenage central-Jersey greasers called the Castiles, there was one member marked for success. He had a smooth, pure tenor. He was the group's designated heartthrob. His name was George Theiss, and he invited Springsteen into the band as lead guitarist in the first place. "We were the only five freaks in Monmouth County," Theiss once told Rolling Stone — though Van Zandt, over in Middletown with his band the Shadows, would beg to differ. Theiss and Springsteen were close, often walking to high school together, but they clashed as time went on, especially as Springsteen began singing more. "They were competing for the same spot in the band," says Diana Theiss, George's widow. "And George was a little threatened." The Castiles broke up in 1968. In the end, one of the band's singers became Bruce Springsteen, and the other did not. Theiss married Diana at age 20, worked as a carpenter, and kept playing music in Jersey Shore clubs on the side. While Springsteen famously took inspiration for the early marriage he wrote about in "The River" from the lives of his own sister and brother-in-law, Diana always wondered whether he was also thinking about George.

It wasn't always easy for Theiss to watch his former bandmate leap from one unimaginable triumph to another. When Theiss and his wife attended a party with a band at Springsteen and Scialfa's property a few years ago, Theiss resisted an invitation to get up and jam. "He just couldn't put himself in that position of being the almost-was kind of guy," Diana recalls. "And that's not to say our whole life was one big disappointment! Of course it wasn't." Springsteen understood George's feelings, she adds. "I always felt like Bruce saw his alter ego there — 'There but for the grace of God.'"

"It's just different paths," says Springsteen. "I don't know how to make much more sense of it than that." He and his friend never fully fell out of touch, but Springsteen and Theiss reconnected in the past few years. When Springsteen learned in July 2018 that Theiss was in the final stages of terminal lung cancer, he chartered a plane to North Carolina to sit with him just before his passing. The whole way back, Diana was told, Springsteen was silent, lost in his thoughts. He was, at that point, performing on Broadway five nights a week, talking about his past again and again. Springsteen realized he was the last surviving member of the Castiles, a revelation he sat with for a while. "You can't think about it," he says, "without thinking of your own mortality. Most of the guys in the band died young for one reason or another, and so it really kind of came down to George and myself."

Before 2019, Springsteen hadn't written a song he thought would work for the E Street Band "in about six or seven years. I've written a lot of other kinds of music." He had a particularly fruitful burst of songwriting at the start of the decade, which led to 2012's Wrecking Ball (fiery populist-protest lyrics, experimental-for-Bruce production), last year's belatedly released Western Stars (melodically surprising, slyly autobiographical orchestral pop), and a third album that's "in the can," he says, declining to elaborate. He's vague about any other songwriting last decade, but there also was an acclaimed 500-page autobiography; the Tony-winning Springsteen on Broadway; and 2014's High Hopes, a collection of covers and older songs, most written in the 2000s.

"You're down in the mines," he says, "and you're searching for different veins of creativity. Sometimes you burn through one, so you have to search for something else. That vein can burn out for years or weeks at a time.… You're also at the mercy of events." For Springsteen, few events were more life-shaking than the 2011 death of one of his closest friends, E Street saxophonist and force of nature Clarence Clemons, especially on the heels of the loss of organist Danny Federici in 2008. Though Springsteen doesn't make the connection himself, it's hard not to notice that his E Street songwriting dry spell started around then.
Related: 100 Greatest Bruce Springsteen Songs of All Time
It took the death of Theiss, a friend he'd known even longer, to push him out of it. "We were very close at a very intense period in our lives," says Springsteen. "And I learned almost the entirety of my craft in that group." Springsteen had far more success with a subsequent prefame band, the hard-boogieing Steel Mill, who jammed through his winding original songs of the era to massive hippie crowds. But the Castiles burrowed into the day-to-day lives of their audience. They'd cover Sam and Dave, the Beatles, Bo Diddley, Jimi Hendrix — whatever it took to set kids in motion in a beach club or church basement or roller rink. That was a framework Springsteen would revisit after he scored his record deal in 1972. "I still have a deep emotional thread that links me with the Castiles," Springsteen says. "It was a really good local band that provided a fundamental service to a local audience. And that idea is not that far from the idea that I had of what the E Street Band can be — the world's biggest bar band."

Sometime before Theiss' passing, a fan — from Italy, he thinks — gave Springsteen an acoustic guitar at his Broadway stage door. "I said, ‘Geez, you know, thanks,' " Springsteen recalls. "And I just took a quick glance at it and it looked like a nice guitar, so I jumped in the car with it." The guitar, made by a company he's never heard of, sat in his living room for months, until Springsteen picked it up around April of last year.

Without warning, "all the songs from the album came out of it," he says, full of wonder. "In perhaps less than 10 days. I just wandered around the house in different rooms, and I wrote a song each day. I wrote a song in the bedroom. I wrote a song in our bar. I wrote a song in the living room." The first to emerge was the slow-building, elegiac "Last Man Standing," one of the most directly autobiographical songs in Springsteen's catalog, tracing the Castiles' gigs ("Knights of Columbus and the Fireman's Ball/Friday night at the Union Hall/The black-leather clubs all along Route 9") before jumping to a future scarred by loss: "You count the names of the missing as you count off time."

