A Year with Springsteen
Sometimes you write a piece because you need to organize some thoughts and figure things out. I wrote an essay I guess you could call it, I mean it tries, so there’s that, because I wanted to get that Bruce Springsteen obsession out of my system, you know? But what happened is, probably I’m just even more obsessed with him, his music. Whatever, I’m weird like that. I’m not alone.
But the piece is long, and doesn’t really go anywhere, which is why I’ve decided to post it here, warts and all, and I might eventually take it down, I might revise the hell out of it at some point, but here it is now. Some of it you’ll have heard from me before but I wanted it all in one place. So. Feel free to read, share, etc, and if you really like it, remember to hit that SUPPORT button at the bottom of the post and/or sidebar, hey? Molte grazie.
Also, the photos were taken in the Brewery District, Edmonton, and the sculpture is titled, Carbon Copy, by Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett.
A Year with Springsteen
By Shawna Lemay
I was eighteen in June of 1984 when Born in the U.S.A. arrived in the world. I had dreams of being a writer but they were so unrealistic I knew deep in the madness of my downbound soul they would never be cashed in.
When I left home that summer, I hit the highway from my small town to the not-so-big city of Edmonton in a cerulean blue 1969 Cougar with a 351 Cleveland. I’d drive down Jasper Avenue and some guy would pull beside and say, “Cleveland or Windsor?” I had no real idea what the difference was, but they were always impressed it was the Cleveland. That car was poetry. Elegant, classy lines. The signal lights blinked one-two-three. The horn was a thin silver half-moon around the bottom of the steering wheel. The interior white and spotless. That beauty, that suicide machine, is part of my chemical makeup and some days I yearn for it. The previous owner had installed a cassette deck, a pretty decadent addition, and in it was Born in the U.S.A. I also have the distinct memory of driving down Highway 16 listening to “Born to Run” from 1975, feeling it so hard. But even a distinct memory can be wrong.
“That car was poetry. Elegant, classy lines. The signal lights blinked one-two-three. The horn was a thin silver half-moon around the bottom of the steering wheel.”
That time between eighteen and twenty-three was vulnerable and embarrassing and I’ve kept it private for no reason other than it was weird and messy and full of a soughing longing and despair, and because I hadn’t really lived in my own skin at that point, so that it hurts to look at it even now. Even so I had an instinct for saving myself. It must have been when I began learning if you can fall in love with one thing, you can fall in love with another, and if you keep falling in love with things, eventually you can learn to love yourself.
I remember driving down that crepuscular highway in my ’69 Cougar, the road empty for miles coming and going, and putting my foot down hard. I remember the car rumbling and imagining it coming apart at the seams and feeling afraid but not easing off. This could be it, I thought, this is how you give up. And then I did ease off. I turned the car around. I drove home. The car held together; I held together. Maybe I was born to hold it together. Maybe that was fine.
In the 1980s I saw Bruce Springsteen out of the corner of my eye but for all sorts of reasons, I rejected his music. What I didn’t know is that it would be there all along, and that thirty years later it would revitalize me. As I delighted in Bruce at all ages and stages, I would come to love this earlier version of me, this young woman in the blue car. I had no idea how powerful that simple act of loving my young self would be and how much more at peace in my soul I would be because of it.
