No artist can be expected to pump out the same quality of music forever. As much as Bob Dylan is revered as one of the finest writers in the game, there will always be a few moments with some fans tugging at their collars, wondering if he has lost the plot. But even when Bruce Springsteen was making some of the strangest music of his career, every note that ended up on his record seemed to sum up what it was like living in America.
Because from his voice to Clarence Clemons’s saxophone, The Boss’ music had everything an average American would be looking for in their music. Not all of his stories were necessarily happy, and some were steeped in tragedy, but the magic came in the sense of hope he brought to every listener. Escape might not seem possible, but when the kids in ‘Thunder Road’ look out over the horizon in New Jersey, it feels like something is waiting for them on the other side of town that no one realises.
But you wouldn’t be saying that about some of the stuff Springsteen made at the start of the 1990s. He had been through the wringer of going through a divorce on Tunnel of Love, but Human Touch and Lucky Town had the one thing that every Springsteen album needs: a struggle. Springsteen didn’t need to suffer for his art by any means, but the only way to get audiences invested in your music is for them to appreciate the struggle it took to be happy.
While he eventually found time to get more gritty on albums like The Ghost of Tom Joad, something had to change before he went into the studio for The Rising. America had been dealt a body blow when the terrorist attacks on 9/11 happened, and as someone who was born and bred in New Jersey, witnessing the Twin Towers fall made the air feel more than a little bit heavy for him.
He knew he needed to deliver the goods, but the two songs that kicked everything into motion didn’t even make the album, saying, “I was interested in a renewal of the band — and that meant I would need to write the kind of music that would stand alongside our best records. On the reunion tour with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ and said, ‘Well, that’s as good of a song as any of my other songs.’ Towards the end of the tour, I wrote ‘American Skin (41 Shots).’ It gave me the confidence that I could continue to write for the band.”
Although The Rising would feature a few more pressing songs like ‘Further On’ and ‘Into the Fire’, that doesn’t mean that they were of any lower quality than what Springsteen started with. The Rising was intended to be the kind of comforting album that most of the country needed to hear, and while it was easy to cry along to ‘You’re Missing’ or ‘My City of Ruins’, the tone of the album was about regrouping and coming together as a community to get over these horrible events that transpired.
When songs like ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ eventually did get released, they had a much greater resonance on Wrecking Ball. For an album made right as the country was going into a recession, hearing a song about how the nation can go through even the toughest of struggles and still make it out in one piece was another case of ‘The Boss’ knowing what people needed to hear.
Because Springsteen never saw himself as a songwriter who writes only for himself. He had his audience in mind every step of the way in his early days, and that wasn’t about to stop once he reached his twilight years. It was still a job, and he knew that the best way to serve his audience would be to give them the songs they needed rather than what they wanted.
