We need to talk about America

From The London Sunday Times

Dan Cairns

September 30, 2007

Bruce Springsteen has made his best – and most direct – album for 25 years. Our correspondent hears how on home turf

When he was a young boy, Bruce Springsteen, as if in anticipation of the rock’n’roll hours he would later keep, liked to stay up late. It wasn’t until years later, when his wife read the riot act to a snoozing Boss as he lay in bed at 11 one morning, that he adjusted his clock. The lecture clearly worked, because here he is, on stage at the Convention Hall, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at 8.30am, ripping through songs from his new album, Magic. To his left, as he has done for the best part of 40 years, stands Steve Van Zandt, who, despite the early hour, has found time to select a dependably eccentric outfit – matching bandanna, blouson and trousers in a vivid shade of lilac. The Jersey Shore’s answer to Widow Twankey, Van Zandt teases and cajoles the other members of the E Street Band in the between-song breaks. Springsteen, though, is focused on rehearsing the set he will shortly take out on the road, on a tour that will travel the world – the latest chapter in a love affair between the man and his zealous fans that began in the early 1970s.

Right now, this affair is being consummated up close and personal: barring a handful of technicians and road crew, it’s just me and the band. So unsettling is the reality of sitting opposite the great man later that morning in his dressing room, I don’t really listen to what he’s saying for the first 10 minutes of the interview. In a white T-shirt and a leather bomber jacket, he’s the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town come to life. I hurl platitudes in his direction and apologise if he’s distrustful of such gushing. “Gush on,” he jokes, letting fly his customary sandpapered cackle. “I’m not suspicious of people who gush too much.” The hall is part of an ornate 1920s edifice, one of a series of landmarks (many now demolished) that formed the architecture of Springsteen’s teenage years, when he moved from nearby Freehold to play the bars and chase the girls of his adopted town, and watch shows by the likes of the Stones, the Kinks and Janis Joplin. “We start all our tours in this building,” the 58-year-old says. “I guess I’ve been coming here since I was 16 or 17. I saw the Who here, on their first American tour, when they wrecked their instruments, and it was shocking.” He laughs wryly at this, and, in an instant, you are reminded of the sheer length of his career, the trends he has seen come and go, the role that rock has played during that period in, first, rebellion and, latterly and increasingly, hard commerce. He clings, he says, for dear life to continuity, aware how precious such a concept now seems.

“Not only is our band still together, but – and this is one of the things I’m proudest of – all my guys are alive. It’s not an accident. I’ve stood next to [Steve] since we were 16. I can’t think of another band where all of the original members are still living, and on stage together and enjoying it. We had all the ups and downs that other bands have had, but we really took care of one another. I think when I was young, I felt the tug of chaos in my house, so I wanted a stable life. I like that long chain of experience.”

For Springsteen, and for his fans, that chain has gone through periods of both strength and weakness. It was years into his recording career before the singer began to be perceived as a political songwriter. When that shift occurred, with the global success of 1984’s Born in the USA album, and Ronald Reagan’s opportunistic kidnapping of the title track, the experience so shook Springsteen that he has shied away from explicit statements ever since. (A rare exception was his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.) For the most part, he has let his songs do the talking. Even now, with his most political album in years about to hit the racks, Springsteen avoids full-on explication of Magic’s songs, and edges warily towards the subject.

But he has form here. Throughout his career, he has sought to evade the mantles his disciples have attempted to place on him. He followed the bright, soaring pop-rock of Born to Run with the haunted soul-searching of Darkness on the Edge of Town. After scoring his first radio hit, with Hungry Heart, and significant album sales for The River, he retreated to a farmhouse with a four-track tape deck and made the minimalist, sombre masterpiece Nebraska. Born in the USA ushered in a period when his early fans found themselves jockeying for space in vast arenas with, as they saw it, yuppies and rednecks; when Springsteen rushed into marriage with a model, and subsequently documented the union’s demise on 1987’s downbeat Tunnel of Love. When he later broke up the E Street band, quitting New Jersey for the Hollywood Hills with his second wife, the singer Patti Scialfa, and releasing two critically panned albums (Human Touch and Lucky Town) on the same day, all seemed lost. Thus were new mantles prepared – he had sold out, he was finished – as fans cleaved to the early records for solace and reassurance.

“The pop world is a symbolic world,” he says, “and there’s only one problem with that: I’m not a symbol, I’m real. So you sort of break through and confine yourself simultaneously. The trick for the musician is to be an escape artist. And you have to protect your talent, what is of value to you, because those are your life rafts. Whatever the vicissitudes of the music business, of fans blowing hot, cold, indifferent, it all comes down to that same thing.”

He feels, he says, freer than he ever has before, liberated from labels, from the constraints of packaging and image. “My take on the whole thing is, by the time you’re my age, the race is over; these are the victory laps. I make any kind of music I want to make, you know? There are no rules – they’re not waiting for my record at Top 40 radio next week. I’m not worried about whether I’m going to be competing with 50 Cent. All that pressure is off. So I don’t really feel hemmed in by any previous image people might have of me, or any current one. You have such a list of ‘selves’ behind you, and everybody has their favourite or unfavourite. That’s what they were there for. They were built for a certain moment in time: somebody likes that one, doesn’t like the other one.” He cackles again. “Then you build another one – you paint yourself out of that corner and you move on to the next corner.”