Springsteen had begun to create his first set of songs about what it felt like to be in a band. He was also writing about being haunted, not unpleasantly, by the dead, most directly on the rousing "Ghosts" ("I turn up the volume and let the spirits be my guide/Meet you, brother and sister, on the other side," he howls), the opening ballad, "One Minute You're Here," and the closing track, "I'll See You in My Dreams."

"The loss of Clarence and Danny still echoes every day in my life," says Springsteen. "I still don't believe it. I'm like, ‘I'm not gonna see Clarence again? That doesn't sound quite possible!' I live with the dead every day at this point in my life. Whether it's my father or Clarence or Danny, all those people sort of walk alongside you. Their spirit, their energy, their echo continues to resonate in the physical world.… A beautiful part of living is what we're left by the dead."

And he really does see his friends in his dreams. Terry Magovern, his friend and longtime assistant, who died in 2007, stops by "a couple times a year." "I see Clarence every once in a while," he says. "I'll see the houses I lived in as a child. I'll walk through their halls. We see all those folks in our dreams until we become a dream ourselves."

Clarence's nephew, Jake Clemons, replaced him in the band, and Charlie Giordano, an organist with similar musical roots, took over for Federici. But the departed are still along for the ride. "It's a little chilling," says Roy Bittan, E Street's keyboardist since 1974 and a linchpin of the band's sound. "You're playing, and I guess you could say that the ghosts of Danny and Clarence are there.… We miss them dearly, but they're standing right next to us."

Soon after Springsteen wrote the new songs, he had lunch with Bittan, and told him about the material. The musician had one suggestion: "I said, ‘Hey, man, y'know, don't demo anything,'" Bittan recalls. "‘Let's do it the way we used to, which is play us the song and let us record it.' " It was a perceptive piece of advice, with deep implications for the album. It echoed what Van Zandt had been telling Springsteen for years.

"I knew he was right," says Springsteen. One of the most pivotal moments in his career came in 1981, when he sent a roadie out to buy what became his first home-studio setup, a Tascam cassette four-track that would end up on display in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. On Nebraska, released the next year, what were meant to be demos for the E Street Band became his first real solo album, kicking off an entire career apart from the band. 1987's Tunnel of Love was essentially homemade, bedroom pop, and the line between demos and released recordings blurred from there — take the one-man sparseness and aching solitude of "Streets of Philadelphia."
Related: 18 Great Bruce Springsteen Collaborations
In the 2000s, the echoes of Springsteen's work with the E Street Band were easy to find, as acts from Arcade Fire to the Killers aimed for bombast. Lately, though, it's his solo material that seems more influential, from the hermetic churn of the War on Drugs to avowed superfan Jack Antonoff's synth-y production for Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey. (Springsteen played the War on Drugs on his excellent radio show, From My Home to Yours, and is fond of Del Rey: "Patti and I are both big fans," he says. "Norman Fucking Rockwell! Just the detail of the writing. It's really novelistic and cinematic and quite lovely.")

Springsteen kept making demos even after he resumed recording with the E Street Band on The Rising (which, somehow, is now 18 years old, a fact Springsteen finds "mind-boggling," since "that's one of my new albums!"). But last year, he finally saw a reason to stop. "When I demo, I start putting things on to see if it works," says Springsteen. "And suddenly, I'm locked into an arrangement. And then the band has to fit themselves into an arrangement. And suddenly, we don't have an E Street Band album. So I intentionally did not demo anything." Bypassing his studio, he captured the songs only on his iPhone, in quick solo-acoustic renditions, to make sure he remembered them.

No one was happier about this decision than Van Zandt, who thrived in the freewheeling early days, when he could jump in with his formidable arranging skills. For Van Zandt, the entire Brendan O'Brien period of (oft-superb) E Street albums — The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream — were "kind of transitional," with Springsteen slowly moving away from thinking of himself as a "solo artist." "We finally made it back to the band sensibility," says Van Zandt, "where Bruce is comfortable trusting the band again, thinking like a band member again."

It only took 37 years, I point out. Van Zandt laughs. "He's a little slow," he says. "Let's call it … deliberate."

Letter to You is also full of the signature stylistic flourishes that Springsteen has largely avoided in the studio for decades: glockenspiel, lyrical piano intros, swelling organ chords, Jake's uncanny evocation of Clarence's call-to-arms solos. At one point in the sessions, Springsteen actually told Bittan to play more "E Street." "It makes me chuckle," says Bittan, "because there were times when he said, ‘Don't play it like E Street!'"

"I wanted to revisit that sound with my current material," says Springsteen. "I think the audience always wants two things — they want to feel at home, and they want to be surprised." As early as 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was already pushing away from the style he'd established on Born to Run. "Your first records, you're just making music," he says. "Then when you have a hit, you slip into a reactionary and self-protective mode. And from that record onward, I didn't have anybody play that fundamental ‘E Street' style. I didn't want to repeat myself."

