Bruce Springsteen's "Chasin' Wild Horses" was released on his 2019 album "Western Stars," a set of songs told from the viewpoint of an older man, about remembrance, regret, and the search for redemption in the American West. The album marks a musical departure for Mr. Springsteen, as it features a classical chamber orchestral and a [...]
Bruce Springsteen's unrivaled stage presence comes across remarkably well in the film "Western Stars," as he performs his recent album in its entirety. But it is the brief, meditative, and confessional vignettes he uses to introduce each song that reveal just how much the entire album serves as his own version of St. Augustine's "Confessions." [...]
As Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen turns 70 years old, one finds it a daunting task to make an exhaustive list of his artistic accomplishments and the accolades he has received for them: Mr. Springsteen, who has been performing live for more than a half-century now, is the 15th highest-selling artist of all-time; his first album, [...]
Editor's Note: In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bruce Springsteen, who had watched the smoking devastation of lower Manhattan from a point across the river in New Jersey, and who had lost friends as the World Trade Center towers crumbled, was in Rumson, when a passing driver yelled at him: [...]
Early in the morning factory whistle blows Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light It's the working, the working, just the working life Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in [...]
The old men who narrate the songs of Bruce Springsteen's cinematic "Western Stars" are broken, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Seeking a land of sunshine, open roads, and new beginnings, they find that the fabled American West cannot provide salvation for the lost and lonely. But "Western Stars" will surely provide balm for the soul. Western Stars, [...]
When I was eight years old I had an experience that set a trajectory for my whole life. I was lying in bed, I had the radio on—this was the 1970s—and Bruce Springsteen comes on with his 70s anthem “Born to Run.” Something broke open in my soul. Something grabbed a hold of me and [...]
Editor’s Note: Bruce Springsteen released the song "Jesus Was An Only Son" on his 2005 album, Devils and Dust. Words and music follow below. Well Jesus was an only son As he walked up Calvary Hill His mother Mary walking beside him In the path where his blood spilled Jesus was an only son In [...]
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 wheels and carousels, breezy counters with young people selling waffle cones and hamburgers to beachgoers in the salty air—was largely gone. [...]
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 biographies (and one great autobiography) this past year. Foremost among the former is Jan Swafford’s magisterial Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, which could easily be termed the definitive biography of perhaps the [...]
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 grown daughter that he's never seen," Mr. Springsteen explains, [...]
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, in the dusty, roots and deep earth, in the [...]
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 these hard tears are all I [...]
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 continues to be told because along with [...]