Bruce Springsteen

Greetings From Asbury Park: The Revival of a City on the Shore

Asbury Park postcard, sometime between 1930-1945. When I was a teenager, in the late 1990s, Asbury Park, New Jersey had fallen on hard times. The kinetic energy of the small shore city—Ferris...

Good Books and Great Music for Christmas Gifting

Here are four recently-published books and four new classical music albums that I have greatly enjoyed this past year... Books I've read several excellent...

“Brothers Under the Bridge”

Editor's Note: Bruce Springsteen wrote the song "Brothers Under the Bridge" in 1995. It tells the story of a group of homeless Vietnam veterans who set up a camp in the San Gabriel mountains near Los Angeles. "This is the story about one of them who has...

“A Long and Noisy Prayer”: Bruce Springsteen Tells His Life Story

Though his fans will undoubtedly enjoy this engrossing autobiography, it deserves a broader audience because of the beauty of Mr. Springsteen's writing, his penetrating observations about human nature, and his well-crafted history of an interesting and important life... "We remain in the air, the empty space,...

“The Wall”

Editor's Note: Bruce Springsteen composed "The Wall" in honor of Walter Cichon, a fellow guitarist and friend from his home town of Freehold, New Jersey, who was killed in the Vietnam War. Cigarettes and a bottle of beer this poem that I wrote for you This black stone and...

“I Work To Be an Ancestor”

The story of one's life has no end. It is simply told in your own blood until it is passed along to be told in the blood of those you love, who inherit it. As it’s told, it is altered, as all stories are in the telling. It...

My Hometown, My Church

"When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town’s eastern edge. I don’t like coffee...

Breaking with The Boss: Why This Conservative is Spurning Springsteen

I bought my wife tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert for Christmas.  This may sound like the stereotypical man-gift—a present a husband bestows on his long-suffering spouse because he wants it for himself, like a riding lawn mower—but...

A World of Tragedy and Grace

The spiritual life is going to be a life of mystery. Why would you not be humble in the face of that mystery? Why would you assume that the answers can be handed down to you, A to...

Ten Great Songs About America by Bruce Springsteen

Novelist Walker Percy was a fan of Bruce Springsteen, calling him "my favorite American philosopher." Percy even wrote a letter to Mr. Springsteen, seeking information about his interest in Flannery O'Connor and his spiritual journey as...

Books for Christmas: Bruce Springsteen Recommends

The great Southern novelist Walker Percy called singer-writer Bruce Springsteen his "favorite American philosopher." Raised in a blue-collar household in central New Jersey, Mr. Springsteen was not exposed to literature by his parents and attended a junior college only briefly;...

Bruce Springsteen at the Berlin Wall

In 1988, the Cold War seemed to be far from over. Though Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union three years earlier and had signed a major arms reduction treaty with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the...

The “Antigone” of Bruce Springsteen: Highway Patrolman

Viggo Mortensen as Franky In Sophocles' great play, Antigone, the eponymous heroine defies Creon, the ruler of Thebes, by burying her brother, Polyneices, who fought against Creon in the city's recent...

Bruce Springsteen: American Gadfly

"I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you." —Socrates, quoted by Plato, Apology "My work has always...