But at this stage of his career, he's just not worried anymore. "You're less self-conscious," he says. "And you're less rigid. So it's just like, ‘Hey, what would be creative? What would be fun for the fans? What would we enjoy doing?' It's sort of your own set of rules be damned."

In that spirit, he went as far as to lead the band through muscled-up rearrangements of three often-bootlegged, never-released songs from 1972 or 1973. All of them made the album: "Song to Orphans" (a Dylan-derived slow-burner that may have captured some of Springsteen's turn-of-decade disenchantment with the dreams of the Sixties), "Janey Needs a Shooter" (a lost classic the band rehearsed as late as 1979 in a near-identical arrangement, leading Warren Zevon to half-borrow its title for his own "Jeannie Needs a Shooter"), and an unexpectedly hard-hitting take on the gleefully sacrilegious gem "If I Was the Priest" (covered by Hollies singer Allan Clarke in the Seventies). Last year, Springsteen was working through his archives for a follow-up to his 1998 outtakes box set, Tracks, when he "sort of came across these songs." There's no particular message in their inclusion. He simply wanted to hear the band play them now, he says, "to be able to go back and sing in your adult voice but with ideas of your youth.… It was kind of insane fun, because the lyrics for all those songs were so completely crazy."

Despite a release close to Election Day, Letter to You is decidedly not an album of fiery anti-Trump anthems. "That would be the most boring album in the world," Springsteen says, a wrinkle of annoyance appearing between his eyebrows. He took on 9/11 with The Rising and George W. Bush's failures with Magic, but those state-of-the-union reports are exceptions. With its focus on poverty, dispossession, and the plight of immigrants from Mexico, 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad was his most prescient album, but he released it in the heart of the Clinton boom years.

The song that seems to most directly address the Trump era on Letter to You is a foreboding, rootsy rocker called "Rainmaker," in which a conman offers false hope to drought-stricken farmers. Springsteen acknowledges the relevance — "it's about a demagogue" — but he wrote it a few years before Trump took office. "That was sort of the one that stood in for the album I didn't make," Springsteen says.

The album's only actual reference to current events is in one line, a glancing reference to a "criminal clown" who "has stolen the throne" in a song that otherwise transcends politics, the sweeping anthem "House of a Thousand Guitars," in which Bittan's E Street-redux piano looms large. That song, which paints a beguiling picture of a rock & roll heaven on Earth, a place "where the music never ends" and fellowship reigns, a destination not far from his "Land of Hope and Dreams," is important enough to Springsteen that he dashes into the house and grabs his MacBook so he can listen to it again before we discuss it.

Once he's back at the table, he plays the song over the computer speakers, eyes shut, head nodding to Weinberg's beat. "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 in everything I've been trying to do for the past 50 years."

There's a reference in there to churches and jails, and I ask if it's a nod to a similar line in "Jungleland." Springsteen laughs. "That line has been tickling my brain since we recorded the record," he says. "And I wasn't sure where I heard it! You just reminded me where I heard that line before."

Even if it's not the current focus of his songwriting, Springsteen is still willing to dive directly into politics, as his approval of — and brief appearance in — a Democratic National Convention video using "The Rising" in August made clear. He's found the past few years to be a "very disturbing time." "Overall, as somebody who was a born populist," he says, "I've got a little less faith in my neighbors than I had four years ago."
Related: Springsteen's 25 Biggest Heroes
Many on the left — including Springsteen's friend Tom Morello — see Trump as more of a symptom of larger problems, I point out. "I'm probably not as left as Tom," says Springsteen. "But look, if we want to have the America that we envision, it's going to need some pretty serious systemic changes moving leftward." As for the leading politician on the left: "I like Bernie Sanders a lot," Springsteen says. "I don't know if he was my main choice, my first choice. I like Elizabeth Warren, I like Bernie." For the moment, though, he is fully on board with the centrist Democratic nominee. "The power of the American idea has been abandoned," Springsteen says. "It's a terrible shame, and we need somebody who can bring that to life again.… I think if we get Joe Biden, it's gonna go a long way towards helping us regain our status around the world. The country as the shining light of democracy has been trashed by the administration. We abandoned friends, we befriended dictators, we denied climate science."

His review of the Republican convention? "Horrific. Just seeded with constant lies and total distortion of the American idea. It's heartbreaking and terrible. The first thing is to get the Trump administration out of office and start again."

For Springsteen, the Black Lives Matter movement has unearthed truths he hadn't quite grasped, even when he became the rare white rock star to take on police violence against black Americans with "American Skin (41 Shots)," back in 2000. "White supremacy and white privilege have gone much deeper than I thought they did," he says. "I think my feeling previously to the past three or four years was that racism and white supremacy and white privilege were veins in our extremities, rather than an aorta that cuts through the very heart of the nation, which I feel it is now. So that was eye-opening, whether I was previously stupidly innocent to that or not."

He's proud that his 30-year-old son, Evan, has been marching in New York City. "There's not going to be any post-racial society," Springsteen says. "That's never gonna happen. But I think that a society where people really see one another as full men and women, as Americans, is possible. It's a movement of tremendous hope, and it's a tremendously diverse group of young people that are out on the street. And it's a movement that history is demanding right now."

