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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
I Stopped Listening to Springsteen's Music. I Heard Something More.
From a distance I have always found Bruce Springsteen interesting, especially in his current incarnation as a committed populist straddling the line between his own politics and those of his many MAGA fans. But his set-to last spring with President Trump, who called him 'overrated' and 'not a talented guy,' made me realize how very little of Springsteen's music I have ever really engaged. I must come clean and say that I just never got it. That fact came up in conversation the other day with a Springsteen fan, a fellow member of the Catskills bungalow colony I visit every year. He gave me a song list, and I sat down to listen. And I mean really listen: My mantra is that you have to give something seven tries to really get it. That's tough in the thick of a workweek, but I'm on vacation, so I made time for all of it: 'Rosalita,' 'Prove It All Night,' 'Brilliant Disguise,' 'The River,' 'Spirit in the Night,' 'The Promised Land,' 'Backstreets,' 'Badlands,' 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,' 'The Rising,' 'New York City Serenade' and the album 'Born to Run.' As engrossed as I was, I kept having to remind myself to listen to the music. What grabbed my ear was the lyrics. That had been my mistake all these years — waiting for these songs to be, primarily, songs, as if they were Schubert lieder. For me, Springsteen's work is poetry with musical accompaniment. Realizing that helped me understand something important about him, but something important about America, too. There were certainly some musical moments that struck me. Clarence Clemons's justly famous saxophone solo on 'Jungleland,' with its gospel-inflected wail, is a marvel. It starts suddenly, about four minutes in, with a soaring, authoritative clarion call that brings us abruptly from C major to an unexpected E flat, a new world. It feels like when the film 'The Wizard of Oz' goes into color. But moments like that were the exception. Even about 'Jungleland,' the music blogger Michael Miller offers the praise that it's 'nothing less than pure rock and roll poetry' (italics mine). Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
50 Years Ago, Bruce Springsteen Made a Masterpiece. It Wasn't Easy.
TONIGHT IN JUNGLELAND: The Making of 'Born to Run,' by Peter Ames Carlin Every star's career is the sum of wild improbabilities. So many things have to line up: ambition, talent, discipline, cultural timing, connections, support, perseverance and more than a little luck. Peter Ames Carlin focuses on a crucial make-or-break moment for Bruce Springsteen with 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of 'Born to Run.'' Springsteen has been a top-tier rock star ever since the August 1975 release of 'Born to Run' made him known nationwide. The album, his third, was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece when it came out. It's the grandly Promethean statement of a 25-year-old rocker pouring all his experience, all his rock-oldie erudition, all his stage-honed reflexes and all his literary and commercial aspirations into songs that unabashedly reach for sweaty glory. On the album, Springsteen sang about love, escape, dread, transcendence and desperate, determined motion: 'It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win,' he announced in its opening song, 'Thunder Road.' Half a century later, he clearly won. Yet without some fateful choices and unlikely coincidences in 1974 and 1975, things could have gone very differently. Carlin revisits those pivotal years with a fan's fervor and a journalist's attention to detail. He has written biographies of Paul Simon, R.E.M., Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson, and his full Springsteen biography, 'Bruce,' was published in 2012. Like a director's cut, 'Tonight in Jungleland' expands on, updates and sometimes revises his researches into Springsteen's self-invention in the 1970s. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Post
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Bruce Springsteen almost drove his band to quit while making ‘Born to Run'