In the cringe-worthy 80s, moms packed lunches for their kids in liquor store bags. We did our jeans up with coat hangers, and if the jeans weren’t tight enough, we ripped seams and hand sewed them up tighter. We went to bush parties near the bog where a rare wild orchid was rumoured to grow and we drank to the point of blacking out. Someone would occasionally fall into the bonfire and be fished out. Back in Black played constantly. We drank at the tennis court near the high school, and sometimes at lunch we’d hop into one of the cool guys’ muscle cars, and go to McDonald’s which was new to our small town. I sometimes got invited because I helped a guy on the hockey team with his English homework, that cliché. We drank swamp juice – the skimmed off alcohol from multiple bottles. Rye, rum, vodka, all together. I had a terrible complexion and a string of bad haircuts, but I made an attempt to feather like the women in Charlie’s Angels though my cowlick resisted. I was skinny and I thought I was fat. We’d buy a sheet of brownies or a discounted birthday cake someone forgot to pick up from Safeway – Happy Birthday Roxy! – and eat the entire thing. Some did, but I never purged. One weekend I stayed at a friend’s acreage and we camped out in a tent in the yard. She borrowed her sister’s hash pipe and in the middle of the night we saw Jesus in the ditch beside the gravel road. I swear to God we met Jesus. I was in love with this one guy with a souped up shiny black muscle car but that was never going to happen. I was smart but my grades were abysmal and I didn’t know anyone who was going off to university or college even. I surely was not. I tried to smoke cigarettes so I could hang out with the leather jackets in the designated smoking area but my suppressed coughing monologues curtailed this. I was full of such a thick despair and dread that I would now find terrifying. This sums up the first half of the 80s for me.
Is that enough? It was pretty much like that. The second half of the 80s were no screaming hell either, as the saying went.
When I moved out, I worked jobs I had no feeling for, lived in a green shag carpeted bachelor apartment downtown where my rock-hard futon bed resided behind a glamourous band-aid coloured screen, and silverfish on the ceiling worked on their MTV choreography. I started going to nightclubs almost every night. My complexion would improve slightly. My hair started cooperating. Once in a while someone would say how cool they thought my mismatched eyes were, which perhaps balanced out the fact of my unfortunate teeth. And here’s Bruce. I met my first boyfriend in a bar when “Dancing in the Dark” played. The dance floor was raised and there were twinkle lights above, and off in the distance, if you rashly looked out into the night, you’d see planes or shooting stars. I would later learn how much the boyfriend loved Springsteen, and when any Springsteen song came on, he insisted we dance. I can still clearly picture the studied way this guy danced, just like Courtney Cox. The night we met I was wearing blue – capris, and a top that showed about half an inch of my midriff. My blonde hair was back-combed and my eyeliner and mascara were on point, which is to say thick and smudgy and I tried my best. The table was full of greyhounds and I would have had too many and only paid for the first one. I would have been a curious mix of shy, low self-esteem but tempered with a steely regard for myself, and knowing that I was smarter than mostly everyone I spoke to but also feeling supremely intellectually wanting, smothered, stymied. I lived in a dump and there was no script I could see writing for myself that would create the sparks I would need to get out of it. I had no faith in the magic of the night.
So that guy? Bad. When he started dealing drugs, I realized I needed to incrementally break-up with him which probably says all you need to know. We all know what incremental break-up means. I was no bird, ensnared, and I bloody exerted my will to leave. It took a bit but I was never going back. Things got better, also incrementally, as things do. But I also had to leave Bruce in the dust for the reckless and unexamined self-preservation of my mad and swaying soul.
There was a gym in a sketchy part of town. Mr. C’s was old school, free weights, basic machines, endless mirrors, loud music, a lot of sweat, and it was in the basement, cave-like. In rotation was Springsteen’s, “I’m on Fire,” “Dancing in the Dark.” There was no longer a Mr. C. but the name stuck perhaps because of all the logo t-shirts he left for sale. I fell into unrequited love at Mr. C’s Gym, hanging out gawping at the juice bar guys’ delts and traps with my fellow blonde gym ladies after a workout. That was a good thing. I needed unrequited.