Springsteen flips through a blue, spiral-bound notebook, looking for some writing he's been doing about Clarence Clemons and BLM. He finds a page with the letter "C" on top. Part of his audience's outsize reaction to his and Clemons' stage antics and palpable brotherhood, he thinks, is that they were seeing "an America they would like to imagine existed. And I think that was not completely unintentional. Our idea was, we wanted to present to our audience a musical version of John Lewis' ‘beloved community.'" The late congressman and civil rights leader often referenced that phrase of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, which Lewis described as "a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being."

Springsteen knows it wasn't always easy for Clemons, who only briefly experienced life in a half-white, half-black version of the E Street Band, the one that recorded the title track "Born to Run." The black members encountered racism on the road, but racial tensions weren't an issue within the group, drummer Ernest "Boom" Carter once told me: "None of that shit ever came into the band. The only time I had problems was outside the band." When Carter and David Sancious left together in 1974 to start a jazz-fusion group, Clemons was, from then on, the only black member of a white band, often playing to all-white audiences. "We were too close," says Springsteen, "to pretend that race wasn't an issue." (Clemons told author Peter Ames Carlin that he was overjoyed to finally perform for a sea of black faces at the E Street Band's first show in Africa, in 1988: "It was the first time I ever saw more than one black person at Bruce's concerts.… I was like, ‘Wow! Purple trees and no white people! This must be heaven!'")

In the old days, Springsteen would, pretty frequently, give Clemons a lingering kiss right on the lips onstage, sometimes sliding all the way across the stage to meet his welcoming arms. For years, this gesture sparked cultural-studies theorizing — queer overtones, racial subversion, etc. — and lately, it's been inspiring social media photo collages from young music fans charmed by the thought of the seemingly super-straightest of rock stars challenging the squarer elements of his audience. When I bring all this up to Springsteen, he's as amused as he is dumbfounded. "You're kidding," he says. "I gotta be honest with you. I never thought about it. I can honestly tell you, I never felt self-conscious about it or gave it any thought. We were just close."

Later, he adds: "We're talking about one of the deepest relationships of my life. I can't reduce it to an intellectual exercise. I can't reduce it to a capsule sociological explanation, of 45 years of work and love between me and one of my dearest friends."
Related: 15 Insanely Great Bruce Springsteen Songs You've Never Heard
There is, from some angles, an unnerving sense of finality around Letter to You. The cover photo shows Springsteen in a wintry landscape, while the title track, he acknowledges, is a sort of summation of his artistic output: It was all a letter he sent out to the world, where he "tried to summon all that my heart finds true." Even unearthing the three Seventies songs has a full-circle feel to it, as much as Springsteen may insist otherwise.

Could this be the last E Street Band album? "I think what he has come to realize is, it could be," says Van Zandt. "Confronting one's mortality is both truthful and realistic, and it can assist people who are in that frame of mind — who may be leaving, or who had someone pass right now that they love. And by the time this comes out, it could be 200,000 of us. It could be cathartic for those people. It could also be literal. At this point, if you have something to say, you better say it now! Don't wait too much longer! Because who knows? I don't think he meant it literally. And if it is the last album, y'know, we went out swinging. And if it's not, we're gonna have to come back, and we're gonna have to beat it!"

Springsteen acknowledges that "no tomorrows are guaranteed," but that's as far as he'll go on the subject. And it's probably worth noting that the chorus of "Ghosts" finds him practically screaming, "I'm alive!" "I plan," says Springsteen, "to have a long road in front of me.… Some of my recent projects have been kind of summational, but really, for me, it's summational for this stage of my work life. I've got a lot left to do, and I plan to carry on."

He's got "a lot of projects" in the works, including all of that work on his archives, which include various full "lost albums" along with more scattered outtakes. (Weinberg, for one, has been in the studio to overdub at least 40 old songs "in all different styles" over the past three years. "Any other artist would kill to get these songs," the drummer says.) Some of these songs will appear on a second volume of Tracks, some perhaps in other formats. "There's a lot of really good music left," Springsteen says, noting that he enjoys collaborating with his former selves. "You just go back there. It's not that hard. If I pull out something from 1980, or 1985, or 1970, it's amazing how you can slip into that voice. It's just sort of a headspace. All of those voices remain available to me, if I want to go to them."

It's been a long afternoon, and Springsteen starts to walk me to my car — trailed by two dogs, a German shepherd named Dusty (Dusty Springsteen!) and a small apparent terrier named Toast — before calling an audible. We head into the studio, where Ron Aniello, his producer since Wrecking Ball, and engineer Rob Lebret are at work at whatever the day's mystery project might be. On a music stand sits a piece of paper listing a set of chords, with an unfamiliar song title on top. "This," says Springsteen, gesturing at the instruments overflowing from every corner, "is the house of a thousand guitars." He also shows off the adjoining garage, stuffed with motorcycles and vintage cars, including the Corvette from the cover of his autobiography, which one of his sons recently rebuilt to look precisely as it does in the photo.

