we learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school
The New Yorker has a fantastic profile of Bruce Springsteen this week. Generally speaking, if you can't tell from context who I mean when I say "Bruce" (i.e., Banner or Wayne), it is likely I mean Springsteen, because he is the first and foremost Bruce in my heart and has been since 1984.
There are some great quotes in this thing:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, "Wrecking Ball," is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls "the distance between the American reality and the American dream." The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
He also talks about his father and his depression and his thirty years in therapy, and the narcissism and obsessiveness that got him where he is, but which has its own costs. The losses of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. All the work that goes into each show. The disconnect of being a rich man in a poor man's shirt. It's a really good read. (I especially like the bit where he talks about writing a song about his life and Little Steven is like, "fuck that! You write about their lives! That's what's important! That's what you do!")
"You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody," Springsteen said. "You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It's all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That's what we do for one another."
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I broke 10k words on "Welcome to Wherever You Are" last night. Still no trembly comfort sex, and still only one barely there hug, but maybe they are getting closer? I don't even know anymore. Sigh. Why is writing so much easier when I'm lying in bed, half-asleep, than when I'm sitting at the keyboard trying to accomplish something?
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This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/486447.html.
people have commented there.
There are some great quotes in this thing:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, "Wrecking Ball," is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls "the distance between the American reality and the American dream." The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
He also talks about his father and his depression and his thirty years in therapy, and the narcissism and obsessiveness that got him where he is, but which has its own costs. The losses of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. All the work that goes into each show. The disconnect of being a rich man in a poor man's shirt. It's a really good read. (I especially like the bit where he talks about writing a song about his life and Little Steven is like, "fuck that! You write about their lives! That's what's important! That's what you do!")
"You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody," Springsteen said. "You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It's all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That's what we do for one another."
*
I broke 10k words on "Welcome to Wherever You Are" last night. Still no trembly comfort sex, and still only one barely there hug, but maybe they are getting closer? I don't even know anymore. Sigh. Why is writing so much easier when I'm lying in bed, half-asleep, than when I'm sitting at the keyboard trying to accomplish something?
*
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/486447.html.
people have commented there.