Bruce Springsteen turns 71 today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve written about Bruce a bit over the years<\/a>, including my thesis that Springsteen, notwithstanding his lefty-populist politics, has written some of the best conservative music there is over the course of his fifty-odd year career<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After Western Stars<\/em> – his album and concert film from last year – I read an interview in which he seemed <\/em>to be saying the days of the eighteen-month tour of four hour rock and roll revivals were done, and that he was a different place. Ironically, he skipped the tour the year before <\/em>all communal fun got tanked by the Blue City Flu. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Bruce did actually plan a tour in support of Letter To You<\/em> – a very rock and roll album, recorded in five frenzied days with the E Street Band. Until, y’know, Covid: <\/p>\n\n\n\n There may be no bringing together the E Street Band right now, a group almost big enough to constitute a mass gathering in its own right. But Letter to You<\/em> sounds live enough to make you feel a little guilty listening to it, as if you\u2019re violating quarantine. That makes the album feel all the more precious, and the lack of a tour all the more painful. Letter to You<\/em> is the first time since Born in the U.S.A.<\/em> that Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded live in the studio to this extent, and possibly the rawest album they\u2019ve ever made, with close to zero overdubs. \u201cIt\u2019s the only album where it\u2019s the entire band playing at one time,\u201d says Springsteen, \u201cwith all the vocals and everything completely live.\u201d (A few of Springsteen\u2019s twangy guitar leads, played on a Gretsch, are among the only exceptions.)<\/p> \u201cIt was really like the old days,\u201d says drummer Max Weinberg. \u201cJust pure musical energy, with the hard-earned musical and professional wisdom of guys in their 70s, or close to 70.\u201d It also happens to bethe most classically, unabashedly E Street-sounding album since at least The River<\/em>. It\u2019s a late-period rebirth of sorts, and it started with thoughts of death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And the piece officially notes something I’d wondered about starting with Tunnel of Love<\/em>: originally, the band would hash out songs in the rehearsal space or studio, the old fashioned way, arranging the songs on the fly with the input of the entire band. But along about the time of Nebraska<\/em>, Bruce started recording everything as demos, himself, at home or later on in a home studio, basically giving the band faits accompli<\/em> that sounded…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …well, not like the E Steet Band anymore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And with Letter To You<\/em>been rol, that seems to have rolled way, way back:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Springsteen kept making demos even after he resumed recording with the E Street Band on The Rising<\/em> (which, somehow, is now 18 years old, a fact Springsteen finds \u201cmind-boggling,\u201d since \u201cthat\u2019s one of my new<\/em> albums!\u201d). But last year, he finally saw a reason to stop. \u201cWhen I demo, I start putting things on to see if it works,\u201d says Springsteen. \u201cAnd suddenly, I\u2019m locked into an arrangement. And then the band has to fit themselves into an arrangement. And suddenly, we don\u2019t have an E Street Band album. So I intentionally did not demo anything.\u201d Bypassing his studio, he captured the songs only on his iPhone, in quick solo-acoustic renditions, to make sure he remembered them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n