He asks Aniello to break out a bottle of ice-cold Cuervo, and we sit down in front of a flatscreen to take in Thom Zimny's movie of the Letters to You sessions. His longtime documentarian was there to capture every moment of recording, in evocative black and white, right where we're sitting. ("There were, like, 20 cameramen there," Weinberg recalls.) Springsteen's plan is to show only 10 minutes or so of the movie, which will be out to accompany the album.

Instead, we end up watching the whole thing, for an hour and a half, with Springsteen periodically grabbing a remote control to crank the volume to MetLife Stadium levels. He pours himself a bit more tequila as the film goes on, laughing at the jokes, maybe singing along occasionally. It's just another afternoon in Jersey, watching Bruce Springsteen watch Bruce Springsteen record an album with the E Street Band.

Before the film starts, Springsteen pours glasses for me and Aniello and offers a toast. "To rock & roll," he says, pausing for a long beat before the punchline: "What's left of it." He laughs, and we all drink."

^{By Brian Hiatt via Rolling Stone.}

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Letter to You’ is the album we need right now

SPOILER ALERT

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Bruce Springsteen's new album Letter to You is not directly about life in the tumultuous year of 2020, the way that The Rising represented a response to the events of 9/11. There is no mention of the pandemic, and not much political content.

Yet we need this album — which will be released on Oct. 23 — just as much as we needed The Rising, then.

At a time when foolishness runs rampant, it's a work of wisdom. At a time when everything seems so empty and meaningless, it's grandly ambitious. At a time when people feel isolated, it celebrates unity and a shared sense of purpose. At a time when new art of any kind is hard to come by, it's a major work from a major artist.

Letter to You was recorded over a five-day period at Springsteen's home studio in Colts Neck in November 2019 (which explains the lack of pandemic references). The whole band played together, without overdubs, giving the album a fresh, organic feel. Surprisingly, new recordings of three songs from Springsteen's distant past — "Song for Orphans", "If I Was the Priest" and "Janey Needs a Shooter", all written in the early '70s but never released — made it onto the album, along with newer material.

The presence of the older songs and the speed at which the album was recorded may have led some fans to assume that this would be a disconnected collection of randomly chosen songs — a sort of High Hopes II — but surprisingly, it comes off as a coherent whole.

I see the first two songs as a kind of introduction.

The delicate, sparsely arranged "One Minute You're Here" makes it clear that mortality is on Springsteen's mind. He lays it out bluntly: "One minute you're here, next minute you're gone."

He may have contemplated death when he was younger, too, but now now that he's older, it seems more real. "On the muddy banks/I lay my body down/This body down", he sings. Death is no longer abstract; it's a threat to his specific body.

He also includes two references to the end of summer in the song. The end of summer is a big deal for him; check out the transcript of one of his recent SiriusXM DJ shows devoted to that subject.

The second part of the album's two-song intro is the title track, which was also the album's first single. I have to confess that I did not love this song as a single, but it takes on greater meaning in the context of the entire album, tying everything together. The "letters", of course, represent songs — the method through which Springsteen has brought meaning to his life — and the "you" is whoever is listening.

Tracks 3 through 11 are, then, the letters: Songs that zero in on different aspects of life, with certain themes recurring.

In "Ghosts" (the album's second single) and "Last Man Standing", Springsteen looks back on his own history as a musician.

In the former, he feels the presence of musical comrades who have died as a force in the present. "I need/Need you by my side/Your love and I'm alive!" he exclaims, in perhaps the album's most thrilling moment.

Similarly, in "Last Man Standing", he looks for inspiration in his own past: "Rock of ages lift me somehow/Somewhere high and hard and loud/Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd/I'm the last man standing now", he sings, referring to the fact that he's the last surviving member of his first band, The Castiles.

Expanding on this theme is "House of a Thousand Guitars", which is not a cover of the Willie Nile song (and actually reminded me of Coldplay's "Viva la Vida"). But like Nile's song, it's a rousing anthem about the power of music itself. "Wake and shake off your troubles, my friend/We'll go where the music never ends/From the stadiums to the small-town bars/We'll light up the house of a thousand guitars", Springsteen sings.

The power of music is also a theme of "The Power of Prayer", though this song is really more about the idea that love itself is, in a way, a manifestation of the power of prayer.

There is an obvious reference to President Trump in "House of a Thousand Guitars": "The criminal clown has stolen the throne/He steals what he can never own." But that's not what the song is about. "Rainmaker" is the album's only song that offers an extensive political metaphor, castigating a con man for taking advantage of people who are hurting.

"Burnin' Train" is the album's hardest rocker, with lots of death imagery and religious references. It's breathtaking, musically, but it's also the song I'd most like to hear Springsteen talk about a little, just to make sure I understand what he's going for, lyrically.

You could easily argue that "Song for Orphans", "If I Was the Priest" and "Janey Needs a Shooter" are the album's least essential songs, though they do add some resonance by providing a connection to Springsteen's early days as a musician, and the manic verbosity that was a trademark of his work, then.

It's fascinating to hear what he and the E Street Band, as mature musicians, do with them now. For "Song for Orphans" and "If I Was the Priest", they come up with richly textured sound that evokes Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album and his mid-'60s tours with The Band. I can't listen to "Song for Orphans", in particular, without thinking about this arrangement of "One Too Many Mornings."

