Back‘Letter to you’ by Bruce Springsteen: A memo from the boss
Bruce Springsteen’s 20th studio LP is an album tailored to longtime fans that explores aging, loss and the meaning found in music.
PremiumSince the release of his 2012 LP, “Wrecking Ball," Bruce Springsteen’s creative output has mostly focused on sorting through and reframing his past. His 2014 collection, “High Hopes," was filled with covers and older songs that were polished up and re-recorded. He issued an expanded version of 1980’s “The River" in late 2015 and later performed the album on tour. His terrific autobiography, “Born to Run," followed in 2016, and during the next two years he presented “Springsteen on Broadway," the show about his life and music based on his book. Mr. Springsteen’s record from last year, “Western Stars," a set of string-laden character sketches that evoked the orchestrated folk-pop of the early ’70s, was an exception to this retrospective trend, but he wrote most of it in 2010, before his extended season of reflection.
“Letter to You" (Columbia), Mr. Springsteen’s 20th studio LP, out Friday, puts a bow on this phase of his creative life. It’s in part a concept album about the ability of music to give meaning to existence—a favorite theme of his—and it’s also a meditation on time’s passing, how if you live long enough you get used to saying goodbye to the people around you.
For such themes it makes sense that Mr. Springsteen would reconvene the E Street Band, who haven’t joined him for a full studio album since 2009’s “Working on a Dream." He wrote most of the songs last year—though, intriguingly, three tunes date from the early ’70s—and all were recorded at Mr. Springsteen’s home studio in New Jersey over just a few days in November 2019. A film companion to the record by Thom Zimny, a frequent visual collaborator of Mr. Springsteen’s, documents the recording of the album in cozy black-and-white. It will be available Friday on Apple TV+. The result of these sessions is a comforting and often moving record tailored for Mr. Springsteen’s most loyal fans, reflecting an exchange between artist and audience that only long-term connection makes possible.
The sonic character of “Letter to You" is quintessentially E Street, with Roy Bittan’s piano and glockenspiel providing the sparkle atop sturdy guitar work from Mr. Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren; Jake Clemons, nephew of longtime bandmember Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, provides blasts of saxophone here and there.
Three consecutive tracks in the middle of the record directly address music as a force for transformation. “Last Man Standing" was written following the death of a friend of Mr. Springsteen’s, a bandmate from his high-school rock ’n’ roll outfit, the Castiles. With his friend’s passing, Mr. Springsteen realized he was the only surviving member of the five-person group and uses the song to reminisce about their gigs and marvel at the fact that he’s still making music all these years later. “The Power of Prayer" and “House of a Thousand Guitars" extend the backward-looking theme and connect to Mr. Springsteen’s earlier work—for example, “Bells ring out through churches and jails" in the latter echoes imagery from early classics “Backstreets" and “Jungleland." These melodies are so elemental they can sometimes bleed together, but when the tunes are less memorable the conviction in Mr. Springsteen’s delivery and the chiming arrangements carry the weight.
The reworking of previously unreleased songs is the most provocative choice here. “Janey Needs a Shooter," “If I Was the Priest" and “Song for Orphans" were written just a few years after the Castiles split, in some cases before Mr. Springsteen had a recording deal. Each stretches past six minutes, reflecting his impressionistic word-drunk era, when he seemed desperate to squeeze in every thought. But the down-the-middle arrangements on “Letter to You" are consistent enough to absorb the shaggy originals into the new record’s more disciplined aesthetic. The gesture of including such early work is meaningful for those who have been following his story for years, even if the execution smooths out its defining idiosyncrasies.
Hearing songs from Mr. Springsteen’s youth bumping up against new songs about his youth gives the album an alluring time-stretching flavor that seems designed to draw the faithful closer. During this late phase of his career, the individual listener’s relationship to his previous work provides the context. So what’s affecting to a devotee might seem cliché or even self-parodic to someone who approaches his music with skepticism.
The opening and closing tracks provide the perfect frame for the album, showing how death and loss are the flip-side of nostalgia, and they also illustrate just how fan-directed this record is. “One Minute You’re Here," a haunted acoustic number delivered by Mr. Springsteen alone, points out that life can end in an instant, so every moment must be cherished. The lines “Autumn carnival on the edge of town / We walk down the midway arm-in-arm" conjure the wistful Jersey Shore setting that has served as a backdrop for Mr. Springsteen’s work from the beginning.
The brilliant closer “I’ll See You in My Dreams," big-hearted and warmly optimistic, expresses earnest belief few artists other than Mr. Springsteen could pull off. It says that death is not the end, because memories remain, and it’s easy to draw lines between the song and the loss of E Street compatriots, namely Clemons and organist Danny Federici, who died in 2008. Mr. Springsteen, who is spry and healthy at 71 years old and probably has a lot of new music in front of him, has written a few dozen anthems that have dented the broader culture and will far outlive him. These more modest songs are likely to be remembered only by those whose relationship to Mr. Springsteen’s music feels more familial, which, given the record’s aims, seems just right.
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text
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