Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You: a masterly ode to rock ’n’ roll
For his 20th album, Bruce Springsteen turned once again to the E Street Band for a special assignment.
In November last year Bruce Springsteen gathered the E Street Band at his home studio in Colts Neck, New Jersey. The US singer-songwriter had allocated just five days to record an album from scratch and, for the first time in his long career, none of his bandmates had heard the new tracks before entering the studio.
Instead, the musicians walked in fresh, and the change of pace ended up suiting all parties so well that Springsteen’s 20th album, Letter to You, was recorded in four days — a remarkably quick turnaround for an artist whose meticulousness and painstaking attention to detail have been a constant trait since 1973, despite regular encouragement from longtime guitarist Stevie Van Zandt and pianist Roy Bittan to try the process without recording demos in advance.
“The problem is, once I start the demo, I’m starting to make a record, and I get very attached to the sounds that I’ve made in the demo, so it makes it very difficult for the E Street Band,” says Springsteen. “This time, the two of them were very smart: they said, ‘Don’t make any demos’, so I just recorded the song to remember it to my iPhone, with an acoustic guitar. And then I came in, I picked up a guitar, I played through the song for the band, and then we went for it. It was definitely the best way to go.”
As for the fifth day they’d allocated for recording, which suddenly became unnecessary? Well, that was a fine opportunity to sit back at The Boss’s place, enjoy each other’s company, tell stories and proudly listen to playbacks that capture the esteemed rock ’n’ roll band at its potent, persuasive best.
Fittingly, the subject matter that Springsteen has drawn on for the 12-song set is the thing to which he has devoted much of his life, as he details in a press conference with Australian journalists conducted via Zoom this month, with the artist sitting in the same home studio where the songs came to life almost a year ago.
“It’s the first time that I chose the music itself as my subject,” he says. “It’s about rock ’n’ roll; it’s about being in a band over your lifetime. So it encompasses me reflecting on my first band (the Castiles) with the early members from 1965, and reflecting on the E Street Band that I’ve been in now for the past 45 years.
“But the subject is the music itself and the world that we’ve created with our fans.”
Although Letter to You opens with an almost-whispered acoustic ballad named One Minute You’re Here, much of the rest of the album is given over to the familiar and beloved stylistic tropes of the band’s heartland rock ’n’ roll: anthemic choruses, ringing open chords played on electric guitars, occasional injections of soulful saxophone lines from Jake Clemons, and a powerhouse rhythm section courtesy of drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Garry Tallent.
Before that handful of highly productive days last year, it was more than six years since the group was in the studio together to record High Hopes, a collection of covers, outtakes and reimagined versions of older songs, some of which the band tracked in Australia while touring here in early 2013.
Since then, Springsteen has occupied himself with several solo projects, most notably his 236-date run of Broadway shows at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York that ended in December 2018 and later was released as a Netflix concert film directed by Thom Zimny.
Then came his solo album Western Stars last year, accompanied by a film of the same name directed by Zimny, in which Springsteen played the album for fans in a barn on his property alongside a backing band and orchestra.
For the E Street Band, it was a matter of waiting on the bench until The Boss felt the time was right to return. As a new feature-length film documenting the recording of Letter to You shows, those few years apart have only strengthened their bonds.
“The E Street Band is a finely tuned instrument of great flexibility and power,” Springsteen says near the beginning of Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You. “They can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Our years of playing together have created a shorthand and an efficiency in the studio comparable to that of a finely tuned racing engine. We are a unit 45 years in the making, decades in the refining, and we bring that power to bear when we engage with you.”
Beautifully shot in black and white, this latest documentary by Zimny is an essential companion to not only this new set of songs but to understand Springsteen’s longevity as a performer and a pop cultural figure. At 71 the band leader looks lithe, tanned and match fit, and the performances captured in the film — all of which are the first-take vocals that appear on the album — show just how seriously he takes his art.
Yet for all the weight of an 80-minute documentary about what is essentially a bunch of colleagues putting in a few great shifts at their workplace, there are plenty of moments of camaraderie and funny asides, including this voiceover observation by Springsteen, which appears right after the self-serious quote above. “The E Street Band is not a job; it is a vocation, a calling,” he says. “It is both one of the most important things in your life and, of course, it’s only rock ’n’ roll.”
Given the unique lack of demo recordings to precede those four days in the studio, some of the best moments in Zimny’s new film are when the band members assemble around their leader and his acoustic guitar, listening carefully with notebooks in hand, then immediately breaking into discussions on how to improve the arrangement.
Van Zandt is in his element as musical director, even out-bossing The Boss on occasion, as Springsteen looks on, amused, having seen — and loved — it all before.
Hearing these songs for the first time while watching the musicians playing and recording together in the same room — amazingly, this is the first time they’ve done this since 1984’s Born in the USA — really emphasises the empathy, respect and trust that the players have for one another.
As well, there is pure pleasure in watching one of the great American rock bands simply going at it, enjoying each others’ musicianship while also trying to impress the hell out of men and women they’ve played beside for decades. Witnessing that fellowship and shared purpose is beautiful, moving and inspiring.
When great bands have been around for a long time, it can become easy to take their greatness for granted. If nothing else, this excellent film foregrounds the rare chemistry that powers these players, and that has allowed them to create so many songs that have become enmeshed in the cultural DNA. Together, they have soundtracked their own lives and millions more across the world.
Themes of ageing and mortality loom large across these songs, but the mood that Springsteen strikes in his writing is more often triumphant rather than morose. As he notes in Zimny’s film, he stared death in the eyes from a young age, as a result of the cultural norms he grew up with, where children of six or seven were expected to attend open-casket viewings at funerals, then try to make sense of what they’d seen.
The E Street Band has already lost two of its founding members: keyboardist Danny Federici died in 2008, while saxophonist Clarence Clemons followed him in 2011. At the end of the documentary, Springsteen’s narration — set to stunning overhead drone shots of the wintry landscape surrounding his property — reflects on the notion of ageing, and the knowledge that we all have only “so many star-filled nights, snow falls, brisk fall afternoons, rainy midsummer days” before the inevitable claims us, too.
“How you conduct yourself and do your work matters,” he says, and as these two intertwined projects show, Springsteen has chosen to conduct himself and do his work with a small group of trusted people who together form something much greater than the sum of their parts.
On the fifth day in the studio, after telling stories and listening to playbacks, Springsteen rose to his feet to address his bandmates.
“All I can say is that the greatest thrill of my life continues to be standing behind that microphone with you guys behind me,” he said.
“This is the best playing on record; I think it’s just gotten better. It blows my mind to have everybody playing together at the same time, in the same room — and to have it come out sounding like that, it’s just one of the deepest experiences of my life. I love all of you beyond words.” And then they raised a toast: to rock ’n’ roll, to friendship, to purpose, to themselves. To all they had created together so far, and all they might create together in future.
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Letter to You is released on Friday, October 23 via Sony Music, the same day that Thom Zimny’s film Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is released on Apple TV+.
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