NB: Reviews posted on LiberationNow are not intended to be timely or aesthetically focused.  Although some reviews may be timely, works of art and cultural production come to us at different places and times and speak to us in those moments outside of chronology or official release dates.   I offer this review and all others from a space of personal interaction and engagement with the book, movie, or piece of music under review as a practice of the philology of liberation. 

As a kid who grew up on the Pennsylvania side of the river looking at the Jersey mountains on the other side, it is hard to sum up what the music of Bruce Springsteen means to me.  I knew nothing of the Jersey Shore, which Springsteen animates so iconically for his listeners, until I was in my late teens.  In fact, I found it all confusing since there is a town in the middle of Pennsylvania called Jersey Shore that I knew of; it took me a while sort through the ambiguity there.  Although I knew nothing of carnival lights and boardwalks, I had a solid feeling that Springsteen was speaking to my experiences. 

Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. was released just as I was coming to consciousness of pop music and the political world I inhabited.  I bought the record as well as the 45 of “Born in the U.S.A.”  I fell asleep listening to the album.  I would retreat to my room alone to listen repeatedly to the 45.  That song is not about me, but it is about my father, who served in the Army in the ‘60s and my uncle, who served two tours of duty with the Marines in Vietnam so my father wouldn’t have to.  It was almost as if it is written from the perspective of my father, who worked in a factory, about my uncle, who fought at Khe Sahn.  I felt I understood them both better hearing that song, and recognizing their experiences in it I knew at that young age the song was less of an anthem and more of a visceral shout of rage.  I knew something was amiss in America, and it didn’t arise simply from present circumstances; there was a history to it that was not easy to shake.  Springsteen sang with equal rage though less anthemically about it in “My Hometown.”  That song would bleed out of my father’s radio in the pre-dawn winter morning as we drove into town where his factory stood across the tracks from my school.  It was like a soundtrack to a movie I was watching outside my car window.  I’d watch my father walk through those factory gates, as my sister and I sat in my father’s car feeling the cold creep in the windows and dreading the coming school day.  Some people think Springsteen didn’t sing protest songs, but if you grew up in a (white?) working class family in the northeast you recognized every Springsteen song as a protest against anyone who said you didn’t exist or your life didn’t matter.  That your problems weren’t real.  I had friends who didn’t like Bruce Springsteen’s music; they had grown up in the suburbs and had parents who were college professors.  I write this knowing de gustibus non disputandum (there’s no arguing about tastes) and that people in the suburbs who are college professors appreciate Springsteen’s music, buy his albums, and attend his concerts.  But in my trailer park, it wasn’t about appreciation, and it certainly wasn’t about attending his concerts.

So when I listen to Springsteen’s Letter to You, or any of his music, it comes with a past and with an emotion that wants to break out of my chest.   Letter to You is a collaboration with The E Street Band, a return of sorts for Springsteen.  I found Letter to You when Autumn was becoming Winter in a year beset by a pandemic, racial unrest, and an election in peril.  The album itself does not speak directly to these things, although my reception of it does.  I can’t help feeling a sense of loss and nostalgia in the lyrics or hear an echo of other artists, particularly Bob Dylan, in the music. 

It all begins quietly with “One Minute You’re Here.”  Springsteen’s raspy vocals recall a haunting absence that comes and goes, the way thoughts come and go, the way people come in and out of our memory.  It all ends a little more positively, though no less melancholically, with “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” a song in which Springsteen observes “death is not the end.”  In between these reflections there are several tracks that especially stand out. 

In “Letter to You,” there’s a desire to sum up the wisdom one gains in life.  In many ways, this would have been a very fitting opening track to the album, as it could serve as the introduction to the “letter” that follows; although the track is second on the album, one still gets a sense of this, as the song is less about what the letter contains and more about how it came to be written – “In my letter to you, I took all my fears and doubts / In my letter to you all the hard things I found out.”  That Springsteen chose to put this track second raises the question of why “One Minute You’re Here” came first.  I don’t have an answer to that question yet.  Perhaps the person’s absence necessitates the letter.

