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Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’ - Rolling Stone

Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’ - Rolling Stone

Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’ - Rolling Stone
Oct 15, 2020 2 mins, 45 secs

Recorded in just a few days with the E Street Band, this is one of the most personal statements of Springsteen’s career.

With the E Street Band backing him, Bruce Springsteen attempts to make sense of the past on his new album, 'Letter to You.'.

Now on his 20th album, Letter to You, and at age 71, Springsteen seems to be making sense of all of his brilliant disguises for himself.

When Springsteen sings about glory days, this time, they’re his own glory days.

It’s an album with several levels of Bruce Springsteen working through different dreams from different times all in concert.

The album opens with a flurry of blatant signposts pointing backwards — a downbound train flattening a penny he left on the tracks, a “river running along the edge of town” — and the refrain “One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone.” The music is somber, built on acoustic guitars and synthy strings, and his voice sounds pensive as he confesses, “Baby, baby, baby, I’m so alone/Baby, baby, baby, I’m coming home,” possibly to the ghosts of Clarence Clemons, George Theiss of his Sixties band the Castiles, or maybe even himself.

A church organ runs through “House of a Thousand Guitars,” as he delivers a sermon about the healing power of rock & roll: “Here, the bitter and the bored wake in search of the lost chord that’ll band us together … in the house of a thousand guitars.” These are the same thousand guitars Springsteen summoned by name on Magic’s “Radio Nowhere,” the spirit of which goes back to the guitar he taught to talk on “Thunder Road.” And on Letter to You’s “The Power of Prayer,” a lilting, gentle rocker, he praises Ben E.

And then there’s “Ghosts,” perhaps the album’s strongest, hardest-rocking homily, on which he sings about hearing “the sound of your guitar comin’ in from the mystic far,” and builds the song up, detailing the rituals of performing until it explodes, and he and the E Street Band sing together, “by the end of the set we leave no one alive.” The song ties together the two main themes of Bruce Springsteen right now — reckoning with formative years and finding salvation in rock & roll — as he sings, “I turn up the volume, let the spirits be my guide,” amid shivering piano and glocks before exploding again.

Stylistically, they’re very different from the confessional nature of the rest of Letter to You, but since they’re still Springsteen songs and the E Street Band is playing them live, just as they did nearly 50 years ago, they never feel out of place.

“Song for Orphans” is a madcap, country-rock retelling of history’s losers — the Axis losing its grip, the Confederacy giving up — as he sings cleverly of sons in search of fathers “but their fathers are all gone.” Meanwhile, “If I Was the Priest” is a sacrilegious tale of devolution where the Virgin Mary gives out personally blessed balloons and Jesus wears a buckskin jacket, and “Janey Needs a Shooter,” with all its gospel organ and harmonica glory accompanies a bizarre story about predatory doctors, priests, and cops while Springsteen plays guardian angel to a vulnerable girl.

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