After his delightful singer-songwriter sabbatical with last year’s ‘Western Stars’, the boss has returned with the E-Street Band and produced his best album in 30 years. ‘Letter To You’ really delivers!
It’s full of stadium-ready anthems and harkens back to those glory days when The E-Street Band roamed and conquered the world. Yet, at its heart lies a deeply personal rumination on loss, friendship, community and belonging, and the sheer power of music to engage and unite.
The “You” of the title could be his fans who have followed him over the past 50 years with delight. It could be to fallen colleagues and comrades Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici, and most recently George Theiss of his formative band The Castilles. It could be a letter to himself as he contemplates those losses and enters his eighth decade on the earth.
Most likely it’s an amalgam of all three.
The album is bookended with two songs that contemplate loss, bereavement, survivor guilt – the sparse ‘One Minute You’re Here’, and the rockier ‘I’ll see you in my Dreams’:
I’ll see you in my dreams. When all our summers have come to an end. I’ll see you in my dreams. We’ll meet and live and laugh again. I’ll see you in my dreams, yeah, up around the bend. For death is not the end, and I’ll see you in my dreams.
Is the chilly cover scene depicting the artist contemplating the winter of his life or simply a reflection on the harsh realities of life in a pandemic?
The past number of years have seen Springsteen consider his past, and perhaps the legacy that he will leave, through his autobiography, stage play “Springsteen on Broadway”, and the film of ‘Western Stars’. Here, he cleverly brings symmetry to the work by including three older songs, the oldest actually played at his audition for John Hammond at Columbia Records, ‘If I Was The Priest’.
Alongside ‘Janey Needs A Shooter’ and ‘Song For Orphans’, these older songs are a remembrance of things and glories past, reminiscent of his debut, ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ with a stream of imagination, larger than life characters, and high word count. Here they are dusted down and given a fresh new coat of E-Street paint, restored and elevated in the Springsteen pantheon of glorious anthems.
‘Ghosts’ continues the theme of fallen colleagues but in a more celebratory mode:
I’m alive. I can feel the blood shiver in my bones. I’m alive and I’m out here on my own. I’m alive and I’m coming home. Your old Fender Twin from Johnny’s Music downtown, count the band in then kick into overdrive. By the end of the set, we leave no one alive.
The redemptive soul of Rock’n’Roll indeed.
A recurring theme of Springsteen’s work is community, be that the love of a family, strength in a band, or faith in a country, and those sentiments are laced throughout this work. ‘House Of A Thousand Guitars’ is a prime example.
Bruce carries this theme to a national stage, and he takes aim at the present calamitous incumbent of the White House, “the criminal clown has stolen the throne”, in ‘Rainmaker’. A big fan of film noir, the song is based on the 1956 Burt Lancaster feature, in which a shiftless conman tries to sell fake salvation to a drought-stricken town. The allegory is obvious. In an America desperate to believe in better times, they will buy the dream no matter the real cost to the community.
Recorded live over just five days, there is a vibrancy, punch, and electricity to the music. A collaborative process up to a point, “The Benevolent Monarchy”, as the process has been called by Springsteen consigliere, Steven Van Zandt, has produced a highly literate album of quality, which sits easily beside his best works.
While themes of loss are explored, ultimately this is life-affirming material. There’s joy in the music and while Bruce is looking back on his past and remembering friends gone, he’s looking to new adventures in the future.
In these strange days of pandemic, where loss and the need to support each other is all around us, ‘Letter To You’ will hit people with resonance. In the absence of it being played live, play it loud!