Bruce Springsteen Confronts His Ghosts on the Rousing ‘Letter to You’

Over the past half a century, Bruce Springsteen has played down-on-their-luck working men, wide-eyed youngsters growing up too quickly, local-circuit rockers who can only dream of playing stadiums, Cadillac ranchers tearin’ up the highway for cheap kicks, and on and on in his songs.

Although he was playing roles in his songs, the same sense of hope for the future and desire to live a simpler life have connected his characters since the beginning, and those threads have only become more apparent as time has gone on.

Now on his 20th album, Letter to You, and at age 71, Springsteen seems to be making sense of all of his brilliant disguises for himself.

The sentimentality that pulses through Letter to You feels more authentic and personal than the fictional stories he dreamt up in his early work or even his recent dives into nostalgia, like his Magic album.

He recorded the album in just five days, live in the studio with the E Street Band. Together, they sound comfortable rescaling the Phil Spector-inspired Wall of Sound they built in the Seventies with glockenspiels, saxophone expositions, and thousands of guitars. When Springsteen sings about glory days, this time, they’re his own glory days.

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Source: RollingStone