The Boss travels time in tribute to love
Post Obama, Springsteen delves into our past again for inspiration, writes Barry Egan
Bruce Springsteen. Photo: Vince Bucci, Getty Images
BOB Dylan -- who is in these parts next Tuesday and Wednesday for sold-out shows at the 02 Arena -- said a good few years ago that artists like Bruce Springsteen had missed something: "They weren't there to see the end of the traditional people."
"But I was," Dylan added, referring to the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Clarence Ashley.
Springsteen has been making up for it, however. In 1995, he was possibly showing Dylan he didn't have creative ownership on Woody Guthrie when he released The Ghost of Tom Joad. It is said that Springsteen was handed a biography on Guthrie in 1980; and that he had been stewing over it for 15 years, writing songs like 'Across the Border' and 'Galveston Bay'. The sequel to The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust, is an acoustic classic, full of rootsy reflections on the war in Iraq. Just as Dylan started to embrace old folk music on his early Nineties, records like Good As I've Been To You and World Gone Wrong, the Boss had long returned to the past, too. On his new album, Working On A Dream, Springsteen's first of the Obama era, he returns to a different part of the past.
This is more Spector than Steinbeck, as he appears to be reconnecting with a love of Sixties pop a la Roy Orbison and Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound. Surprise, Surprise owes a debt of gratitude to The Byrds' Turn, Turn, Turn; and there are echoes of Creedence Clearwater Revival in the title song. This Life could be partly inspired by The Four Seasons or The Beach Boys. Life Itself and What Love Can Do owe a debt of gratitude to The Byrds. Queen of the Supermarket has similarities with Manfred Mann's Pretty Flamingo. (From a different era, Tomorrow Never Knows leans in the direction, in my opinion, of John Hiatt's Memphis in the Meantime'
Is Springsteen trying to make a connection between the optimism of America during the Sixties and the beginning of Obama's reign? Or is the boss just trying to show us he is still relevant, just as in 1975 his 'Born To Run' classic reflected how post-Watergate America was responding the country's romantic vision of escape?
Lest we forget, there is a famous story about why he choose to make to make 2002's post-9/11 album The Rising. Someone shouted out of the window of their car at him on the street: "We need you now." In any event, it feels good to finally have a feelgood Bruce Springsteen album.
"Pop always brings with it the intimations of forever and immortality," he told The New York Times. "There was something so in tune with the universe in their math, and in the way that math was imbued with someone's hopes, dreams, love, despair, immortal feelings, feelings of death coming around the corner, and then you try to put it all in three minutes. It was very exciting for me, being in this place of my life, to go back to those forms which are filled with that sense of forever and put finiteness in it."
Apropos of which, on Kingdom of Days, 59-year-old Bruce sings, wistfully, beautifully: "I don't see the summer as it wanes, just the subtle change of light upon your face ... "
"It's a line about time and I'm old enough to worry about that a little bit," he told The Observer. "And, at certain moments, time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren't here any more. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older, those very fearsome markers ... in the presence of love -- they lose some of their power." He demonstrates his power at the RDS in Dublin on July 11 and 12.
