Golden Oldies
BRUCE IS STILL THE BOSS
This hour-long album, Bruce Springsteen’s 20th, starts with the Boss, 71, alone, with his guitar, growling intimations of his own mortality.
There’s a big, black train coming down the track. There’s a red river running along the edge of town. But the chorus to this gateway track that hooks us into this addictive album – for which Bruce got the E Street Band back together for only four days to record it in its entirety – runs, ‘One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone.’
Indeed. Vita brevis. We at The Oldie know all about that.
After this memento mori, we’re off, but the good news is we’re still back in the familiar Badlands of the Boss. The rollicking, thumping tracks are delivered in the same strong, cracked roar, and against the same pulsing wall of sound, as if the galvanic horror of 2020 had never happened.
In fact, it all feels reassuringly familiar because no fewer than three of the tracks pre-date Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ: If I Was the Priest, Janey Needs a Shooter and Song for Orphans. It is only now that he’s taken them out of retirement for our listening pleasure.
Not gonna lie – I loved this album. At LBC’S Leicester Square HQ, where I work, there’s a mission statement emblazoned on the wall in reception, saying, ‘Nobody will ever remember what you said. But they won’t forget how you made them feel.’ It’s the same with Bruce. This is a distillation of feeling into song. Feelings of loss, change and age, yet with no accompanying sense of decay.
He mourns the death of a bandmate, George Theiss, but you can feel his joy, too, at being still at the height of his powers at 71. He’s having fun this year – the year the music died – which means we do, too.
This is noisy, big-band ensemble playing so alive you feel you are breaking social-distancing guidelines just by listening, the spittle from Springsteen almost spraying your cheek. OK, as one reviewer noted, there’s your full house of Springsteen bingo: rivers, factories, guns, the Virgin Mary, priests, jails and small-town bars. But we would miss them if they were gone.
At the end of the album, which I played three times over, I felt happy. A new President. A new Bruce Springsteen album (and there’s even a Twitter emoji for the Boss). A new year. 2021 could already be worse.
As soon as the Boss is on the road again, I’ll be right there – for this album alone. The world might be on fire – so is he.