The album's 12th and final song, "I'll See You in My Dreams", is another galloping rocker, but one that ties together the album's themes and puts a hopeful spin on them. Springsteen once again sings about departed friends and the end of summer, though now it's "when all our summers have come to an end." But he asserts that death is not the end and, somehow, "we'll meet and live and laugh again."

Let me repeat that this song was recorded in November 2019. But if Springsteen were trying, now, to write an anthem to help people hold onto hope during the pandemic, he couldn't have done a better job.

It almost sounds like something he said on one of his SiriusXM shows, recorded in pandemic isolation, when he promised to throw "the wildest party you have ever seen", after all this is over.

"We'll meet and live and laugh again."

^{By Jay Lustig via NJArts.}

Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’

Recorded in just a few days with the E Street Band, this is one of the most personal statements of Springsteen’s career

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Over the past half a century, Bruce Springsteen has played down-on-their-luck working men, wide-eyed youngsters growing up too quickly, local-circuit rockers who can only dream of playing stadiums, Cadillac ranchers tearin’ up the highway for cheap kicks, and on and on in his songs. Although he was playing roles in his songs, the same sense of hope for the future and desire to live a simpler life has connected his characters since the beginning, and those threads have only become more apparent as time has gone on. Now on his 20th album, Letter to You, and at age 71, Springsteen seems to be making sense of all of his brilliant disguises for himself.

The sentimentality that pulses through Letter to You feels more authentic and personal than the fictional stories he dreamt up in his early work or even his recent dives into nostalgia, like his Magic album. He recorded the record quickly, over just five days, live in the studio with the E Street Band, similar to how they cut Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. Together, they sound comfortable rescaling the Phil Spector-inspired Wall of Sound they built in the Seventies with glockenspiels, saxophone expositions, and thousands of guitars. When Springsteen sings about glory days, this time, they’re his own glory days.

He may have released the orchestral-tinged country rock album Western Stars immediately after his autobiography and reflective Broadway engagement, but it’s only now it sounds like he’s looking back through his songwriting. Many of the record’s lyrics are introspective, private, and sometimes quixotic — he hides his feelings on “Letter to You” in a way he’d never allow a character on Nebraska get away with — and the only reason some of the songs here don’t feel intimate are because they are literal nods to his past, tracks he wrote in 1972, played once or twice, and retired until now. It’s an album with several levels of Bruce Springsteen working through different dreams from different times all in concert.

At its center is Springsteen today, retracing his steps. The album opens with a flurry of blatant signposts pointing backwards — a downbound train flattening a penny he left on the tracks, a “river running along the edge of town” — and the refrain “One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone.” The music is somber, built on acoustic guitars and synthy strings, and his voice sounds pensive as he confesses, “Baby, baby, baby, I’m so alone/Baby, baby, baby, I’m coming home,” possibly to the ghosts of Clarence Clemons, George Theiss of his Sixties band the Castiles, or maybe even himself. He similarly grapples with mortality on “Last Man Standing,” looking at faded pictures of “when you were hard and young and proud … running raw and loud,” and name-checking gigs he played at Jersey Shore dives — all with the punchline, “I’m the last man standing now.” And he closes the album with “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” a more upbeat, folky number that finds him echoing Dylan, declaring “death is not the end.”

In between all the self-therapy, Springsteen prays. A church organ runs through “House of a Thousand Guitars,” as he delivers a sermon about the healing power of rock & roll: “Here, the bitter and the bored wake in search of the lost chord that’ll band us together … in the house of a thousand guitars.” These are the same thousand guitars Springsteen summoned by name on Magic’s “Radio Nowhere,” the spirit of which goes back to the guitar he taught to talk on “Thunder Road.” And on Letter to You’s “The Power of Prayer,” a lilting, gentle rocker, he praises Ben E. King and the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” as an answered prayer and exclaims, “I’m reachin’ for heaven, we’ll make it there,” to his lover (probably someone like Wendy from “Born to Run”).

And then there’s “Ghosts,” perhaps the album’s strongest, hardest-rocking homily, on which he sings about hearing “the sound of your guitar comin’ in from the mystic far,” and builds the song up, detailing the rituals of performing until it explodes, and he and the E Street Band sing together, “by the end of the set we leave no one alive.” The song ties together the two main themes of Bruce Springsteen right now — reckoning with formative years and finding salvation in rock & roll — as he sings, “I turn up the volume, let the spirits be my guide,” amid shivering piano and glocks before exploding again.

There are also songs on Letter to You where he lets his ghosts possess him. Several tunes date back to Springsteen’s “New Dylan” days in the early Seventies, when he thought he was paid by the word. Stylistically, they’re very different from the confessional nature of the rest of Letter to You, but since they’re still Springsteen songs and the E Street Band is playing them live, just as they did nearly 50 years ago, they never feel out of place. “Song for Orphans” is a madcap, country-rock retelling of history’s losers — the Axis losing its grip, the Confederacy giving up — as he sings cleverly of sons in search of fathers “but their fathers are all gone.” Meanwhile, “If I Was the Priest” is a sacrilegious tale of devolution where the Virgin Mary gives out personally blessed balloons and Jesus wears a buckskin jacket, and “Janey Needs a Shooter,” with all its gospel organ and harmonica glory accompanies a bizarre story about predatory doctors, priests, and cops while Springsteen plays guardian angel to a vulnerable girl. It’s all a bit lofty, but they’re also some of the best, most Springsteeny songs here.