Eventually, the juice bar boys left, even they went off to college, and the gym moved to a swankier non-subterranean location. I became the juice bar girl for a while, blending Joe Weider protein powder with frozen fruit and bananas and off-brand juice, and wiping sweat off the mirrors. I made new friends and we went to parties rather than nightclubs. Here, let me say that I’ve skipped over about three seedy apartments. I’ve skipped over a couple of boyfriends, genuinely sweet roommates, various terrible choices. I skipped over how I pawned my flute which I played poorly in high school band class to pay rent the month I’d spent too much money on booze, trading in my wings, and trying to get them back again. I ditched my unsavoury pals and ended up with a friend group of truly decent guys from Mr. C’s who hung out with me and my then roommate at skating ponds, and movie nights, and restaurants. That group of people probably saved my life and I never see them now but it was thanks to them and the friend of a friend scenario that I met my husband at a party at a sculptor’s house in the backyard under a full moon. The scene was so romantic I distrusted it completely. But then, if I had had faith in anything, it would have been that romance wasn’t meant for someone like me, someone who woke up at 3am and turned on the lights to mentally record the silverfish scurry around like inebriated line-dancers at last call. Magic wasn’t for weird unschooled girls with heterochromia, blending protein powder drinks and who wrote poetry about the controlled pain of lifting weights and the way ripped bodies looked broken in mirrors, hungry and pure and futile, and then tore the poetry into strips, placing it in the garbage with banana peels so that no one could ever dredge it up and find it legible. In the years to come, when Springsteen came on the car radio, I changed the channel.
To condense a lot of what happened after the gym years: I went to college, then university, married, had a daughter, published multiple books, and have lived happily ever after, in the usual messy and complicated sense of that phrase. In my extended family and friend group I have experienced or witnessed most of the statistically probable elements – recovering alcoholics, suicide, mental illness, divorce, estrangement, friend break-ups, ghosting, early deaths, late ones, some divisions that occur because of politics or boredom, other riffs occur because of childish but irrevocable behavior – once said things cannot be unsaid sort of stuff. Does anyone escape from these types of things? There were years of listening to Billy Bragg, feeling that everyone was better than me, wearing clothes from Le Chateau, pointy shoes a half size too small, taking a modelling course with a friend and enjoying a subsequent impromptu and short-lived gig as a photographer’s model, feeling always ugly and gawky and self-conscious about my bad teeth. It felt as though life, whatever that was, was coming at me from all directions. Later, I would go to university and all through I worked two and at one point three jobs, and I remember a professor called me lazy. Then, I imagined I would always feel as though I were on top of the scrapheap.
So here we are now, wondrously not on the scrapheap – currently I’m 53 years old. Maybe this is an aside and maybe this entire essay is an aside but I tend to get a bit obsessed with things. I’ve read The Stream of Life and A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, over and over. And I’m like that way with music. I trace this behavior back to when I drove a Volkswagen Fox – a couple of cars after the Mercury Cougar – a cassette became lodged in the player – Beggar’s Banquet by the Stones. It would have cost to have it extricated and I would later sell the Fox with the cassette still stuck in it. When I gave anyone a ride, they always wanted to hear Beggar’s Banquet. I still listen to “Factory Girl” and I’m right back there in that car.
In 2016, I pop Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker into the CD player of my current car – a silver Fiat 500 – and it stays there for about a year. I drive to work singing the title song. Leonard Cohen dies and then Trump gets into office. I’d never cried in my life over the death of a celebrity; I wept when Leonard Cohen died; I was also weeping for the state of the world. I love that album, but after a year, it might have been contributing to my melancholy.
“It’s a bit lonely when your family is either in the afterlife or New Jersey, but I have to be fine with that.”
We have a picture of Leonard Cohen on our fridge. “Is that your uncle?” I’ve been asked. “Spiritually, yes.” There’s also a picture of Clarice Lispector, and the Barry Schneier photo of Bruce at the piano in 1974. Family is where you find it, goes the saying. It’s a bit lonely when your family is either in the afterlife or New Jersey, but I have to be fine with that. I wonder if Clarice Lispector would like Bruce’s music, his broken spirits, his hot-rod angels. And I reread her with his lyrics in mind. She says, “For anything can happen and damage the most intimate life of a person. What will have been done to my soul next year? Will that soul have grown? and grown peacefully or through the pain of doubt?” I imagine Bruce would like Clarice, but I’ll never know.
