Guitar Tricks Insider April/May Digital Edition | Page 40

ON SONGWRITING

‘Play this for me and my girl.’ Some girl will
be holding a sign saying ‘I wanna marry you.’
There’s a certain entertainment factor happening
in the audience and if you look past it, you’re
going to miss it.”
But for Bruce Springsteen it goes far beyond
mere entertainment. “Unless you can win an
audience you’re in for a tough time. That’s the
most challenging thing – to play the kind of
music you want to play, do the kind of shows
you want to do, and win people who will listen to
you – win people’s ears, all kinds of people. And
then be able to sustain that relationship by being
responsible about it. I’ve always been concerned
with living up to that responsibility.”
The responsibility extends to almost every
song he’s written. “I was into messing around
with words when I was 18 or 19,” said the man
who was once compared in the same review to
Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Van Morrison, Rod
Stewart, and the cult movie El Topo. “Then I quit
for a while and played R&B. It took me a few
years to figure out a way to fuse the two.”
His early songs like “Sandy,” “Spirit in the
Night,” “Growing Up,” “For
You,” and the indomitable
jobs. The idea is that they
“I
WAS
INTO
MESSING
AROUND
“Rosalita” mapped out the
all break down. They fail.
WITH
WORDS
WHEN
I
WAS
18
OR
landscape of teen desire with
The record was a spiritual
amazing specificity filled with
19. THEN I QUIT FOR A WHILE AND crisis. Families fail, your job
boardwalks, carnivals, and
fails, and then you’re gone.
PLAYED R&B. IT TOOK ME A FEW
circuses. With “Backstreets”
You’re lost. You don’t have
YEARS
TO
FIGURE
OUT
A
WAY
TO
and “Thunder Road” he
any connection to anything.
FUSE
THE
TWO.”
raised the stakes to operatic
Everything just goes out the
window. I was interested
heights. These images grew
darker after his success. As the working class
in finding out what happens then – who do my
kids he wrote about got older and passed their
characters do, what do I do. Those records were
glory days to find they’d married too soon, they
kind of my reaction – not necessarily to my
were ultimately caught in the great American
success, but to what I was singing about, and
writing about, and what I was feeling. What I felt
nightmare. It’s possible that a sense of survivor’s
guilt might have crept into his work.
the role of an artist should be.”
“For the Born to Run album I had established
In his role as one of the most significant
a certain type of optimism. After that I felt I had
rock artists of the past 40 years, Springsteen
to test those things to see what they were worth. routinely brings his audience through a series
of epiphanies – whether rocking with “Born in
So I just dove into it. I decided to move into
the darkness and look around, and write about
the USA,” about a disgruntled returning vet, or
what I knew, and what I saw. I was trying to find
reaching into hearts with “My City of Ruins,”
something to hold onto that doesn’t disappear
about his beloved Asbury Park, New Jersey,
out from under you. Eventually it led up to
which received tumultuous applause when
he played it after 9/11 and again in 2012 at a
Nebraska, which was a record about the basic
things that keep people functioning in society,
benefit for the survivors of the ironically named
in a community, or in their families or in their
Hurricane Sandy.
40

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