The infamous sax solo Clarence Clemons plays on Bruce Springsteen's rock classic 'Born To Run' is so vibrant and exhilarating that it seems like a moment of pure inspiration on Clemons' part. In truth, as Peter Ames Carlin lays out in his new book, 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born To Run,' (Doubleday, August 5), it was the exact opposite. I came together note by meticulous note in a studio session that set new records for frustration. 7 'Born To Run' features an iconic Clarence Clemons sax solo that was crafted by Bruce Springsteen singing — and changing — it note by note to Clemons. Advertisement Springsteen's songwriting mastery was developed through an obsessive process that found him toiling over ideas, lyrics, and concepts virtually non-stop. 'If you saw Bruce offstage, at home, or on the road in 1973 or 1974, you wouldn't have to look very far to find his songwriting notebook,' Carlin writes. 'He usually kept it within reach and always had a song, or more likely several songs, working at the same time.' The 1975 album 'Born to Run,' Springsteen's third, came to life over many months of tortured labor by Springsteen, a perfectionist whose process at the time could best be described as demented exhaustion. Advertisement To arrive at the familiar version of the title track, Springsteen tried just about every musical idea he had ever heard, played, or thought about including a string section, women singers backing up the chorus, and even a disco portion. For the song's infamous sax solo, Springsteen worked with Clemons by singing his vision for the solo note by note, having Clemons play it, then changing one note, having Clemons play it again, and so on. This went on for hours, throughout the night. 'He spent ages working on it with Clemons, eight, ten, maybe twelve hours, playing the same notes over and over again, Bruce looking for a slightly different feel, a slightly different tone, a tiny adjustment to the rhythm of this passage, this pair of notes, this portion of that note,' writes Carlin. Springsteen's obsession with the details in the music, however, was nothing compared to how he labored over the song's lyrics, constantly re-writing, seeking a different tone, a new phrase, anything that would help him make 'Born To Run' as great as he knew it could be. Advertisement 7 Bruce Springsteen's perfectionism sent his band (above) storming out of the studio as he threatened to scrap 'Born To Run.' Instead it was released and made rock history. Photograph by Barry Schneier 'Sometimes he'd be in the midst of a take, sing a few lines of a verse, shake it off, then take his notebook to a folding chair,' Carlin writes. 'He'd find a pen, open the book, look at the page, and just…think. He'd be there for a while. An hour, two hours, maybe more.' That time proved to be worth it, because the song was improving dramatically as it went. Springsteen's longtime fans would hardly recognize the early versions of the song. At one point, it sounded like a musical salute to 'Mad Max.' Advertisement 'A song that had started as a nearly surrealistic portrait of a world gone mad — racers run down by their own cars, the highway buckling beneath their mag wheels, the thrill-kill junkies gunning down soldiers 'just for the noise/Not even for the kicks' — had been remade into a vibrant highway saga that, while heavily symbolic, could be recognized as existing on the modern Jersey Shore,' Carlin writes. 7 Both Newsweek (above) and Time put Bruce Springsteen on their covers after the album dropped. Given all this, the album's recording process almost crumbled under the weight of Springsteen's relentless perfectionism. Stephen Appel, Springsteen's road manager at the time, describes a scene of pure chaos. 'You're working and it sounds great and so you start to think you have it right, but Bruce says, 'Nope, it's s–t,'' says Appel in the book. 'And then you work for hours to change it. And then that's done, and Bruce says, 'You know what? Maybe it was better before, because now this sounds like s**t.' And you would do that for ten to fifteen hours a day.' When the album was finally complete, it was played for executives at Columbia, including Walter Yetnikoff, who had just been placed in charge of all of CBS' record labels. (Columbia was owned by CBS at the time.) 7 The record's reception blew everyone away. After he heard the entire album, Yetnikoff was asked what he thought and replied, 'It's like f—ing.' Advertisement Despite this rave review, when Springsteen the perfectionist heard the album's final mix for the first time, he had a very different reaction. As the music played, Springsteen started adding self-deprecating commentary. 'Oh, well, if I'm going to sing something I guess I should oversing it, that's great,' Springsteen said. 