The writer Anne Boyer once simply tweeted the line “Born to Recluse” and ever since, I’ve wanted to steal it. The phrase encapsulates my life after that brief stint of feeling born to run. Maybe it’s like that for most of us, especially those who wanted to become writers. I spent years trying to cultivate silence, reading about silence, and listening to medieval chants, trying to drown out the sound of the freeway that we happen to live ridiculously close to. In the summer when the sun doesn’t set until 11pm, you can hear the motorcycles racing. All day long it’s the semis rumbling, the commute in SUVs and Ford F150s. After twenty years of living in this same house, I can filter out the noise from the highway and find my inner silence. It’s taken that long.
And this is where I arrive back at Bruce in the present, because I’m no longer going for hour long walks with the dog. I start walking on the treadmill in our basement and I start working out with a dumbbells. After a bit, I make a trip to Canadian Tire and buy some heavier dumbbells. Lifting weights I listen to Springsteen’s Greatest Hits. It’s perfect. When I’m on the treadmill I start watching videos of Springsteen in concert, interviews, you name it, if Bruce is in it, I watch. I fall in love with young Bruce, and all the Bruces through the years. I fall in love with the E Street Band. I fall in love with Patti, and Clarence, Stevie, Nils, Max, Garry, Roy, Soozie. I’m sad when I belatedly find out about Danny Federici’s death. I’m fond of Charles Giordano. And then while I knew about Clarence, I hadn’t really known that his nephew Jake Clemons came on into the band. Of course I love Jake. I allow myself to become a fan, mooning and swooning over them all.
But I don’t really think about what I’m doing; I’m just going with what I love. I’m allowing it. And the more I listen and watch, the happier I become, and because I like the feeling, I am loath to analyze it. I just keep going. Normally, when I get this interested in a subject, it means I probably need to write a book about it. But I could never write a book about Springsteen because I’m a Springsteen fraud, especially in comparison to the legion of hardcore fans who follow his work and know about it in incredible detail. I’ve never experienced one of his legendary heart-stopping, earth-quaking shows and I know I’m too much of a recluse to handle one. His fan base is, understatement, dedicated. Because I am not writing a book, I experience his music through a different lens. My story of loving Bruce is a story about coming to love something with joy and openness and finding that it’s okay to just happily and adoringly swoon over someone in a world gone mad. My story of loving Bruce is about embracing all the darkness at the edge of town but remembering also to crank the tunes and dance to “Cadillac Ranch” in that strip of light that comes low into my house in January at latitude 53 at eleven in the morning like an annunciation.
It takes me forever to connect my new fitness regime with my Bruce fondness. Back in my 20s, I ditched the crumby boyfriend and I also ditched Bruce after which I worked my way through things by pumping iron. Lifting weights again, reclaiming the music, felt empowering as hell. But I hadn’t really left anything behind. As Springsteen says in his memoir, Born to Run: “No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride.” I might have thought I’d left certain memories behind, but sure enough, they were all there in my car. But if the car I was driving was that 1969 Mercury Cougar, then maybe I could find a way to be compassionate to that young woman with the back-combed hair and jeans she ripped herself.
I download albums from iTunes, one at a time. You Want It Darker comes out of the CD player, and I play Springsteen’s Greatest Hits which I’d had for some time and hadn’t even really registered. If I had it to do over again, I would have been methodical. I would have started at Asbury Park. Later, I would read one of Steven Van Zandt’s tweets about Springsteen’s Western Stars, where he says that the proper way to listen to it would be one song per day. To just absorb an album like that. And I wish I would have done this with Springsteen’s oeuvre. I should say here that I know more about silence than I do about music. I know little about the music scene, I can’t sing, and I play no instruments – you’ll remember what happened to my flute. I would say, though, that I have enthusiasm and that prolonged listening to Springsteen inspires even more enthusiasm.
