Miles to Go is Miles Away, Does the Sunshine Ever Stay?
Hello Sunshine, Won't You Stay?
A new song from Bruce Springsteen, and a new album to come. I took to this new song Hello Sunshine immediately. It sounds very old and very familiar to me, conveying a message and touching emotions I have known since ever. The sound itself is reminiscent of many of my favourite songs and singers. When it opened I immediately thought of Janis Ian's Other Side of the Sun. I wasn't concerned with identifying influences at first. I loved the sound immediately. It was the words that grabbed me and moved me deeply. Long before even the halfway stage was reached I knew this song to be a classic. Repeated plays had me thinking of Gordon Lightfoot's Early Mornin' Rain as well as of Danny O'Keefe's Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues, both of which my favourite singer Elvis sang beautifully. In interviews, Bruce has referenced two other favourite singers of mine, Roy Orbison and Glen Campbell. I can certainly hear Glen Campbell's Gentle on My Mind here, done in Elvis' slowed down, soulful version. It's one of my most favourite songs (from a short list of a few thousand), and I love to sing Elvis' slower version. I'm reminded too of Jason Aldean's Dirt Road Anthem. Throw in traces of the great Jimmy Webb songs recorded by Glen Campbell (The Moon's a Harsh Mistress, Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Witchita Lineman), along with Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin', and you can see why I loved this song the moment I heard it.
The song is familiar in the best of senses. It's not simply the influences – one song can't be all those influences – it's that all those great songs from the past tap into a universal theme, the longing that is within us all. Heidegger argued that human beings are ontologically nostalgic. I don't know if we are forever looking backwards to some perfect state past, or forwards to that perfect place to be, or if there is a God-shaped hole we all desire to fill. Whatever it is, it is there, and the most emotionally powerful songs tap into that cosmic yearning.
I have played the song repeatedly since I first heard it. The lyrics strike a deep chord with me. Elvis' first hit record Heartbreak Hotel was based on a suicide note in which the words were written 'I walk a lonely street.' I love too Ricky Nelson's Lonesome Town. It's a place where you can find a dream or two, to last you all through the years. It's a town of broken dreams. I have been re-writing the lyrics to Hello Sunshine in light of these songs, changing the line 'you know I always loved a lonely town,' to 'you know I always loved a lonesome town, those empty streets no one around. You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way, hello sunshine won't you stay.'
I've been pondering the lyrics here. I've walked those lonely streets. And I've walked for miles and miles into the darkness, going nowhere because there was nowhere to go. That kind of loneliness doesn't go away, only the sunshine. Is there a way out of that Heartbreak Hotel down at the end of Lonesome Town? It is said that philosophy is born of homesickness. My main philosophical work is organised around the theme of 'Being and Place,' involving a search for a being that is embedded in and articulated through a moral and social sense of place. I did think of calling the work 'Place to Be,' after the Nick Drake song of that name. That title denotes a place in which being is nurtured and made to flourish, also points to such a place as future potentiality and state. I note the line in Hello Sunshine: 'No place to be and miles to go.'
In the lyrics I hear the final lines of Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
That's how this journey into 'Being and Place' feels in its undertaking.
My favourite Biblical text is from Isaiah:
'This is what the LORD says: "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?' (Isaiah 66:1).
Where is that place to be? Where is our true native land and when will we come to rest in it?
'Has not My hand made all these things? And so they came into being, declares the LORD. This is the one I will esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at My word.…' (Isaiah 66:2).
Housing our own psyches is also housing the sacred. This is our place of repose.
The philosophical labours are heavy and the road is long and seemingly endless. But I carry on in hope, and in knowledge that there is an end. The Comedy of the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri is my unfailing guide in this. Dante and Bruce Springsteen. Lost in the woods, Dante lights the way and invites us to follow. Robert Frost, too, knows about life as a journey. And he knows that it is not always easy to identify the right path. He writes this in The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
One of the videos to Hello Sunshine turns the song into a road song. Whether it's the right or the wrong road I don't know. It's the empty road with miles to go that Springsteen sings of.
