Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (55 page)

Your dad wasn’t all that proud of you as a young man?

Oh, he was later. When I came home with the Oscar and I put it on the kitchen table, and he just looked at it and said, “Bruce, I’ll never tell anybody what to do ever again.” It was like—that was his comment. Oh, that’s OK, you know?

[
Voiceover
] The music that emerged from his upbringing was a blue collar ballad set to rock ’n’ roll. Elvis meets Dylan, uniquely Springsteen
.

Much of the new music is a protest, some of it blunt, as in the song that asks, “Who will be the last to die for a mistake?” But most of it is subtle, like the story of a man who returns to his all-American small town but doesn’t recognize it anymore
.

[
Voiceover
] “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”

What’s on your mind? What are you writing about?

I would say that what I do is try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality. That’s how my music is laid out. It’s like we reached a point where we’re so intent on protecting ourselves that we’re willing to destroy the best parts of ourselves to do so.

What do you mean?

Well, I think that we’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d see in the United States. When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping, they don’t think of voter suppression, they don’t think of no habeas corpus, no right to a lawyer to—you know? Those are things that are anti-American.

You know, I think this record is going to be seen as anti-war. And you know there are people watching this interview who are going to say to themselves, “Bruce Springsteen is no patriot.”

Well, that’s the—that’s just the language of the day, you know? The modus operandi for anybody who doesn’t like somebody, you know, criticizing where we’ve been or where we’re going, you know. It’s unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are—that are damaging to someplace that you love so dearly and that’s given
me so much, and that I believe in. I still feel and see it as a beacon of hope and possibility.

[
Voiceover
] Springsteen sees himself following a long American tradition that reaches back through Vietnam and on to the Great Depression, from Dylan to Guthrie
.

There’s a part of the singer going way back in American history that is, of course, the canary in the coal mine. When it gets dark, you’re supposed to be singing. It’s dark right now. The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out.

The Guardian
, January 18, 2009

Springsteen discusses the songs of
Working on a Dream
and the passing of his dear friend and E Street bandmate Danny Federici: “He’s the first guy we ever lost. The thing I’ve been proudest about for a long time was that, unlike many other bands, our band members, they lived. They lived, and that was something that was a group effort; it was something that we did together, the surviving part.”

It’s a cold winter’s day, and I’m driving through snowy fields on my way to meet Bruce Springsteen. Towards the end of the 18th century, a Scottish émigré came to this part of northern New Jersey in search of a new world. He bought land, built a house for his family and settled down to the life of a farmer. The ducks and chickens are still here, but the current owner lives a very different life.

Bruce Springsteen and I struck up a friendship 10 years ago when I came to this same farm to make a film for the BBC. It’s a warm, familiar place, the wood and slate of the kitchen giving way to a small recording studio and a front room decorated with photographs of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Band; the room, in fact, where Springsteen
made 2006’s
The Seeger Sessions
album, the musicians setting up around the sofas and on the stairs. In the parlour some of the photographs for
Devils & Dust
were taken in 2005 and just out the back is the swimming pool from which he emerged, dripping, in the dead of night for the video of “A Night with the Jersey Devil,” a spectral blues number based on a sample of Gene Vincent’s 1958 single “Baby Blue” and given away as a web-based Hallowe’en surprise last year.

I’ve been back regularly, sometimes to revisit old ground, sometimes to talk about new projects, but always to drink beer, swap musical discoveries and speculate on life’s great mysteries, like how exactly Elvis got his hair to do that quiff thing. Today I’m here as Springsteen prepares to release his 16th studio album,
Working on a Dream
, a collection of intimate songs about long-term relationships, meditations on the effects of time that come wrapped in lush, layered arrangements rooted in the 1960s of the Beach Boys, the Turtles and the Byrds.

Springsteen has seldom shied away from big themes—think back to 1975 and the way a worried post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America responded to
Born to Run
’s romantic vision of escape, or how the smalltown dramas of 1984’s
Born in the U.S.A
. found resonance as the Reagan era deepened the divide between have and have not. In recent years that has continued to be the case; he famously began to make 2002’s
The Rising
in the wake of 9/11 after a passing stranger wound down his car window and told the singer: “We need you now.”
Magic
, released two years ago, was in large part a railing against the Bush era, and in November last year, Barack Obama came to see him play live and confessed to his wife that he was only running for president because he couldn’t be Bruce Springsteen. He has often referred to his work as a long conversation with his audience, and it’s the ability to keep that exchange going—and it is most definitely a two-way thing—that has kept him relevant, timely and firmly in place alongside Dylan, Presley and Johnny Cash on the Mount Rushmore of American popular music.

With that in mind, plus the fact that he plays at the Super Bowl—that most American of events—on 1 February, the week after its release, it’s something of a surprise that
Working on a Dream
isn’t a state of the nation address, but something more personal, and a departure from his usual sound. Springsteen himself recognises this when he says: “You’ll hear pieces of it in all my other records, but if you have all my other records, you don’t have this—it takes it to some different place.”

The Springsteen who greets me with a warm hug is in typical form, however, laughing wheezily as he recalls the time he saw the New York Dolls at Max’s Kansas City in 1972, stranded in Manhattan after missing his last bus home. He asks me what I’m listening to at the moment, and carefully notes down the names of Kate Rusby and Girls Aloud for further investigation. Svelte in a black shirt over a black skull and crossbones T-shirt, he’s never been the world’s most eager interviewee, but he goes about it with a good grace, refining and honing his answers as meticulously as one suspects he writes his songs. Which isn’t to say that he’s guarded or in any way circumspect, nor does he steer clear of politics. In fact, the next couple of hours reveal a man prepared to open up about his life and work to a quite remarkable degree.