I could have started anywhere, but I started with Tunnel of Love. In Brian Hiatt’s book Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs, he says that Springsteen “scoffed at the idea of “married music” just a couple years earlier, but now he was intent on making some.” I fell for Springsteen via his married music. Maybe my favourite songs aren’t his most known, but I love them with all my heart. I love “Tougher Than the Rest” from Tunnel of Love. I love “Better Days” and “If I should Fall Behind” and “Leap of Faith” from Lucky Town. I love “Happy” from Tracks. I mean, where has that song been all my life? Honestly, I was a bit mad at myself for ignoring Springsteen all those years in my going on thirty years marriage. These are songs to live with and to listen to when things are amazing and the sky is blue and when things are dull and seem precarious, and maybe especially when circumstances require us to be tougher than the rest, not just for each other but against the rest of the world, together. It’s not that my marriage hadn’t been just lovely before, it’s just that Bruce and Patti would have been good company.
Now, because I have read many books about Bruce, interviews with him, his memoir, a collection of philosophical essays, as well as watching (on Netflix) the Broadway show and Western Stars, and Blinded by the Light in the movie theatre, I know that I have nothing new to add to Springsteenalia. At a cocktail party, I could hold my own in a debate about whether Mary’s dress waves or sways (it sways), or whether or not Wendy in “Thunder Road” is Wendy from Peter Pan. I can talk about the way his songs can be simultaneously happy and sad, full of angst and full of joy, passionate and desperate, depressing and uplifting, melancholy and fiery. His songs live in the multiple registers, just like we all do every day. It’s been said that his work is more like prose than poetry but I think I could make a good case for the poetry in his songs.
There are feminist readings of Springsteen’s work, and it’s fine to say that it’s of its time. Isn’t that the goal in writing anything? To capture what it is to live in a precise moment in time. Would it be possible, even, to write many of the songs featuring a woman’s name (others have made the count to be so far 29 give or take) today? As Rebecca Traister has pointed out in an article on Vulture about his memoir, “… a lot of us have also long heard (or perhaps wanted to hear) in Bruce something more nuanced and appreciative in his portraits of the Candys, Marys, Janeys, and Rosies. We have loved that he doesn’t just sing about perfect beach babes, but about women who’ve been around a time or two, who put our makeup on and our hair up pretty, who push our baby carriages down the street and drink warm beer, and may not be beauties but are alright nonetheless.” In his music, she hears his respect for women. My personal favourite is Cynthia, who is “an inspiring sight” who doesn’t have to “smile or say hi” because it’s enough that she exists.
What I learned from steadily listening to Bruce Springsteen’s music for a year, and more now, is that the soul goes on in disrepair, that we go on repairing it, and this is what it is to be human. Throughout my adulthood, I have constantly posed the question to myself, what constitutes a good life? Springsteen says, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.” I have spent the last several years working on a novel about angels which in part investigates the idea put forth by Clarice Lispector in an essay on annunciation that, “each of us is responsible for the entire world.” Maybe my novel will end up being as informed by Bruce as it is by Clarice.
I didn’t turn to Springsteen’s music to learn anything, but rather to feel things I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. I didn’t specifically or intellectually know that music was for this – to filter your life through. Yet I learned that you can come back to these places where your spirit was hurt or broken or leaking out, and you can replace those missing or damaged parts with something more joyful. That there are more ways to heal than one, and that in looking back at moments in a life, and holding them for a bit, you can laugh a little at how you were, and who you are now. We get to re-read our own selves, the stories of our lives, with tenderness and forgiveness.
In a video of a 2013 show in London, before he plays “I’m Going Down,” Springsteen says to the audience, “help me out” and then gives that great laugh of his. Sometimes just saying, “help me out” can be a kindness. People want to feel useful, and when you ask them for help, it’s saying, I trust you to help me, I trust that you have my back. I believe that you can do this thing. Sure, I’m fine on my own maybe, but it would be better with a little help. Thanks to Bruce I learned to be kinder to myself; I learned to say help me out. I wrote the following out and taped it onto my computer monitor: “Speak to yourself with tenderness. Call yourself honey, baby, darling, as though you are the subject of a Springsteen song.” I learned that you’ve got to be okay with yourself. You’ve got to just reach a deep sort of acceptance of yourself because you are not going to be here forever. Your life is a rock and roll show, and baby that won’t last all night. In an interview on Esquire about figuring things out in his forties, Springsteen says, “You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love — which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love.” Maybe I’d had the same realizations myself at some point, but here they were from Bruce.