There seems to be a doublet with “Last Man Standing” and “The Power of Prayer.”  These songs echo off one another and with a slight change in melody and rhythm could form one single track.  “Last Man Standing” begins with an image many of us recognize: “Faded pictures in an old scrapbook / Faded pictures that somebody took / When you were hard and young and proud / Backed against the wall, running raw and loud.”  We recognize this image from our own youth, either now past or perhaps still burning in us.  We all have this photo, or have seen our friends’.  Still the song evokes a world less easily recognized, filled with American Legion and union halls, Knights of Columbus gatherings and so on.  These places still exist but they are not the cultural markers they once were.  They are some of the losses Springsteen sang about in “My Hometown” and “Born in the U.S.A.”  They are images that help convey what is gone.  “Last Man Standing” ends “with just the music ringing in your ears.”  “The Power of Prayer” begins with the summer sun, a theme that runs throughout Springsteen’s music; it closes with the same end of the night reflection as “Last Man Standing,” but the scene is one of salvation rather than loss.  It’s last call and the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” plays, a song within a song.  There is grace in these lost spaces and loves – death does not have the last word.

In the album’s most political song, “Rainmaker,” Springsteen captures much of the fear and grievances of White America in the Trump years.  Indeed, Trump is the Rainmaker, the one who “Say’s white’s black and black’s white / Say’s night’s day and day’s night.”  Over the decades, Springsteen has sung about the hardships of many of the working class Whites who have become Trump supporters.  Those hardships are real – opioid addiction, lack of sufficient employment and healthcare – but as Springsteen observes here, their solution is not to be found in a rainmaker “crawlin’ ‘cross the dry fields like a dark shroud.”  Most of Trump’s supporters “don’t care or understand / What it really takes for the sky to / open up the land.”  It will take a lot more love and it will take more understanding than White grievance can offer.

The song that follows, “If I Was the Priest,” though enigmatic, is one of the more captivating on the album.  It seems to be a Western allegory on music dressed up as a reflection on religion.  The chorus is a contrary to fact condition, “If Jesus was a sheriff and I was the priest . . .”  The ‘then’ part of the condition never comes, so we’re left to wonder what would happen on two counts: first the silent ‘then’ clause – what would happen if Jesus was a sheriff? – and second the reality – but he’s not a sheriff and I’m not a priest.  It is unclear what holds true.  There’s a stanza that evokes Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, that pays homage and demands independence: “Well things ain’t been the same in heaven / since big bad Bobby came to town / He’s been known to down eleven, then ask / for another round / Me, I’ve got scabs on my knees from kneeling way too long / It’s about time I played the man and took / a stand where I belong / Forget about the old friends and the old times / There’s just too many new boys tryin’ to work the same line.”  Taking a stand and playing the man is the paradigmatic act for Springsteen.

An echo of Dylan can also be heard in “Song for Orphans,” both in its lyrics, which are abstract and impressionistic like some of Dylan’s best lyrics from the mid-sixties, and its music and rhythm, which hints at Dylan’s “My Back Pages.”  Similar echoes can be heard on “Burning Train,” which evokes Dylan’s “Series of Dreams.”  Whether or not these echoes of Dylan are intentional or not is of little consequence.  Like all great artists, Springsteen speaks both to a community and from a community, that we should hear voices from that community is more to be expected than shocking.  “Song for Orphans” has much more to it than shadows of Dylan.  He even recalls his own lyrics, such as “the aurora will shine your way;” Springsteen’s use of the Latinate aurora as a synonym for dawn is highly poetic; its rarity in pop songs, working class ones at that, can’t help but make it an all the more striking reminder, even for casual listeners, of his line from “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” – “the aurora is risin’ behind us.”  Springsteen also plays with the idea of all of us being orphans – “Well sons, they search for fathers / But their fathers are all gone” – sons who have fathers are not orphans, but they can feel like it sometimes.  There’s a bit of a twist on the Prodigal Son here, more like the Prodigal Father.  This is to say nothing of Springsteen’s own metaphorical search for his father, a search that haunts many of his albums. 

Letter to You is solid and demonstrative proof that even at this point in his career Springsteen is still making relevant music.