rampstyle #36

Out in The Street with Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen has always held a special place for us. We even titled one of our magazines “Hungry Hearts”. And if you look closely, The Boss makes several appearances in the current issue. For this story, we visited him at his Thrill Hill studio shortly before the release of seven previously unheard albums. The seventy-five-year-old musician talked to us about how Tracks II came about and when he made the decision to become famous.

Of course, the conversation turned to politics – but he also explained why loneliness is so typically American.

Text
Jon Pareles for the The New York Times
Photos
Daniel Arnold The New York Times/Redux/laif

“The past always weighs heavy on me,” Bruce Springsteen said on an April afternoon, sitting in the anteroom attached to Thrill Hill, his home studio in New Jersey, where he can make music at any time. “Our pasts have a lot to do with shaping who we are now and the things we’re pursuing. So that is a theme that constantly recurs to me, and I’m always rewriting it, trying to get it right.”

Springsteen is well aware of his longtime role as a symbol of America.

On Friday, Springsteen will unveil a huge, almost entirely unknown trove of songs from his past on Tracks II: The Lost Albums. They reveal musical paths – mostly pensive, occasionally rowdy – that he briefly explored but chose to set aside. Unlike his 1998 collection Tracks, a set of demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs dating back to the 1970s, Tracks II, with 83 songs, 74 of them previously unreleased in any form, is organized as seven distinct albums.

Springsteen grew up in the era of vinyl LPs, not playlists that can be shuffled. For him an album is “a cohesive group of songs, basically, that end up being greater than the sum of their parts,” he said. “They resonate off of one another, creating altered meanings and meanings in reflection with the other songs.”

A record, he added, “is exactly what it says it is. It is a record of who you are and where you were at that moment in your life. These were actual albums that were of a piece, of a moment, of a genre – that fell together, often while working on other albums.”

“Nobody can explain that moment when you breathe life into the characters in your music, in your songs.”

Bruce Springsteen

As he’s been preparing this extensive look back, the seventy-five-year-old musician, well aware of his longtime role as a symbol of America, has also been confronting the political present.

During his current tour of Britain and Europe, Springsteen has given recurring, forthright speeches onstage, and released them immediately online in a six-track EP. Introducing songs like “Land of Hope and Dreams”, about immigrant aspirations, and “My City of Ruins”, about urban neglect, Springsteen has been directly denouncing the Trump administration as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous”, and warning about “an unfit president and a rogue government”.

→ Read the entire interview in the new rampstyle #36 “Beyond the Sea ”!

rampstyle #36
Beyond the Sea

Out in the Street with Bruce Springsteen

rampstyle #36
Beyond the Sea

Beyond the sea lies the unknown. And that’s exactly where we’ve always been drawn. Adventure beckons. Our imagination kicks in. “Somewhere beyond the sea . . .” – those are the opening lines to a song that has long since become the cultural soundtrack of our yearning. This magazine is a perfect match. And the courage to set out. Dream big. Think wider. Go beyond.

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