There is a fan video of Springsteen doing “Reason to Believe” in Paris, 2016, and midway through, he just sort of breathes into the microphone. It could be interpreted as a lot of things. The deep sighs from the underbelly of the universe. When you first listen to the song you might think that it’s designed to be uplifting, but as Brian Hiatt says in his book on the songs, it’s “the bleakest song Springsteen has ever written, almost dangerously so.” The song, says Hiatt, is “the artist mocking his own past certainties, wondering aloud if everyone is fooling themselves. The song is an existential cry for help…” It was on the 1982 album Nebraska but in 2016 his performance of it adds another layer to it. There he is breathing for the audience, breathing with. Breathing with. Or maybe it’s tonglen – a Buddhist practice used to awaken compassion – on the in-breath you take in the pain of another, and on the out-breath you send them love and relief. The song, sure, is bleak, but it’s also about resilience, about believing, even when life shows you, you’re a fool to do so. In a lot of Springsteen’s lyrics he’s able to be in two, and maybe more, places at once, which is the gift of his storytelling, his poetry. The fictional Author in Clarice Lispector’s book, A Breath of Life, has created the character Angela, with whom he speaks in tandem, but separately. Sometimes Angela hears the Author’s monologuing, and sometimes it’s more secret. They go back and forth, one breathing, then the other. The premise is that the fictional Author has created Angela, and he says, “I’ve discovered why I breathed life into Angela’s flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning. And it’s frustrating to have faith. I hate this creature who simply seems to believe.” And later, “I am looking for somebody whose life I can save. The only one who allows me to do that is Angela. And as I save her life, I save my own.” Of course, the author and Angela are parts of Clarice Lispector, the writer, and none of them are each other. They are all one and all separate. They go back and forth, each one in turn saving the others’ life, Lispector’s life, the readers’ lives. Mine.
I want to talk more here about how I have the worst memory but I know all the words to “Racing in the Street,” and when I drive to work sometimes I play it on repeat – three times at 6:56 minutes – because it calms my nerves and gets me in the correct headspace to talk to anyone who might walk into a public library – the homeless, the unemployed, the at-risk youths, the seniors, the recently incarcerated, the doctors and the lawyers, and the truckers and oil workers. I want to exuberantly reveal that both Nils Lofgren and Amy Aiello Lofgren followed me back on Twitter. I want to brag about the blurb I was asked to do for an anthology of writing about Springsteen, titled Shut Down Strangers and Hot Rod Angels, and how ridiculously excited I was to do it. It’s not that I thought Bruce would ever read my blurb, but that it meant I was aligned with people who loved his work as much as I do. I wish to tell you about all the sweet people in the Springsteen Facebook group I’m in where they coach each other to be inclusive and respectful. I want to talk about the way I love how Bruce lets people in, how he lives the contradiction of being the rich man in the poor man’s clothes in a way that reminds me of the lines from Hafiz: “Greatness / is always / built upon this foundation: / the ability to appear, speak, and act / as the most / common / man.” I want to say that when I began posting flower photographs on Instagram accompanied by Springsteen lyrics, so many Springsteen fans among my acquaintance came out of the woodwork and shared their Springsteen-love with me. I bonded with people in emails and DMs about favourite songs and the ones they love to sing. I want to talk about how watching the video of “Dream Baby Dream” in black and white by dvddubbingguy is a religious and healing experience that cracks me open inside and my response to it is both thank you and I love you, which can be translated into: Bruuuuuuuce!
