Bruce Springsteen – Letter To You
Columbia – 23 October 2020
Reunited with Stevie Van Zandt, Roy Bittan, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, Charlie Giordano, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa and Jake Clemons, this is the first all-new material from Bruce Springsteen and his legendary E Street Band since 2012; well, not quite all-new. Three of the songs here date back to the 1972 demos recorded as an audition for John Hammond prior to making Greetings From Asbury Park (from which only bassist Tallent remains of the original line-up), other than on ‘unofficial’ bootlegs, have never been previously available. Fans will, of course, be well-familiar with these and the strong Bob Dylan influences, the first up being the slow and steady near seven-minute, partly revised lyric, Janey Needs A Shooter, introduced by Giordano’s sweeping organ, a slow swagger in which, in a bizarre gynaecological image, our hero declares that he’s the man Janey needs, not the old doctor with cold hands “who tears apart her insides” and “probes with his fingers/But knows her heart only through his stethoscope” or the priest who “provides consolation and hears her confession” or the scary local cop who would make “her skin would turn pale as the siren he’d wail outside”.
Opening with slow chugging guitar, one second longer If I Was The Priest, the band weighing in after the first verse to build muscular anthemic feel, the Dylanesque lyrics (“Well sweet Virgin Mary runs the Holy Grail saloon/For a nickel she’ll give you whiskey and a personally blessed balloon”) unchanged with its mix of Westerns, drugs and Catholic imagery, again Springsteen casting himself in the protector role (“It’s about time I played the man and took a stand where I belong”).
The Dylan influence is even more evident on the third from the archives, Song For Orphans (originally Song To The Orphans), another slow march beat six-minute opus, which owes a clear debt to Chimes Of Freedom, as the apocalyptic lyrics speak of lost souls (“sons, they search for fathers/But their fathers are all gone/The lost souls search for saviors/But saviors don’t last long/Those nameless, questless renegade brats/Who live their lives in songs/They run the length of a candle/With a goodnight whisper then they’re gone”) as he sings “How many wasted have I seen signed “Hollywood or bust”/They’re left to ride them ever-ghostly Arizona gusts/Cheerleader tramps and kids with big amps/Sounding in the void/High society vamps, ex-heavyweight champs/Mistaking soot for soil”.
The first of the new songs come with the album’s opening musing on mortality, One Minute You’re Here, a simple acoustic number featuring some minimal piano notes, synth strings and muted drums, that kicks off with a classic line about some “Big black train comin’ down the track”. The title track follows, the band bursting into swaggering life behind Weiberg’s powerful drums, the cascading chords a familiar signature on an equally familiar lyrics about digging into your soul to find what’s true. The momentum continues with Burnin’ Train, a pumped-up rocking number with what sounds like pealing bells in the intro before Springsteen launches in with “I wanted you to heal me/But instead you set me on fire/We were out over the borders/I washed you in holy /water/We whispered our black prayers/And rose up in flames”, a sentiment that connects back to things like Born To Run, except now its fingers “‘cross the hollow of your stomach” as opposed to hands strapped “‘cross my engines”.
When you’ve finished fisting the air, the tempo falls back with the twangsome guitars of Last Man Standing which, featuring a scorching solo from Clemons, another reflection on mortality, thinking back to those early pre ‘E Street’ gigs and “Nights of Columbus and the Fireman’s Ball/Friday night at the Union Hall/The black-leather clubs all along Route 9”, looking over “Faded pictures in an old scrapbook” of those no longer around such as Danny Federici and Clarence, the title a reference to the fact he’s the sole surviving member of his first band, The Castiles.
Perhaps that’s why, Bittan’s piano providing the intro, it’s followed by Power of Prayer, a song of hope, constancy and love when “We’d lie by the lake till the evening comes/I run my fingers through your sun-streaked hair” and how in “a fixed game without any rules” it’s another’s love that lifts you up as “the bouncer shuts the door/“This Magic Moment” drifts across the floor/As Ben E King’s voice fills the air”.
It’s back to imagery of the performing musician for House Of A Thousand Guitars as “good souls from near and far” come together on a Saturday night “in search of the lost chord”, from “the stadiums to the small town bars” where the truth rings out loud and clear and “we’ll rise together till we fire the spark” in a land where “The criminal clown has stolen the throne”.
If that would seem a clear allusion to Trump, the following track, the quietly opening, quickly building storm of Rainmaker, apparently dates back to the Bush era but, on the eve of possibly America’s most important presidential election, the imagery of drought has a striking contemporary pertinence with its talk of “Parched crops dying ‘neath a dead sun/We’ve been praying but no good comes…We’ve been worried but now were scared”, of gatherings to pray for salvation, though it’s hard not to detect a note of political cynicism as he speaks of how, when times are bad, “people need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad” but “they don’t care or understand/What it really takes for the sky to open up the land.”
Launching with Weinberg’s tumbling drums, another lost friend and bandmate informs Ghosts, as he sings “I hear the sound of your guitar/Comin’ in from the mystic far/The stone and the gravel in your voice” in reference to the late George Theiss, the rhythm guitarist with The Castiles who, dating his sister, invited the young Springsteen to join the band and who co-wrote some of his first songs. It’s a suitably big guitars anthemic tribute. It ends then with another song of mortality and holding on to those that have passed (“I got your guitar/Here, by the bed/All your favorite records”) , but, unlike the opening track, just as Ghosts speaks of meeting on the other side, so with a guitar riff evocative of Born To Run, I’ll See You In My Dreams avows “When all our summers have come to an end…We’ll meet and live and laugh again…Up around the riverbend/For death is not the end”. This Letter To You comes with a first-class stamp.
Order Letter To You via Amazon
Photo credit: Danny Clinch