It is easy in the aftermath of musical, literary, or artistic creation for those who are merely knowledgeable to identify the influences that may or may or not have gone into that creation; it takes true inspiration and imagination to be able to discern what you are looking for in the process of creation, draw on these diverse strands, and knit them together whilst making your own additional and unique contribution. I've listed what I think are a number of influences going into Hello Sunshine. But there is far more to composition and creation than that. To all those who play the game of 'fluencies I say simply this: make your own selections and mix and match them together and add a few ideas of your own. It's beginning to sound less easy, isn't it?
I can't quite remember when I became a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. The truth is that I was not immediately bowled over by his music. It took a while for him to grow on me. I thought his songs a bit overblown, his act a form of mugging for effect. Not that that in itself worried me. I'm not averse to what is contemptuously dismissed as 'showbizz.' I like artists who are not afraid to put out for the public. I was and remain a huge fan of Queen, a band whose music was often so far over the top that you could no longer believe a top ever existed. Where Queen excited me, Springsteen just seemed forced and dull, not merely an act, just a rather dull one. Born in the USA didn't help, either. I didn't like the Rambo look and feel, the punching of the air, and the American flag. Of course, I'd totally missed the point and had read the wrong message into the image. But in 1983, as Springsteen went from merely huge to being ginormous, I passed him by. It couldn't have helped that at that time I was also rapidly losing interest in Elvis, my boyhood idol. In fact I was turning on Elvis with a vengeance as the facts about his life and his music were shattering the god-like image we had once revered into little pieces. Springsteen was inspired to become a singer and musician at the age of seven after seeing Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan show in 1957. Elvis is a huge influence on Springsteen. Elvis took a simple musical form and inflated it out of its musical proportions. He showed how big it could be at the top. But he couldn't live there; he couldn't sustain the endless reinvention needed - no one could. Whether the music alone could sustain that level of importance is another question; my main point is that Elvis was doomed to a premature end as a result of having to meet the impossible challenge of endless reinvention. I'd say that Springsteen alone is big enough to fill those legendary shoes, but that he does so by eschewing idealisation and the dehumanization that comes with it; he and his music have retained a profound humanity. In the 1980s the Elvis connection was not helpful in my appreciation of Springsteen; I had ceased to be an Elvis fan, and I was vilifying the man and his music possessed by an intense feeling of betrayal. Elvis didn't live up to his potential, he sold his music and his fans short, he denied us what we most wanted, he was addicted to drugs and, most outrageously of all, so the scandal sheets tell us relentlessly, female flesh. Well is that any way for a rock'n'roll singer to behave? And he died. He was something less than a god and something all-too-human, then. And that was unforgivable of him. Poor Elvis. No wonder he died alone. Springsteen sings well on this: Johnny Bye Bye
And it is that 'alone' that interests me about Springsteen. I find the philosophy running through his songs to be life affirming. I like that he is not averse to air-punching celebrations of joy. In the hands of others, such things can seem contrived. Not with Springsteen. He knows the troughs, and he sings of them. He knows the 'alone.' Those who also know that 'alone,' and live within its often paralyzing constraints, connect straight away with his words.
I think it was that affirmation of joy in the depths of sorrow that attracted me to Springsteen. I can't quite place when I became a Springsteen fan. I think it was hearing three or four songs together. First up was Hungry Heart, an upbeat, joyous song that sweeps you away, but possesses lyrics that make you think, lyrics about yearning and how it can lead you astray as well as lead you to where you want to be:
Everybody's got a hungry heart.
Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don't make no difference what nobody says
Ain't nobody like to be alone.
I responded to Badlands, too. I still do, actually, it has a message that never fails. Springsteen knows all about 'trouble in the heartland.' He won't settle for the 'in-betweens,' stating plainly: 'I want the heart, I want the soul.'