The only times when he steps out of his own interior are when he seems to be taking metaphorical jabs at Donald Trump. Never one to bite his tongue in an election year (even at the risk of an election biting back at him, as it did in 1984 with the way Reagan embraced “Born in the U.S.A.”), Springsteen describes a demagogue who tricks farmers into believing he can end a drought in “Rainmaker” — and he perfectly dressed his message in a melody made for a stadium singalong. Springsteen has said he wrote the song before Trump took office, but the fact that it’s coming out now speaks volumes. And then there’s a reference to “the criminal clown has stolen the throne [who] steals what he can never own” in “House of a Thousand Guitars” that is clearly aimed at the criminal clown currently occupying Oval Office. These are songs that demand real-world action; perhaps Springsteen doesn’t believe he can leave everything up to the power of prayer.

Still Letter to You is, for the most part, a surprisingly personal statement, since it’s unusual to hear one of rock’s most self-actualized voices take stock of what matters to him — his life, family, art, politics, past, and religion — all in real time. But Springsteen sounds at peace. Although the LP doesn’t sport the same youthful urgency as the recordings he cut in the Seventies and Eighties — there’s no “Badlands” or “Cover Me” here — you can hear how the anger and depression of his tougher times and his many split personalities delivered him to stability, and the most fascinating parts of Letter to You are when he comes out of the shadows to admit that he realizes it, too. So much of his music has been about learning to live with the setbacks his characters cannot change; this is the sound of Springsteen accepting that for himself.

^{By Kory Grow via Rolling Stone.}

Letter To You: Documentary Early Review

SPOILER ALERT
Members of the media have been able to see the documentary about the new album. Here is the combination of two reviews that have been posted on BTX:

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10 of the 12 songs are performed in the doc.

First things first, this is a BAND RECORD. No doubt about it. Even Bruce mentions at some point “what a group sound we got going on these songs.” Max’s drums BOOM like in no other E-Street album since BITUSA. This is also the most piano-driven record since probably THE RIVER. There is also a reason why Bruce chose IF I WAS A PRIEST and SONG FOR THE ORPHANS, this is an ingenious way for him to go back to his folk-rock roots and the Dylan comparisons that used to irk him in the early ’70s and pay tribute to those roots. These two songs are the most Dylan-esque he’s ever sounded on record.

Of note: Janey Need a Shooter and Rainmaker are not featured at all.

-It starts off with Bruce telling the band “Gentlemen get your notepads” as he shows the band LETTER TO YOU on acoustic guitar.
Steve actually jokes around that the 5-day schedule for recording the album is basically playing by the Beatles rule of “recording one song every three hours.”

-Uncle Frank, who was the first person to teach Bruce the guitar is there for all five days and he’s a rather quiet but amusing presence throughout.

-There are shot glasses toasts after every recording session ends. There’s a particularly touching toast to Danny and Clarence on day four of the recording sessions.

-Also, a great scene where the band members reminisce about Italian crowds and toast “to four nights at San Siro” when they take this new record on the road.

- Nice little moment, Bruce to Roy “Roy, in the spirit of Danny Federici, play that glockenspiel”

I’ll try to give a song-by-song assessment based on my notes:

LAST MAN STANDING

I would be shocked if this isn’t the third single released.
This is all about Bruce being the last living member of the Castiles “I’m the last man standing now”
Starts off with Nils feverishly strumming an acoustic guitar
There’s a great Sax Solo and booming Max drumming
A great riff which mixes Roy’s Piano with Steve’s 12 string guitar

THE POWER OF PRAYER

Beautiful piano intro and, really, this is a piano-driven song (one of many on this new album).
Charlie’s organ work here is stunning
One of those romantic rock ballads ala NONE BUT THE BRAVE.
The sax solo is done in combination with Steve’s guitar ala Radio Nowhere Nils-Clarence. There’s also a sax outro.
The best way to describe this song would be MELANCHOLIC rock. Very much a FULL BAND arrangement.
Particular lyric: “The Bouncer shuts down the door, magic fills the floor, As Ben E. King’s voice fills the air, baby that’s the power of prayer”

HOUSE OF 1000 GUITARS

A major highlight of the album.
Another piano-driven song. Piano Intro with lyrics is almost Jungleland-esque.
Blatant Trump lyric: “The criminal clown has stolen the throne, he steals what he could never own”
Patti adds background vocals to the chorus sung by Bruce “yeah it’s alright, yeah it’s alright, meet me darling come Saturday night”
Lyric: “From the stadiums to the small-town bars, we’ll light up the house of 1000 guitars”
The riff to this one is catchy.
Ends with Bruce singing “a thousand guitars” six times

IF I WAS A PRIEST

FULL BAND and way better than the acoustic version. Guitar-driven.
This is totally in the style of BOB DYLAN AND THE BAND’s late 60s sound
Al Kooper-esque Organ and piano drive the song. Barroom piano playing.
Harmonica solo
An Awesome, Mike Bloomfield-esque outro guitar solo courtesy of Little Steven

GHOSTS

we all know the song, but what we additionally learn is how much Steve assisted Bruce and the band in molding the whole tune together. We see Steve arranging the verses and choruses as well as the musical cues. No surprise, this song sounds like it belong on Disc 2 of Tracks.