Lurking unspoken is the obvious parallel – with politics and its dark, demotic arts of spin, polish and seduction. Yet Springsteen’s admission that, on Magic, he consciously used the language of classic pop implies an acceptance of this. He isn’t, he argues, communicating if nobody’s listening. But it took a long time for Springsteen, and, again, his fans, to once more feel comfortable with this power.

His overwhelmingly liberal fan base recoiled at Born in the USA, and it wasn’t until 2002’s devastating post 9/11 album, The Rising, that Springsteen seemed to reconnect with them. At the same time, conversely, he struck a chord with the more fairweather fans he had perhaps deliberately been alienating since the suffocating fame of the mid1980s. Back then, British followers, some already suspicious of Springsteen’s adherence to a common-man mythologising, had their worst fears confirmed. And American liberals’ deep distrust of mass communication and manipulation was mirrored in their responses to that new, 1984 incarnation/ corruption of their beloved Boss.

Arguably, Springsteen was as alarmed by it as his fans were. And it pointed up the potential for conflict between the singer’s raison d’être– to communicate, to begin a conversation – and the more rabble-rousing aspects of the means (marathon shows in huge venues; lyrics whose polemic and passion were suffocated by sloganeering choruses) by which he was attempting to stay true to it.

His new album provides some answers as to how he resolved this. One was, as he admits, to use the power of pop in a way he has not attempted since Born to Run. Another was his rolling his sleeves up and engaging with the struggle to tell stories, in as universal a verbal and musical language as he could devise, without sacrificing subtlety or nuance. If Magic is his greatest album since The River and Nebraska, it’s because he succeeds so triumphantly in those tasks. He wrote the Born to Run album in the shadow of the Vietnam war. Magic is, whether he likes it or not, Springsteen’s response to the current one being fought and lost in Iraq.

“I’ve always felt like I had a base and apocalyptic heart,” he laughs, “so, to protect myself from that, I’m always looking for structure and ‘now’, for narrative and story line. Those are the things that keep me sort of tethered and alive.” He implies that he didn’t have to search hard for the narrative that courses through Magic. “There are a lot of different ways I could address what had happened here over the past six years, and I realised, well, I don’t want to beat people over the head with it, first of all. Everybody’s lived through it — and, damn, that’s enough. And I’m not out there trying to replicate pop forms. I love using those sounds, but use them to what purpose, that’s the key.” It’s a furious album, I say, but surprisingly light. “Those are angry songs,” he replies, “but the lightness is intentional. It’s crucial. Because otherwise I’m on a soap-box, banging people over the head – with what? Anti-Bush messages? You have to make it personal. I love the seductive textures of pop music because they’re so beautiful and they bring you in.”

On Magic, he went back to first Bruce principles, to occupying his characters, to narrative. The “thread of realism” he sees running through the album, which culminates in the breathtaking stillness of the Iraq-vet story on Devil’s Arcade, is interrupted just once, by the upbeat 1960s pop of Girls in Their Summer Clothes. Yet that song contains possibly the most quintessentially Springsteen, lyric on an album crowded with heart-stopping images. “Things been a little tight,” says the narrator, “but I know they’re gonna turn my way.”

“I think people listening to that,” Springsteen says, “know who that guy is. I was interested in having a song where you get this classic image of a late summer, light on, in a small American town, and it’s perfect in a way that only occurs in pop songs – when the air is just right, where the sun’s sitting a certain way. And I subvert that at the end of the record with Long Walk Home.”

The latter ends with (and it’s worth quoting in full): “My father said, ‘Son, we’re lucky in this town /It’s a beautiful place to be born / It just wraps its arms around you / Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone / You know the flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.” You can almost see Springsteen’s lip curling in contempt when you hear this. On the title track, he sings: “Trust none of what you hear /And less of what you see.”

You wonder, at first, about the album title: terse, prosaic, unforthcoming. “We live in a time,” says the name above that title, “where what was true was able to be portrayed as a lie, and what was a lie has been successfully portrayed as true, and has pulled an entire country down this tragic road.”

Rehearsal and interview over, I wander in hazy late-summer sunshine along the boardwalk, the Atlantic perfectly still beside it, Madam Marie’s booth to my right, among other run-to-seed signposts to the singer’s past, many of them namechecked in his songs, either struggling through hard times now or awaiting the wrecking ball. This is the area where Springsteen grew up, fell in love with music, found his feet. And where, nearby, as a five-year-old – already a loner – he’d stay up till three in the morning, unnoticed by his parents, and sleep till mid-afternoon.

Sitting up by yourself in the small hours, you probably get used to your own company. But you might also dream of a huge, universal, unceasing conversation, to banish the gnawing solitude. And of kick-starting that conversation with a song. Well, Bruce Springsteen is talking again. “I want a million different voices speaking in tongues,” he sings on his single, Radio Nowhere. Let’s talk.

— Magic is released tomorrow on Columbia