For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin
To be glad you're alive
I wanna find one face
That ain't looking through me
I wanna find one place
I wanna spit in the face of these.
I was one of those 'ones', and, despite the troubles and dilemmas that life brings, was definitely glad to be alive.
After these I was able to hear Born to Run anew, and actually listen to it. I had once thought it an overblown melodrama in the manner of the god-awful Bat Out of Hell. The scales dropped from my eyes. Bat Out of Hell was a rotten imitation of Born to Run, copying and exaggerating the form whilst utterly emptying it of its rich content. Born to Run is one of the greatest songs ever. It's a young persons song, I heard Springsteen say in an interview. It's people on the run, escaping the limitations of where they are. Side two of that album contains another immense song, Thunder Road, which ends with the lines 'it's a town for losers, we're pulling out of here to win.' It's a bold declaration, but one that is hard to live up to. Finding that 'place to be' is a lot harder than you may think when young. Growing up is about putting down roots, digging in, and growing, making a long-term commitment. I guess 'it's gonna be a long walk home,' to quote a Springsteen song from a few decades later. But we keep walking, even though 'miles to go' always seems to be so many 'miles away.' And, like all those mired in doubt and despair, I'm less than sure that sunshine has the qualities needed to stick around for the long haul.
But there it is, a new Bruce Springsteen song and a new album to come. It will be his nineteenth album overall, and I have them all. No sooner had I completed my vinyl collection in the nineties that the world went over to CD. So I bought them all on CD too. I am a fanatic.
I could wax lyrical about Springsteen. But won't. Well, not immediately, anyway. There are too many great lines from Bruce that resonate for any words from me to be effective. They'll just get in the way. I know what I'm talking about. And I know that Bruce Springsteen does too. I'll leave it at that with respect to a general overview.
With respect to Hello Sunshine, I'd just say that Springsteen knows the dark places we can all end up in, and if he knows there's a way out, and often tells us so, he knows too that finding our way to that 'place to be' is nothing less than the hard, soul-searching, road to take. His songs are addressed to the lost souls of the world, the walking wounded, which is all of us. And his simple message is that there is a safe way home, so long as we can find the strength to just keep on walking. And he knows that we can't always. We need outside help. Which is where his songs come in, a support, a balm, a guide. But he's not one for compromises with the the half-life the world we live in often forces upon us. If the walking wounded can't find the courage to walk tall, they may as well not walk at all. Springsteen's songs encourage you to get your heads up, puff your chests out, and walk tall.
“This record is a return to my solo recordings featuring character-driven songs and sweeping, cinematic orchestral arrangements,” Springsteen said. “It’s a jewel box of a record.” I like this idea of a 'jewel box,' containing all life, with the jagged edges and dirt scraped off, polished, allowed to shine. His songs light the way.
I read that the collection draws inspiration from the Southern California pop records of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Bruce Springsteen Channels Roy Orbison yearning There Goes My Miracle. He has cited Glen Campbell as an influence in interviews. It's my kind of thing, then.
It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive. Welcome back Citizen Bruce.
I love this new song, Hello Sunshine, so very much. I recognize the music, it's my kind of music, calling back so many of my favourite songs and singers. And I recognize myself and my life in the lyrics. I don't feel the need to elaborate on the personal details. That's my business. God knows, and that's a good enough public. Springsteen tells is straight and plain. Nothing else needed.
Hello Sunshine
Had enough of heartbreak and pain
I had a little sweet spot for the rain
For the rain and skies of grey
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
You know I always liked my walking shoes
But you can get a little too fond of the blues
You walk too far, you walk away
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
You know I always loved a lonely town
Those empty streets, no one around
You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
You know I always liked that empty road
No place to be and miles to go
But miles to go is miles away
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
And miles to go is miles away
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
Hello sunshine, won't you stay?
