Bruce Springsteen Has Written a Beautiful Letter to You

Bruce Springsteen recently released his 20^th studio album, Letter To You.

Remarkably, he and the, E Street Band recorded the entire thing live, with no overdub vocals and just a few overdub instruments. In fact, it’s the first truly live, in-the-studio record of the band he’s ever made. And they did it in just four days. They then spent the fifth day listening to it.

I too have listened to it, several times, and felt compelled to write about it.

Like a lot of Springsteen’s work, you can feel the emotion in the lyrics and arrangements, however, it also feels deeply personal, picking up where his previous album Western Stars left off, and is perhaps more self-reflective than any of his other stuff. But don’t let its heavy themes lull you into thinking this album doesn’t rock. It’s an emphatic cornucopia of the band’s signature sound: drums, guitars, saxophone, piano keys, organ chords, and glockenspiel.

The record was born from a guitar he was gifted by a fan one night outside a Broadway theater where his show Springsteen on Broadway played. Furthermore, he wrote all the songs in less than 10 days. The 12-track opus is an album of reflection. The songs encompass themes of the passage of life, the loss of loved ones, and how one is affected by carrying on in the face of all that loss.

The impetus for most of the material was… death.

In July 2018, Bruce learned that, George Theiss, a bandmate in The Castiles (Springsteen’s first band) was in the final stages of terminal cancer. He chartered a plane to North Carolina to sit with George before his passing. Afterwards, Springsteen said he sat with the revelation that he was the last surviving member of that band: “You can’t think about it without thinking of your own mortality.” Additionally, the loss of two E Street bandmates (Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons), the passing of his father, and the decline of his mother due to Alzheimer’s all played a prominent role in the album’s genesis. As Springsteen points out, “I live with the dead every day at this point in my life. Whether it’s my father or Clarence or Danny, all those people sort of walk alongside you. Their spirit, their energy, their echo continues to resonate in the physical world.… A beautiful part of living is what we’re left by the dead.”

In this case, what they’ve left us is the beautiful masterpiece that is Letter To You.

Ironically, the album opens with the acoustic song, “One Minute You’re Here” which sounds like more of a carryover from Western Stars. But listening to its lyrics, it serves as the perfect preface for what’s to come and together with “I’ll See You In My Dreams” (which closes out the album) provides the perfect set of bookends to the album.

The signature track “Letter to You” and “Burnin’ Train” quickly launch into the up-tempo feel that the rest of the album provides.

Springsteen then hits us with a real treat in “Janey Needs A Shooter” which he wrote 50 years ago but never recorded. It’s one of three songs on the album he penned in his early 20s (“If I Was the Priest” and “Song for Orphans” being the others). “I wanted to revisit that sound with my current material,” says Springsteen. “I think the audience always wants two things — they want to feel at home, and they want to be surprised.”

The album’s fifth song, “Last Man Standing” was the first song Springsteen wrote for the album, an autobiographical journey from his days with The Castiles.

“The Power of Prayer” is a song about the spiritual experience of music. Bruce says in an interview “You can run away from your religion, but you can’t really run away from your faith. Those three-minute records were escapes, little meditations, and faith came in and gave those songs a spiritual dimension.”

“House of a Thousand Guitars” which comes in the middle of the album, is the perfect summation. “It’s about this entire spiritual world that I wanted to build for myself,” Bruce says, “and give to my audience and experience with my band. It’s like that gospel song ‘I’m Working on a Building.’ That’s the building we’ve been working on all these years. It also speaks somewhat to the spiritual life of the nation. It may be one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. It draws in everything I’ve been trying to do for the past 50 years.”

“Rainmaker” and “Ghosts” continue the album’s charge, before giving way to the aforementioned “I’ll See You in My Dreams” which reminds us that the people we love don’t ever really leave us.

There’s a lot of death interwoven throughout this album. But there’s also the feeling of joy in acceptance and belief in reconnection with our past and those lost. And in some ways the album conveys a sense of finality. As Springsteen says, “[this album] is to you! It’s a letter to you! Whoever is listening. And, yeah, it is a summing up of what I’ve tried to do over the course of my 45, 50 years now, working.”

I certainly hope this is not the band’s final album. They have never sounded better. It’s unfortunate that the current pandemic will prevent the band from touring anytime soon, because these songs are meant to be heard live. In the meantime, you can do the next best thing: turn it on, turn it up, and enjoy this wonderful letter that Bruce has written us.

Stand Strong!

Scott