Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
In May, Donald Trump took a break from attacking South Africa on X to lash out at Bruce Springsteen, calling him “highly overrated”, “dumb as a rock”, “a dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and “a pushy, obnoxious JERK”. He followed the tirade with a crude video showing himself, in a Make America Great Again cap, hitting a golf ball that hurtles off a fairway and knocks Springsteen down on stage.
Although younger artists such as Jason Isbell and Sam Fender — both influenced by Springsteen — continue to make compelling rock music, it’s been a long time since rock held the kind of cultural power it once had in the United States. But Springsteen’s vision of a generous, inclusive America, an America in which “the losers” are given deeply empathetic attention, still carries enough moral weight to threaten Trump’s narcissism — as fragile as it is massive.
The four great records Springsteen released between 1975 and 1982 — Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, and Nebraska — chart an arc from youthful passion and rebellion, a longing for escape, preferably driving into the night in a Mustang, to a gritty and often mournful reckoning with lives sinking into crisis.
This sequence comes to a head in the stripped-down sonic palette of Nebraska, an elegiac rendering of the underside of Reagan’s America. The record reaches deep into economic desperation, unemployment, violence, moral ambiguity and the quiet ruin of domestic life through intimate portraits of people pushed to the edge. It is a desolate, haunting work, its emotional tenor distilled into the eerie, elemental howl at the end of State Trooper.
There was strong work after the huge popular success of Born in the USA (1984) propelled seven singles into the Top Ten and turned Springsteen into a figure of national devotion. Tunnel of Love (1987) offered an emotionally complex portrait of a crumbling marriage; We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006) was a rambunctious return to the radical current in American folk music; Wrecking Ball (2012) was a blistering, politically charged reckoning with the social costs of the financial crisis; and Western Stars (2019) an often gorgeous and cinematic meditation on ageing and solitude, imbued with a quiet, hard-earned sense of grace.
The great album in Springsteen’s later work that takes its place with the canonical four is The Ghost of Tom Joad. It is also the record most starkly at odds with Trump’s idea of America, and the brutality he first unleashed through rhetoric and then through ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Released in 1995, its acoustic minimalism recalls the starkness of Nebraska, but it is a very different record — more polished, more spacious and directly political.
Nebraska marked a turn from the deindustrialising rust belt of the Northeast to the rural Midwest. Joad moves outward again, into the borderlands of California. It tells stories of people crossing deserts, sleeping under bridges, drifting through motel towns and prison gates — lives lived at the sharpest edges of America.
There are echoes of Joad in Devils & Dust (2005), which includes several great songs. Matamoros Banks reaches back to Across the Border, a sublime track on Joad. Both explore the longing for life across the border — in the former, the narrator is dead, his body floating in the Rio Grande. In the latter, the narrator is on the eve of his passage across the river, imagined as a passage into hope. But Devils doesn’t have the same thematic coherence or concentrated, elemental power as Joad.
The wells from which a growing understanding of Springsteen’s work is drawn have always been more numerous than his studio albums. His often extraordinary live performances, and a vast ecosystem of bootlegs, radio recordings and outtakes, have long enriched our sense of his work. In 1998, Tracks brought together 66 previously unreleased songs. Since then a treasure trove of outtakes from the Darkness and River recording sessions have been released, along with an avalanche of officially issued live recordings.
Tracks 2: The Lost Albums was released at the end of last month. It compiles 83 songs, including six previously unreleased albums recorded between 1983 and 2012, along with a seventh record collecting songs from 1994 to 2011.
The first, LA Garage Sessions ’83, was recorded between Nebraska and Born in the USA, and, as Springsteen has noted, is a lo-fi bridge between the two. Richfield Whistle, a prison song, leans closer to Nebraska, while The Klansman, though lyrically in that same terrain, feels sonically like a step toward Born in the USA, evoking something of the mood of Downbound Train.
The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, recorded in the early 1990s, continues the tone and texture of the 1993 Oscar-winning single, extending its drum machine and synth-driven sound across a fuller range of material.
Faithless, recorded in 2005-06, was written as a soundtrack to a never-made “spiritual Western” — rumoured to have been a Martin Scorsese project — and includes several instrumentals and gospel-tinged ballads.
Somewhere North of Nashville, laid down in tandem with the Joad recordings, has a number of very strong songs, some leaning into pedal steel, honky-tonk and rockabilly. Silver Mountain has already been proposed as a new entry into the Springsteen canon, and Blue Highway, with its echoes of Hank Williams, is just as good.
Few critics have resisted the phrase “lush orchestration” when describing Twilight Hours, recorded during the Western Stars sessions. There are some beautiful songs here and High Sierra is transcendent.
Perfect World gathers unreleased songs from 1994 to 2011. It lacks the cohesion of an album, but includes moments of startling power. Rain in the River, which would have slotted seamlessly into Wrecking Ball, would be a great full-throttle E Street Band song performed live.
But it is Inyo, the fifth album in the collection, that will take its place as one of Springsteen’s great records. It’s been known for some years that he shared Inyo with close family and friends, and that he values it highly. He has explained that it was mostly written in hotel rooms during the Ghost of Tom Joad tour, which ran from 1995 to 1997. But three of the songs contain moments — in lyrics or melody — that echo material on the Joad album, suggesting that perhaps they were composed earlier.
Inyo is a quiet record. While it shares Joad’s intimacy and restraint, its sound is warmer, more layered, and often strikingly beautiful. The arrangements feature violin, trumpet, accordion, acoustic guitar and gently luminous inflections of Mexican folk music. The Lost Charro stretches Springsteen’s range with a sensitive mariachi-backed arrangement. He sings with an uncharacteristic softness, at times moving into falsetto.
Springsteen has always worked to expand the vista opened by Walt Whitman, to widen the promise of America. This album goes further. While Joad was largely set on the American side of the border, Inyo crosses into Mexico. It directly confronts the devastation visited on Indigenous people in the making of America — of the making of that promise for some as the cost of devastation for others. Aztec Dance, a conversation between a mother and daughter, evokes the horrors of colonial conquest: Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc are in their graves/ And our people of the valley of Mexico … were enslaved — and brings its accumulation of pain into the present: “Ma, they call us ‘greaser’, they call us ‘wetback’/ Here in this land that once was ours.”
Adelita, an exquisite song, honours the soldaderas, the women fighters of the Mexican Revolution. The singer is a grieving husband:
Adelita, my love, Adelita, my wife
Adelita, my comrade, my life
They’ll remember your name when
freedom fills the Sierranea.
Ciudad Juarez is the story of a father in the agonies of grief. His daughter has disappeared in a city where the sun regularly rises over women’s bodies dumped in the desert.
She vanished into the streets
of the city of death
the city of my lost heart
Ciudad Juarez
Springsteen is clear about the circuits of exchange driving the violence:
The drugs flow north
across the river
the guns flow south
the blood flows here from the devil’s mouth
Trump gives us a video that could have been made by Beavis and Butt-Head. Springsteen gives us Inyo, a record suffused with beauty, grace and deep empathy for lives lived on both sides of the border.
Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.