Hello sunshine
I needed to hear this song right now. Not because the song is life-affirming in any simple sense. It isn't. Such cheap promises fool none of those who are truly down and despairing. I needed to hear this song now because it expresses the uncertainties and doubts that beset us as we try the best we can to affirm life in its actual living. The key character in the lyric is the question-mark expressing doubt. Bruce is inviting sunshine to stay. In fact, he's not even issuing an invitation. As all folk who are down or have been down know, they cannot believe that sunshine, even if it does ever show up, will ever stay for long. The song is not an invitation, nor even a polite request, it's a plea: will you stay around ... just for once? I don't get the impression that expectations are high, here. Experience tells us not to expect too much. I remember a line I used with people I worked with in 2010 in Liverpool, people who were long-term unemployed, discouraged and down, the beaten and almost beaten: 'one of the advantages of being a pessimist is that, occasionally, things can turn out to be marginally better than you had expected, making you deliriously happy.' It was a little mordant humour on my part. 'He's right, you know,' said one guy. It struck a chord.
So 'Hello Bruce' and thank you for telling us what we already know and, in so doing, giving us the reassurance we need to keep on going. There's no promises here. We wouldn't believe them if they were offered. The song doesn't tell us that sunshine will come, still less offer any guarantees that it will, for a change, stay around. But it does tell us that we are not alone after all, and that, for that reason, it may well be worthwhile walking on with renewed hope in our hearts. It's makes us feel a little bit better, and a little bit more hopeful, a little stronger. It rekindles the desire for living and loving, for not giving back our ticket on life and carrying on in the first instance. We take it from there. That's how I've always read Springsteen. That message is all over his records.
It's difficult to make clear just how bright a light Springsteen has been in the times we have been living through. In his songs, Springsteen tells those in despair that, all evidence seemingly to the contrary, there's hope and a safe way home. 'That's what rock and roll is – a promise, an oath,' he told journalist Robert Hilburn. 'It's about being as true as you can at any particular moment.' That's what Springsteen's rock and roll is about, I'd say. Closely observed portraits of men and women in the complex web of doings in time and place is what Springsteen is about. It's a novel packed with real characters acting out their lives to a soundtrack.
Springsteen was once famously described as the future of rock'n'roll. He has long since redeemed that promise and a lot more besides. Such praise can be mere hyperbole. But I do like that Springsteen has always taken his rock'n'roll seriously rather than see it, as way too many music critics see it, merely as a commercial proposition that is derivative of superior musical forms, cheapening those forms. He looked upon rock'n'roll as a vocation and took his role seriously:
'I believe that the life of a rock and roll band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and your audience looks up at you and can see themselves – and as long as those reflections are human, realistic ones. The biggest gift that your fans can give you is just treatin' you like a human being, because anything else dehumanizes you. And that's one of the things that has shortened life spans, both physically and creatively, of some of the best rock'n'roll musicians – that cruel isolation. If the price of fame is that you have to be isolated from the people you write for, then that's too …... high a price to pay.'
He cleaved to the truth of the human condition and, against all odds, retained that fundamentally democratic ethos as he scaled the heights of success. 'Do you believe in rock and roll?' Don McLean asks in American Pie. 'Can music save your mortal soul?' That was rock'n'roll's promise, which it took from blues as the devil's music – music that saves without need of God's saving grace and redemption. That was the old heady illusion. Springsteen is smarter than that. His music has redemptive qualities, certainly, but is tempered by a greater wisdom. 'I used to think that rock could save you. I don't believe it can anymore. It can do a lot … But as you get older, you realize that it is not enough.' (interview with Rolling Stone). In Rolling Stone's twentieth anniversary issue, Springsteen told Mikal Gilmore that 'the world is nothing but complex, and if you do not learn to interpret its complexities, you're going to be on the river without a paddle.' That's what is good about Springsteen's music, it is real, it isn't trading in illusions and false hopes. He knows that there are limits, which itself is the beginning of wisdom. He told Rolling Stone's James Henke in 1992:
'Two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down. What happened was, all my rock and roll answers had fizzled out … It's not your entire life. It never can be. And I realized my real life is waiting to be lived. All the love and the hope and the sorrow and sadness – that's all over there, waiting to be lived … So I decided to work on it.'
