Bruce Springsteen delivered one of the most euphoric sets of music in 2023 at Wembley the majority of people in the stadium had ever seen. Then, to top things off, the E Street Band left the stage, and Springsteen closed the night with just his voice and an acoustic guitar, playing ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’.
On the original recording, it’s not just an acoustic performance, but he decided to play it like that for the live shows, which makes sense from a set perspective, given the hours that build up to it are massive. It’s a nice, calm way to end the evening, but looking at what the song is about, it also feels like a much more personal way to perform it too.
When Springsteen released the track, he dedicated it to music executive Michael Gudinski, with whom he had worked previously, and was good friends with; thus, when he passed away in March 2021, ‘The Boss’ wanted to commemorate him, which he did with this song that reflected on memories, and highlighted the fact that his close collaborator lives on in his mind.
While someone may not be with us anymore, we can see them in our dreams often, which is quite a beautiful thing, and when we allow our memories to overlap with dreams, they can have a real profound power on us. Of course, our dreams don’t just serve as memories, but they can also serve as inspiration, especially for musicians.
You never truly know where creativity is going to strike; it can sometimes take people an age to finalise an idea, while for other people, they may just stumble across creative ideas in the most unlikely of places, in this instance, dreams. Paul McCartney famously came up with ideas in his dreams, as the classic ‘Yesterday’ was penned by his sleeping subconscious, but these ideas didn’t come to Springsteen quite as quickly.
“Usually what happens is you dream a song you’re writing, and you think it’s fantastic. Then you wake up and it’s always not,” explained the musician, “You know, there’s something in the dream that feels great but when you wake up it’s like ‘Oh, this is… never mind’.”
While this was the case the majority of times, there was one instance when Springsteen dreamt up a song and managed to create something fun to listen to out of it. Where normally he would take the foundation of an idea, try to flesh it out, and the end product wouldn’t feel right, this was one instance where everything came together as planned, leading to the album it found itself on to be incredibly appropriately named.
“The only song I ever got out of a dream is a song [and] nobody’s really gunna know what it is, it’s a song called ‘Surprise Surprise’ from my Working on a Dream record,” he said, explaining, “For some reason I dreamt that song, woke up, wrote it, it came out pretty good, but that’s the only song I’ve ever grabbed out of a dream that ended up being anything.”
Lightning doesn’t always strike twice, as this is still the only track Springsteen has clawed from the maws of sleep; however, that fact alone makes the song even more of a surprise than the original title suggests.