Working on a Dream
starts with “Outlaw Pete,” which is a very American story: a fable about a character who can’t escape his past
.

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad. It will come and it will devour you, it will remove you from the present. It will steal your future and this happens every day.

We’ve lived through a nightmare like that in the past eight years here. We had a historically blind administration who didn’t take consideration of the past; thousands and thousands of people died, lives were ruined and terrible, terrible things occurred because is there was no sense of history, no sense that the past is living and real.

So the song is about this happening to this character. He moves ahead. He tries to make the right moves. He awakes from a vision of his death, and realises: life is finite. Time is with me always. And I’m frightened. And he rides west where he settles down. But the past comes back in the form of this bounty hunter, whose mind is also quickened and burdened by the need to get his man. And these possessed creatures meet along the shores of this river where the bounty hunter of course is killed, and his last words are: “We can’t undo the things we’ve done.”

In other words, your past is your past. You carry it with you always. These are your sins. You carry them with you always. You better learn how to live with them, learn the story that they’re telling you. Because they’re whispering your future in your ear, and if you don’t listen, it will be contaminated by the toxicity of your past.

So do you think that kind of nightmare is going to change? That to an extent America has now taken account of that?

Yes, because, you know … the whole place practically has come crashing down [
laughs
]. Yes, there is severe accounting being taken of it right now. We’re going through something that we haven’t gone through in my life. Foreign policy, domestic policy—driven to its breaking point. Everything got broken.

And the philosophy that was at the base of the last administration has ruined many, many people’s lives. The deregulation, the idea of the unfettered, free market, the blind foreign policy. This was a very radical group of people who pushed things in a very radical direction, had great success at moving things in that direction, and we are suffering the consequences.

And are you optimistic?

It’s like this. You go out. You spend 35 years singing your songs about a place. And you see that place in things that people are doing in their communities from city to city on a local basis. But you don’t see it on a national level. Matter of fact, you see the opposite. You see the country drifting further from democratic values, drifting further from any fair sense of economic justice.

So you work under the assumption that you have some small thing that you can do about it. You proceed under the assumption that you can have some limited impact in the marketplace of ideas about the kind of place you live in, its values and the things that make it special to you. But you don’t see it. And then something happens that you didn’t think you might see in your lifetime, which is that that country actually shows its face one night, on election night.

A man whose political beliefs had generally been implied rather than stated, Springsteen finally broke cover with his public support for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. This time he came out for Obama early, declaring him “head and shoulders above the rest” in April 2008. In October he headlined a fundraiser alongside Billy Joel and John Legend, then hit the road to play four rallies; the last of these, in Cleveland, Ohio, on 2 November, saw him debuting the title track of
Working on a Dream
before bringing his entire family out on stage to stand alongside Obama’s wife and daughters
.

You said you had to be “peeled off the wall” after Kerry lost; what was this year like?

Well, it was an exhilaration I’ve never seen after an election. And it was rooted, I think, in a recognition that this country, that so often seems buried beneath missteps and mistakes, had suddenly shown its real face.

And what about Obama himself?

Obama’s a unique figure in history. The fundamental American-ness of his story and the fact that he represents for many, many people an image and a view of the country that felt like it was so long missing in action.

His election was an incredible moment for someone who seemed to carry, both seriously, and … not, not lightly but without great burden, enormous parts of American history with him. Enormous and painful parts.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future—that’s fabulous. And for the country to recognise that was a wonderful moment. This place we’ve been talking about, singing about … it’s alive. It isn’t dead. It exists.

That dynamic in my life has been a big part of staying alive. Staying present. Not fucking it up too bad at any given time. But it’s a day-to-day experience. There’s always tomorrow and, hopefully, you can use the word “hopefully” now. You can live here, and use the word “hopefully.” So that’s pretty nice.

With the election won, it would seem that other things are on Springsteen’s mind. Now approaching 60, his personal world is changing too. Much of that has been constant: he’s lived in this same part of Jersey for most of his life. His professional career has predominantly been spent with the same group of musicians, the E Street Band, and this in a world where the Beatles barely lasted a decade. He’s been with wife Patti Scialfa—herself a member of the band—for 20 years, and they have three teenage children
.

Now those children are growing up and leaving home, with eldest son Evan just starting college, and in the past 18 months he’s had to endure the deaths of two close friends: personal assistant Terry Magovern and then, in April, E Street keyboardist Danny Federici, who had played with Springsteen for more than 40 years. Little surprise, then, that when talking about the themes of this new album he quotes Martin Scorsese—“The artist’s job is
to make people care about your obsessions and see them and experience them as their own”—although some of those obsessions come from unlikely sources
.

There’s a song on this album—“Queen of the Supermarket”—about a guy who has a terrible crush on a check-out girl. Where on earth did that spring from?

They opened up this big, beautiful supermarket near where we lived. Patti and I would go down, and I remember walking through the aisles—I hadn’t been in one in a while—and I thought this place is spectacular. This place is … it’s a fantasy land! And then I started to get into it. I started looking around and hmmm—the subtext in here is so heavy! It’s like, “Do people really want to shop in this store or do they just want to screw on the floor?” [
Laughs
]