That's life, experiment, growth, and experience.
In passing, I'll put a word in for Elvis here. (I won't say 'Elvis Presley.' It's 'Elvis,' and there's only the one). Springsteen was inspired into music by seeing Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan TV show in January 1957. He was seven, and he demanded a guitar in order to be like Elvis. Springsteen has continuously praised Elvis' importance in transforming the music scene of the twentieth century, and you can follow these references up at your leisure. The bit that interests me here is Elvis not as king, still less as god, but as a democrat. It's a point I continually labour. Springsteen gets it. As he puts it:
'That's why the importance of rock and roll was just incredible. It reached down into all those homes where there was no music or books or any kind of creative sense, and it infiltrated the whole thing. That's what happened in my house, you know.'
That's what happened with many of those who were the shakers and movers in the sixties. I recall George Harrison being asked about his musical roots. Struggling for an answer, he replied he didn't have any – until he heard Elvis. But although Elvis was his idol, he successfully resisted the temptation and tendency to idealisation and idolatry. That has kept him and his music grounded.
In an interview in 1987, Springsteen explained his motivation in his career in music:
'My job is I search for the human things in myself, and I turn them into notes and words, and then in some fashion I help people hold onto their own humanity – if I'm doing my job right.'
I like how he sees doing what he does as a job, a proletarian of human experience:
'I never felt I was like an Elvis or a Dylan,' Springsteen says. 'I don't see myself in that way. I see myself more like a real good journeyman. And that's fine: You do your job real good, you pass on some part of the flame … and you stir things up a little bit if you can.'
He's doing his job real good and right and has stirred things up a lot.
I used to think Springsteen's songs boring, samey, mundane, predictable ('here is the one that goes like ...') In a way, they are. He's telling the same story. But it's a story with a history, it unfolds in time, enriched by experience. And he takes us into its future. Such is life.
It wasn't any one song or album that really hooked me on Springsteen but listening to one after another as they followed. That's when it clicked with me. His music is all of a piece. Like a life.
"You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way". That's a line that speaks directly to the heart and soul. Show me on the body where the soul is, I have had people ask me. I can't show people what they don't feel. Bruce knows dark places, and he knows that people surrender themselves to them in order to survive. And he knows others struggle on. He sees the light.
Springsteen's music takes us to the core of our being in life. That's not as exciting as it may sound. I once heard Liverpool comedian Alexei Sayle doing a skit of Springsteen. Sung in a dull, monotonous voice (with a little added sneer) it went something like: 'I get up in the morning, I have my breakfast, I go through the door, I catch the bus, I go to work, I work all day, I go home, I have my tea, I watch TV, I go to sleep ….' Springsteen does say this kind of this a lot in his songs, and he repeats it too. But … isn't that life? Much of life is mundane, and involves doing all those things. As he sings in Promised Land:
I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day.
Boring zzz
But listen to where he takes this familiar reality in the lines that follow:
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start
The secret to Springsteen is that he takes the mundane we all know and finds the romance and the drama, excites the passion that threatens to tear it all apart; he redeems the extraordinary that is often buried within and almost worn down by the ordinary. That's his gift. Not all of his lines are 'winners;' instead, he gives us the mundane and then hits us with words of sublime truth. He gives us the context we can all recognize as our world and then, having located us in our lives, he gives us the poetry of our passions. That's how he takes us to the truth.
I don't know if Hello Sunshine is a song about the struggle with depressive illness. There is no hope in depression, it is a hopeless condition. The song doesn't seem to hold out much hope that sunshine will stay around for any great length of time. It never has in the past, after all. But even begging expresses a kind of hope, I'd say. Why make a request in expectation of no reply? Springsteen never quite takes us to the time of no reply. He comes close in places. But there is always redemption, in some form (think of the line in Thunder Road).