At another point in my life, in someone else, I might have dismissed all these moments as lame fan behavior. Or maybe I would have found it all charming but slight, and I would have smiled when someone recounted these connections and thought, cute, or who cares?
I didn’t start listening to Bruce Springsteen and reading everything I could get my hands on about him because I wanted to learn any great truths; I wanted to sing in my car and dance to “Hungry Heart” between sets of bicep curls. I ended up in Springsteen school and didn’t even catch on until about halfway through that “three-minute record,” which is funny, because a lot of the things I learned I’d already worked through in some fashion in my study of poetry. But coming at these truths via Springsteen added a dimension and a layer to my understanding for which I’m grateful. The Irish poet, Paula Meehan says, “I think the whole river of poetry is a history of the dream life and the dreaming of the human species. I think we can solve things through dreaming, I think we can embed important memories, survival strategies, through dreaming. It's the place where everybody is a poet, in the dream.” She goes on to say, “Just as a poem can contain a complete mystery of the universe,” she says, it can also be a kind of salvation. “There are poems that tell stories but there are also poems that just give you a moment of vision or transcendence or colour even, or just an image that you can carry around with you. Two lines. Two lines can save a life, I believe it.”
Poems can save a life, I’ve come to believe, but they won’t change the world. Patrizia Cavalli says: “Someone told me /of course my poems / won't change the world. / I say yes/ of course / my poems / won't change the world.” Which is to say, of course they can change the world, or at least the world of the reader. We can work things out in a poem, we can work things out in dreams. When you write a poem, or a song, or a novel, or anything, I think it helps if you know what the stakes are: you’re able to save a life. In an interview in The Guardian Springsteen says, “And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel.”
“And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel.”
You’ve got to live this life with joy, I’ve learned. You’ve got to transform the ugly stuff into love. The more I fell in love with Springsteen, the more I re-fell in love with other writers. I was reinvigorated by the lines from Rumi: “Because I love this, I am never bored. / Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater, / in my ear and in my inner being.” When you love Springsteen, you are never bored!
What I have found in Springsteen’s songs is that he bears witness in a unique and absorbing way. His songs have been described as cinematic and he is known for his love of certain movies – Badlands, Thunder Road. There is no shortage of darkness in his lyrics, but without being stated, there is also light, a cinematic focus. His songs act like a camera, or a lens, a spotlight. The photographer Robert Adams said, “The job of the photographer in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope.” Adams talks about the poet William Carlos Williams, who “said that poets write for a single reason – to give splendour (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word for a photographer because it implies light – light of overwhelming intensity.” I find in Springsteen’s music not only intuition and hope, but splendour. I have found room to dream baby dream, and room to run.
In listening to Springsteen this past year, I am reminded that when you are creating something, the stakes are high; they are beautiful; a dream. I am reminded to write with joy, toward splendour, toward beauty, the light. I am reminded to write recklessly, under such a spell of wild and zestful joy, that it could infuse another soul with this juice welling up in me. I find it wonderful that the things you love are often magically in conversation with each other and that when you hear the convergences – even in unlikely places, say a mash-up of Lispector and Springsteen and Rumi – it means the universe is handing you a message. The message might be: you’ve got to take everything you’ve got, every last dream and every last bit of spirit and breath and madness in your soul and pour it into a useful vessel – and then share that potion. You’ve got to stay alive; you’ve got to be splendid, babies.
“ It didn’t so much change me as remind me about a lot of things that I knew in one way but needed to learn in another.”
The year I spent listening to Bruce Springsteen was a year of allowing myself to be absorbed by something without questioning why. It didn’t so much change me as remind me about a lot of things that I knew in one way but needed to learn in another. My torn soul became easier, the ride smoother, the car I was metaphorically driving became cooler. I asked myself the age-old question, what were you born for? Was I born to run? Born to hold it together? Born to recluse? It didn’t even have to be just one thing. But in the end the answer was right there. Born to love.
March 8, 2022
