Bruce Springsteen. Photo: Rob DeMartin/Courtesy of the artist.
Springsteen on Broadway
‘I had not heard rock music put in quite this frame before. It is a delight.’
‘What canst thou say… what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’
If George Fox put this question to Bruce Springsteen, he would say ‘I took my fun very seriously, it is my service, it is my long and noisy prayer’. In this stage show he tells this story, interspersed with his music. It’s just him, his guitar and a piano. I watched the show on Netflix, knowing nothing about Bruce Springsteen other than that he is a US singer-songwriter. But soon I found him warming my heart and tingling my brain. His life and music is full of surprises. Out of the oft-grim reality of his early years – his father’s unreachability balanced by his ma’s love of life and dance – came a yearning for escape. From all this, amid wide skies and the road, he forges a powerful reverence. Then rock and roll arrived as some sort of magic spark, a light to his inner life. His life story became bigger, he says, through an elemental love that he experienced as ‘before, now and beyond’.
There are other parts of life or art that I have heard described like this: a picture that gives a sense of something otherworldly; or a landscape that makes wonder bubble up from deep inside; the call of the curlew; the love of another. Artists and writers like Antony Gormley or Robert MacFarlane have spoken of having ‘aliveness’ brought closer, or more completely, to us, but I had not heard rock music put in quite this frame before. It is a delight.
Approaching seventy, Bruce Springsteen describes a life affected by grief: the loss of a copper beech tree (his childhood companion), of friends killed in Vietnam, and the poignant last-minute outreach from his father. Each of these, he says, makes him conscious of something that hangs around in the fabric of ‘our place, our people and our blood’, and doesn’t dissipate quickly. He calls it ‘soul’. The picture he gives of taking his ninety-three-year-old mum to dance at a local bar (because she’s not the sort of woman who wants flowers or a Mother’s Day card) lingers – lingers like the art that Antony Gormley uses to dismantle our prejudices against our cousins the Neanderthals. The imprint of the light that arrives, and is expressed, has staying power.
Bruce Springsteen says he hopes his music accompanies others on their journeys. That it might serve as a reminder to the USA of what, at best, it can be. ‘Come on up for the rising’ is his call to hope, in among the longing and emptiness and blessedness of life. A song for our time.
Springsteen on Broadway is also out on Columbia Records.
