Meet the new boss
It's Bruce Springsteen in utterly candid mode, discussing how Bush ruined America, and how he coped with recent tragedies of his own. But with a new president, the singer has a fresh optimism - hell, he even loves his local supermarket now
Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band in concert, Oslo, Norway. Photograph: Allover Norway/Rex Features
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 emigré 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 dread 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 small-town dramas of 1984's Born in the USA 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."
more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/18/bruce-springsteen-interview
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