NowStreaming: Bruce Springstten Letter to You

NOW STREAMING: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - LETTER TO YOU JASON SAVIO

Letter to You, Bruce Springsteen’s newest release with the E Street Band since 2014’s High Hopes, captures the aging rocker being perhaps more introspective than ever before. Throughout the record Springsteen, 71, ponders the concept of faith and what it leads to. He touches on faith rewarded, faith misplaced, and the places and individuals desperate people put their faith in when there’s nowhere else to turn. But, it’s clear by the album’s end where Springsteen has his own faith cemented, and it’s sure to be an everlasting gift for his listeners.

The opening “One Minute You’re Here” begins a theme that runs throughout Letter To You about the passing of time and those who have come before us. “One Minute You’re Here” tells of someone living in the past and unable to move forward, they feel hopeless and lacking any positive reinforcement. After seeing a “Big black train comin’/Down the track” at the start of the song, and “Stars vanish in a sky/As black as stone” in its final verse, the narrator gives up by laying their body down and repeating over and over “One minute you’re here/Next minute you’re gone.”

This grief twists and turns throughout Letter To You, depending largely on the faith of the character who is dealing with it that Springsteen channels in each song. While the narrator in “If I Was The Priest” is clearly bitter as he says “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,” the person whose point of view we’re seeing through in “The Power of Prayer” is optimistic--perhaps foolishly--as he takes solace in the small miracles of everyday life that help get him through, whether it’s seeing that special someone waiting for him or hearing a certain song play at just the right time.

And it’s that power of music that Springsteen argues is the saving grace--the ultimate wellspring of faith--for the lost and weary. Springsteen’s study of faith and the passage of time coalesce in the musician’s own affinity for his craft; if Letter To You is a letter to anything or anyone, it’s a love letter to the connecting power of music and all those who have experienced it.

That connecting power of music—that communal experience--transcends the living in “Ghosts,” a powerful number in which Springsteen reflects on his own past, those he’s lost and those who paved the way, as sings, “I shoulder your Les Paul and finger that fretboard/I make my vows to those who’ve come before/I turn up the volume, let my spirits be my guide/Meet you brother and sister on the other side.” It’s not all melancholy for Springsteen, though; he recalls the good times and adrenaline he felt as a young musician and still to this day, shouting defiantly, “I’m alive!” in the chorus. Springsteen wants us to know that when someone is gone, their spirit lives on through the music they played and the music they listened to. For musicians who have dedicated their lives to the craft, that’s their faith and their dedication to it being rewarded. It’s a connecting fabric that is passed down from generation to generation. Springsteen is no doubt contemplating his own mortality in Letter To You and how he’ll live on through his own music after he’s gone.

“I’ll See You in My Dreams” ends the album on a positive note, albeit tinged with sadness. Springsteen describes a friend who has passed, their guitar and favorite records all left behind. But Springsteen’s faith isn’t shaken, because, he sings, “I’ll see you in my dreams/Up around the riverbend/For death is not the end.”

For more, visit: Brucespringsteen.net.

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