'Oh, and here comes the saxophone, that's gotta be a Bruce Springsteen record, nothing clichéd about that.' 7 'Born To Run' was born at a rented bungalow (above) on West End Court in Long Branch, NJ, where The Boss still visits today. LoC Advertisement When the record was done playing, Springsteen said, 'I dunno, man, maybe we should just scrap it. Toss this s–t and start over.' Hearing that, Clemons, known as 'The Big Man' at a towering 6'5', stood up and walked out of the room without saying a word. Every member of the band and crew followed. Of course, the record was not scrapped. Given that Springsteen's first two albums had not sold well, Columbia executives ordered 100,000 copies printed — a number that, at the time, indicated the label had low expectations — and were shocked when pre-orders hit three times that. 7 Despite his initial misgivings, Springsteen says he's 'very, very fond' of the album. Redferns Advertisement The album became a #1 hit, and would dominate American rock radio for decades to come. Both Time and Newsweek, two of the biggest magazines in the country at a time when that meant something, put him on the cover in the same week. Interviewing Springsteen in 2024, Carlin found, unsurprisingly, that his view of the album had changed. 'I'm very, very fond of it,' Springsteen, now 75 years old, says in the book. 'And on its anniversaries, I get in a car and I play it from start to finish, right? I just drive around listening.' Advertisement 7 A new book gives an authorized look at the album's recording. On these jaunts, Springsteen makes sure he ends up on West End Court in Long Branch, New Jersey, just outside the rented bungalow where he first put thoughts for the song to paper. 'I get there right before the end, right before [the album's last song] 'Jungleland,'' says Springsteen. 'And I park there. I sit by the curb and I let 'Jungleland' play, all the way through.'
Vogue Singapore
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue Singapore
Here's the first trailer for Jeremy Allen White's Bruce Springsteen biopic
In the process of dealing with his newfound fame following the success of Born To Run , Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River , Springsteen recorded the new songs with a simple four-track recorder alone in the bedroom of a house he was renting in New Jersey, originally not intending to turn it into an album. It was met with critical acclaim and paved the way for his next release, the era-defining Born in the USA . Springsteen himself is actively involved in the project, with the film being an adaptation of Warren Zanes's 2023 book about the period, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska'. Courtesy of Disney Joining Jeremy as The Boss? Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong as Springsteen's long-time confidant and manager, Jon Landau; Paul Walter Hauser as guitar tech Mike Batlan; Stephen Graham as Bruce's father, Doug; Gaby Hoffmann as his mother, Adele; Odessa Young as his love interest, Faye; Marc Maron as record producer Chuck Plotkin; and David Krumholtz as Columbia executive Al Teller, all under the expert direction of Crazy Heart 's Scott Cooper. Courtesy of Disney And, startlingly, the release date isn't that far off either: 24 October 2025, when the film will hit the big screen and have us all listening to Springsteen on repeat yet again. Courtesy of Disney This article was first published on British Vogue.
Perth Now
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Bruce Springsteen explains why he felt 'capable of handling' fame at the height of his career
Bruce Springsteen felt "capable of handling" fame when he was at the height of his career. The 75-year-old rock legend first enjoyed success with his Born To Run record in the mid-1970s and then had a major resurgence with Born in the U.S.A. a decade later, and admitted that while he had "no particular interest" in staying at that level of fame, it was a "cool thing" at the time. He told The Sunday Times: "Well, I was 35. I had previous experience [of fame] at 25, so I was capable of handling the moment. Ninety per cent I enjoyed the ride, 10 per cent of it was stressful, and my take on it now is that it was a cool thing to be at the height of the cultural conversation in the pop world for a while. I just didn't have any particular interest in staying there. That's a fool's game." The Dancing in the Dark hitmaker also fronts the E Street Band but now lives in New Jersey with his wife and co-star Patti Scialfa - with whom he has Evan, 34, Jessica, 33, as well as 31-year-old Samuel - and inisisted that the kind of work he does now is more "important than the money" about more about "writing great" music. He said: "Of course, and I was lucky enough to have Elvis, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, to follow in their footsteps — or not follow in their footsteps. From there I learnt how important it was not to lose focus on who I am or the work I'm doing. It's more important than the money, although it's great to get paid well. It's more important than the fame, although that can be fun too, and a nuisance on occasion. I simply wanted to write great songs, play great shows and have a conversation with a great audience. It is what I've dedicated my life to doing.'