The song is more reassuring than hopeful. Springsteen sings as an old friend who knows about the darkness at the edge of lonesome town. The darkness you experience. You often have no choice to live into a void, if you are to carry on living at all. Promises of a happy ending are glib in this context. They tend not to work. Heard them, seen them run into nothing, don't believe them. The only possibility of success here, I would say, depends on a mental and psychological strength, as in religious faith or mountaineering. That analogy may sound daft, but stick with me. Climbing a mountain, you feel the end will never be in sight, you're body tires and seeks rest, rests feels wonderful, you go to sleep, you die. Mountaineers will tell you that ascending to the top depends on the training that enables you to assert mind over matter, developing the mental toughness to tell the body what to do and where to go, the mind overriding the body's message. The same with religion. There is a good God and a good world, and you have a purpose in life and an end-point. You may not be able to understand it or see it, and the facts of the life you are mired in may contradict that design at almost every point.
I see Springsteen's songs as being about finding the path out of the darkness and isolation in which we can often find ourselves, back into the light, into the place where we can again see the stars. But, then again, I am writing a book on Dante, so I would say that wouldn't I? There's a difference. Dante is sure about the Love that moves the sun and the other stars, he is sure that these things will ever be with us, and will ever shine on to light our path. Springsteen's lyric is a doubtful plea: 'Hello sunshine, won't you stay?' There's a doubt there that isn't and can't be in Dante. But the belief in sunshine is there all the same. And who knows, maybe this time, for once, it will stay. If and when it ever does, that would be journey's end.
The line "but miles to go is miles away..." has a beautiful knowing sadness to it. It reconciles us to a truth that those on this path know deep inside. I can't remember a time since I left school when I didn't have some great plan or ideal I was working towards, in the belief that once realized, I would then be free to do anything I liked. Realize the plan and you'll be able to live … And always other plans and ideals spring up on the distant horizon. I'm still doing it. 'Being and Place' looks as far away as ever it did. I've done plenty, and still there's no place to rest and be. It's all still miles away. In forever postponing living, you forget what it takes to live.
I don't know if Hello Sunshine is a song about a person's struggle with depression or merely with life, which is difficult enough to cause all the pain and strain you can cope with. There's an emphasis on aloneness that takes us into a dimension beyond the normal, hinting at the way we push people away and postpone actual living so long and indefinitely as to never actually live. There's always the hope of 'better days. 'These are Better Days,' Springsteen shouted out confidently back in 1992. I thought so too. But not for long. It's a declaration of intent that isn't always hard to live up to. 'Where did they go, Lord?' the Elvis song asks. Elvis never found those better days. I don't know if plans get in the way of living or life gets in the way of plans. I do know about expressions of hopeless hope.
I'm certain already that this song is a Springsteen classic. I had a feeling of familiarity hearing it for the first time, in the best sense of the word. It's the kind of song I love. It sounds like lots of other songs I love, without being tired and clichéd. It sounds fresh and offers something new. The right word isn't 'familiar,' it is 'classic.'
I've played the song over and again. Far from wearing out its welcome, it's sounding better each time. I may make it my theme tune as I now turn to face an uncertain future. If you reach out to others you may find the help you need, and find, too, that the better days you crave in the place to be are not as far away as you may be inclined to think when mired in misery. You may not. If it seems that Springsteen is still writing the soundtrack of my life, then I need to remember that the promises of 'better days' rest on no objective facts and certainties. Promises may be redeemed, they may not. It depends on what you do, how you act in certain contexts, and it depends on a lot that is outside of your control. We shall see. I really don't know. That's what living in uncertainty is all about. That's why you need a transcendent hope. What I am certain of is that Hello Sunshine is a song that I shall be listening to for years and years to come, God willing. Much as I have been listening to Badlands, Hungry Heart, Brilliant Disguise, Born to Run, Thunder Road and the rest since I heard them. There are songs that you just know on hearing them for the first time that you will listening to them for the rest of your life. Hello Sunshine is one of those songs. Springsteen takes us to the heart and soul of being as something much more, much richer, than mere physical existence. Not that he's shy of the physical, the very opposite. 'It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.' It's all in there.
