Bruce Springsteen
Letter To You
Columbia
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I’ve been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen over the past seven months. His music makes a deep promise: the world is a difficult place to be, but recognizing that hardship in others is some form of solace. That promise has touched me in a deep way during the pandemic.

Which makes the expectations for his latest album, Letter To You, written and produced before The Madness, impossibly high. When I go to my first post-pandemic Springsteen concert, will a Letter To You song follow “Spirit in the Night” and sustain the feeling that I’m deeply connected to every single person in that stadium? When you add the fact that this is the first E Street Band album since 2014’s High Hopes, it’s hard to overestimate how much I was looking forward to this album.

The best Bruce Springsteen songs can get you to believe in something. They engulf you in a way where you feel a love for Wendy and Terry and that abandoned motel on the edge of town. A few songs on Letter To You—the opening track, “Janey Needs A Shooter” and the run from “If I Was The Priest” through “Songs For Orphans”—get that job done. The album at large, though, does not quite reach the heights of Springsteen’s other longform spiritual journeys.

These standout tracks do two important things: first, they have the lyrical precision that got us to all fall in love with Springsteen in the first place. For example, “Janey Needs A Shooter” features a short verse about a cop who checks on Janey and turns on his lights when the narrator goes to visit her. This small story with a lot to say could have been lifted right out of Nebraska (1982), which makes sense, considering it was first finished in 1978.

There’s also “by the end of the set we leave no one alive,” a verse-closing zinger from “Ghosts” that one can easily picture an arena singing as loudly as they sing “I want to spit in the face of these Badlands.” Both of these kinds of lyrics—the hyper-specific story and the bold-idea-said-simply—are Springsteen signatures because they give us either something to feel part of or something that already feels like part of us.

On the rest of the record, the lyrics are either overblown (see most of “House Of A Thousand Guitars”) or too general to have any significant meaning (see most of the title track.) They don’t transport us to a particular place or evoke any particular feelings in us. (Granted, the album is mostly about aging, and I’m just barely out of the whippersnapper phase of my life, so maybe some of it is lost on me.)

The other thing that those key tracks do is instrumentally differentiate themselves from each other. The album’s opener, “One Minute You’re Here,” picks up where Western Stars (2019) had left off, using that album’s instrumentation to transition to the new subject matter of this record. By comparison, “If I Was The Priest,” another old track, has all of the wild energy of the E Street Band’s early days. These two energies, on the same album, can create a great sense of geography for the listener—if every song pulls its weight and differentiates suitably.

But in the middle of the record, particularly on “Last Man Standing,” “The Power of Prayer,” and “House Of A Thousand Guitars,” the distinctions between the tracks are fairly difficult to make. These three midtempo rockers are not all-that special in the first place, and when put next to each other, they put a serious damper on the album’s development.

The most interesting case of these three songs is the minor key and lyrically dark “House Of A Thousand Guitars,” which has a core that could conceivably separate it from the two tracks that came before. You can hear a hint of a song like “Devil’s Arcade”—a phenomenally intense track from Magic (2007) that uses sparse instrumentation to reach a rare level of sinister—but the strumming acoustic guitars and full-band vocals behind “House Of A Thousand Guitars” place it more in Working On A Dream (2008) territory.

It’s probably worth pointing out here that this album was recorded live in the studio with few, if any, overdubs. It’s a technique similar to the one that E Street used on Born In The U.S.A. (1984), an album that I pretty much never listen to because all of the songs run together for me. If you’re a Born In The U.S.A person, then maybe Letter To You is the album for you.

This is not an attempt to disparage the E Street Band in any way—I would never, ever say such a thing. The band’s playing on this record—in particular Max Weinberg and the always under-appreciated Gary W. Tallent—is as tight as ever, and maybe with a little bit more flair than their Ultra Professional reputation gives them credit for. It’s just possible that playing with the full band at all times foreclosed some instrumentation options.

The point is that this long dip in the middle of the record make it difficult to see Letter To You matching up to Springsteen’s other great works. Most of the early albums, as well as latter-day efforts like Magic, Western Stars, and The Rising (2002) build a sense of searching and finding, or some sense of narrative or sonic propulsion. With these doldrums in the center of Letter To You, it’s difficult to feel a great sense of purpose from one track to the next. That’s the journey that I go to Springsteen for, and it’s not completely there on this one.

Notable Tracks: “Ghosts” | “If I Was The Priest” | “Janey Needs A Shooter” | “One Minute You’re Here”

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