SONGS FOR THE ORPHANS

Dylan-esque Harmonica intro and outro
Again, MASSIVE Bob Dylan and the Band influence. Even Bruce’s singing is Dylan-esque.
This sounds like it could have easily belonged on Blonde on Blonde
FULL BAND and done in Pure folk-rock fashion
Nils on slide guitar
Of note; Bruce has to put on his reading glasses when singing this and Priest, no doubt due to the litany of words he has to read in the lyrics.

ONE MINUTE YOU’RE HERE

Echo, slapback vocals, ala Roy Orbinson.
Dreamy, surreal meditation on death.
soft percussion, organ, and piano.
the chorus goes: “one minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone”

I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS

I cried during this one. Also, there’s a closeup of Landau closing his eyes, hearing the song for the first time and just bawling like a baby afterwards.
“I’ll meet you in my dreams, for death is not the end, we’ll meet and live and laugh again”
This is quite clearly a song about Danny, Clarence and Terry.
Starts off slow but the whole band kicks in for some rock and roll
“We’ll meet live and laugh again, I’ll see you by the river bed, for death is not the end, i’ll see you in my dreams”

BURNING TRAIN

Candy’s Room-esque drumming. A driving beat.
It also sounds like an above-average outtake from Tracks disc 4, even Bruce’s vocals sound like his ’90s stuff.
Blazing guitar solo to the tempo of Max’s drums

CONCLUSION

It all ends with the final shot and a toast at the end of the final day of recording.
Bruce “We’re taking this thing until were all in the box”

Bruce on electric guitar alone plays BABY I during the credits.
From another review:

I also saw the doc tonight and have a few things to add to One Step Up’s thoughts which were spot on.

- the documentary is very much in the format of the western stars film, in that each song is introduced by some thoughts from Bruce underneath artistic shots of winter and old video/photos.

- a funny observation I had is Bruce is only wearing glasses while performing the songs he wrote 50 years ago… cause of all the lyrics??

- the footage makes it clear that patti and jake were not a part of most of the live sessions. They recorded later, though Jake appears to have been there for one day (and Bruce notes it’s his first time in studio with the band). Soozie makes an appearance during the band introductions but is otherwise absent from the movie (Soozie shot probably just b roll)

- One Minute You’re Here feels like an outtake from another album. During this performance you only see a close up of Bruce (which to me suggests E Street didn’t record it last year), plus strings are in this one. This song feels like Devils and Dust Bruce.

- Last Man Standing is one of my favorite new songs off the album. Bruce’s vocals on this one are really impressive, and by the way, there are really great vocals throughout the album.

- I’ll See You in my Dreams is really special in the context of the doc. Speaking of that, Bruce opens up to the band a couple times in the doc which is really nice to see, and aligns nicely with the themes of the album. It’s very cathartic for fans like us.

^{By Stan Goldstein via Facebook.}

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Links:

Bruce Springsteen's Powerful Return to Rock ^(AARP)
Bruce Springsteen 'Letter to You' album makes Billboard chart history ^(App.)
Bruce Springsteen 'Letter to You': George Theiss, Castiles and the making of a superstar ^(App.)
Inside The House Of A Thousand Guitars ^{(Backstreets)}
‘Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You’ film out now! ^{(BruceSpringsteen)}
Letter To Bruce ^{(BruceSpringsteen)}
Store: Letter To You ^{(BruceSpringsteen)}
New Album ‘Letter To You’ Coming October 23 ^{(BruceSpringsteen)}
Bruce Springsteen Is Living in the Moment ^{(NewYorkTimes)}
Bruce Springsteen overlooked, again, for Grammys ^(NJArts)
Guest-filled series on SiriusXM and Apple Music will lead up to Springsteen’s ‘Letter to You’ release ^(NJArts)
Ghosts, Guitars, and the E Street Shuffle ^{(RollingStone)}
Springsteen First Artist to Top Billboard Charts in Six Consecutive Decades ^(VideoMuzic)

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Bruce Springsteen's Powerful Return to Rock

Ghosts, Guitars, and the E Street Shuffle

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Letter to You’ is the album we need right now

Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’

Letter To You: Documentary Early Review

	Count
One Minute You're Here	0
Letter To You	94
Burnin' Train	7
Janey Needs A Shooter	1
Last Man Standing	114
The Power Of Prayer	4
House Of A Thousand Guitars	4
Rainmaker	0
If I Was The Priest	14
Ghosts	103
Song For Orphans	6
I'll See You In My Dreams	147