New Springsteen album summons ghosts past, future
NEW YORK: The Boss got the band back together for his 20th studio album out Friday, a work that sees the ever-reflective Bruce Springsteen converse with his past selves while meditating on his own mortality.
Springsteen's album ‘Letter to You' fits neatly into his canon – a return to the layered guitars, dramatic percussion and glockenspiel that swelled into the signature sound he coined with his E Street Band, the group he's performed with since 1972.
After years without inspiration to write new material for the band that includes his wife Patti Scialfa and close friend Steven Van Zandt – a guitarist also well-known for his role as Silvio in ‘The Sopranos' – Springsteen suddenly penned an album's worth of new lyrics for the ensemble around the spring of 2019.
“The E Street band is not a job -- it is a vocation. A calling,” New Jersey's son-turned-America's dad says in the documentary about the recording of his latest album, released Thursday on Apple TV.
“It is both one of the most important things in your life – and of course, it's only rock and roll.”
Last living member
‘Letter to You' comes a year after Springsteen released ‘Western Stars,' a solo work harkening back to the 1970s-era musical golden age of Laurel Canyon.
With his new album, one of rock's most ruminative stars returns to his familiar heartpounding rhythms – but lyrically turns inward.
He's built a decades-long international career weaving tales of characters from bleak American towns, but today Springsteen is singing of the friends he's lost and considering his own life's winter.
The artist's relationship to his former bandmate George Theiss of The Castiles – a group that took in a novice teenage Springsteen – served as particular inspiration.
Theiss died in 2018, leaving the now 71-year-old Springsteen as the last living band member.
“The last living member. I thought about it for a long time, and those meditations ended up being the songs I've written,” he emphasizes in the documentary.
The loss of one of his closest friends and E Street saxophonist Clarence Clemons in 2011 also weighed heavily on Springsteen, a heartbreaking event that came shortly after organist Danny Federici's death in 2008.
His nine new songs include elegiac titles like ‘One Minute You're Here,' ‘Last Man Standing,' ‘I'll See You in My Dreams' and ‘Ghosts.'
The album recorded in just five days also includes three renditions of previously unreleased tracks from the 1970s: ‘Janey Needs a Shooter,' ‘If I was the Priest' and ‘Song for Orphans.'
Twangy, harmonica-laden and an exercise in lyrical excess, Springsteen says the songs ‘were and remain a mystery to me. They were just the way I wrote back then, a lot of words.'
He recalls with a grin a call from legendary producer Clive Davis, who told him one Bob Dylan – whose own work isn't exactly known for its tight edits – said if Springsteen wasn't careful, ‘I was going to use up the entire English language.'