Bruce Springsteen’s new record is a tribute to rock ’n’ roll and an eulogy to old bandmates
Bruce Springsteen has revealed how being the last man standing after the death of a friend from his first teen band inspired his new album.
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The death of the last surviving member of Bruce Springsteen’s teen band was the catalyst for the musical love letters to rock’n’roll on his new album Letter To You.
In an interview from the studio cathedral on his New Jersey farm, The Boss said the songwriting floodgates for his 20th record opened after the death of his Castiles bandmate George Thiess in 2018.
“I had a close friend of mine from my very first band, who was very, very ill and had a few weeks to live … and I visited him down south where he lived. He was the last surviving member of my very first band besides myself. So when he passed away it left just me,” he said.
“And it was a very strange feeling sort of thinking back to your youth and all of those people who meant so much to me at that time all being gone.
“I wrote a song called Last Man Standing and once I wrote that, the dam broke and all of the other songs followed in about seven to 10 days.”
The Castiles formed in 1965 and lasted three years. Springsteen then formed Steel Mill which featured future E Street Band members Stevie Van Zandt and Danny Federici.
Letter To You reunited the E Street Band – his primary backing musicians since 1972 – for their first new studio record together since 2014’s High Hopes.
The five days of the recording sessions are documented in the new film, also called Letter To You, which is released on Apple TV to coincide with the album release on Friday.
Springsteen marvelled at the longevity of his rock’n’roll brotherhood which has sustained their relationship for almost five decades.
As The Boss said, there’s no other job on the planet you would spend 48 years working with the same people.
“Well, the unusual thing about rock bands, now imagine you are in high school and then imagine you’re 70 years old. Imagine that you have worked with the same people your entire life,” he said.
“There is no business in the world where that occurs with the exception of a rock-n-roll band. “It’s a privilege and an honour, and a miracle to have sustained all of those relationships over that long a period of time because it takes quite a bit of social skills and tolerance for the other guys’ foibles, points of view and their tolerance for mine. It’s quite challenging, but if you can do it, it’s quite rewarding.”
With a long row of his prized guitars lined up behind him in the studio as The Boss chatted, he cited the album’s track House Of A Thousand Guitars as the centrepiece of the record.
It also gives a clue to one of his favourite songwriting “tricks”.
“With any song, you need a good metaphor to start out with and an exciting title always helps – Thunder Road, Born To Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Rising … those are all good titles. Racing In The Street … a good title can get you going down the tracks pretty well, you know,” he said.
“Then I just try to follow it. I follow it like someone would follow a map. I find my way through the forest until I get to the inner heart of the subject that I’m writing about.”
While his bandmate’s death kickstarted the lion’s shares of the new material for a record which explores mortality, Springsteen also plucked unreleased tracks from the vaults of his youth – songs he had penned for his very first solo album in the early 1970s.
Singing songs he wrote as a young man now was a “treat” at 71.
“I cut one, Janey Needs A Shooter (for) Record Store Day … but once we were done with it, it sounded so good, I said ‘No, this is the beginning of an album’,” he said.
“It then made me think well, I might have another one or two that I’d be interested in hearing the band interpret, and so I found this If I Was A Priest … it was one of the first songs I auditioned with.
“Then there’s another song, called Song For Orphans, which was just kind of hanging around and a favourite of mine.
“So they just kind of happened by accident, but it was a lot of fun to sing in the mind of your 22-year-old self with your older voice. It was quite a treat.”
The documentary, made by his filmmaking collaborator Thom Zimny, is an intimate look into the machinations of a rock’n’roll band as they create and the warm mateship between the musicians.
Springsteen has issued a raft of films in recent years including the movie which captured his wildly successful Springsteen on Broadway one-man show and last year’s Western Stars concert film.
The Boss said he was open to letting Zimny’s cameras into the studio during the Letter To You sessions because he regrets not documenting the band in its earlier years.
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“If I had it to do over again, I would have filmed a lot more of the band when we were younger,” he said.
“I’m lucky that we have the film of the band that we have from when we were younger because I was very against it and very superstitious about it, about the magician looking too closely at his magic trick.
“So I knew if the band was going to get together — we did not have a document of the band recording together in the studio, and so I knew that that’s what I wanted.”
Letter To You, the record is released on Friday with the documentary available on Apple TV.
Originally published as Bruce Springsteen’s new record is a tribute to rock ’n’ roll and an eulogy to old bandmates