I just don't see Springsteen's gladness as in any way glib.
“You fall in love lonely, you end up that way.
Hello Sunshine, won’t you stay?”
The clear implication is that Sunshine can just as easily, and even more likely, go away. Springsteen takes happy words like Hello Sunshine and makes them sad. Because he knows that's how it is for people beaten down so long by life they fear to ever hope for the prospect of better days to come. So down and disappointed by life are they that it's the good days that upset them the most, in the knowledge that they will not last. You feel like giving in and giving up. And then Springsteen sings of your heartbreak and pain. And the rest. He knows the compromises that people have to make merely to survive.
“Some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racing in the street.”
“My songs are all action songs," he once said in interview. "They're action, you know. All my songs are about people at that moment when they've got to do something, just do something, do anything. There's no halfway in most of the songs because I don't approach what I do in that way. There's just no room for compromise. I think, for most musicians, it has to be like life or death or else it's not worth it. That's why every night we play a real long time, and we play real hard. I want to be able to go home and say I went all the way tonight – and then I went a little further.
“My whole life, I was always around a lot of people whose lives consisted of just this compromising – they knew no other way. That's where rock'n'roll is important, because it said that there could be another way, you know. That's why I write the kind of songs I do, why they have a particular kind of immediacy. As you go along, I think you have to deal more directly with whatever's confronting you because that's the only way to get across.”
That's Springsteen's forte: his words put a lump in your throat, his music makes you straighten up and walk tall. Walking wounded you may be, but you can walk tall, if you walk at all.
Springsteen's songs, his best songs, the songs we know him for, are adventures in uncertainty, excursions into the darkness, tales of living in the Badlands and the struggles which tell of what it takes to get out of them, if ever you can, and the price you pay along the way. The words make the music bleed. That's the key to his music, Greil Marcus wrote: a ride through terror that resolves itself finally as a ride into delight.
Springsteen sings of the Promised Land a lot. There's the song Promised Land on Darkness at the Edge of Town:
“Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge.
The dogs on main street howl,
'cause they understand,
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man,
And I believe in a promised land.”
Boys and girls, 'Growin' Up,' as the song on his first ever album puts it.
The journey to the Promised Land is a recurring theme. It's there in The Price You Pay on The River. It's there on the immense Thunder Road on Born to Run. The ride ain't free, he says, even as he promises freedom:
Oh-oh come take my hand
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
The door's open but the ride ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken.
'You take what you find, but you never give up your demand for something better because you know, in your heart, you deserve it. That contradiction is what keeps Springsteen's story, and the promised land's, alive.' (Greil Marcus, review of Born to Run).
One of the remarkable things about Springsteen's music is the way it draws on a variety of styles and influences and recycles them into a unique blend. It is easy to spot Springsteen's influences, and it is an interesting game to play, showing off our own love and knowledge as we go. But it's not the influences that matter, it's what Springsteen as an original artist does with. With his songs, Springsteen has made a powerful and highly original contribution to music as something new that finds its depth and richness in its rootedness in past forms.
With his words and music as something familiar, something recognizably ours in terms of the experiences of our lives, loves, and longings, Springsteen has entered the hearts, minds and souls of millions. He has given voice to the inarticulate, to people who have plenty to say but little voice to say it with, people who despair of even having an audience that is prepared to listen in any case. In Springsteen's songs, Brel's 'les désespérés' are given identity and accorded respect and dignity. These are the hopeless who walk in silence in leading lives of utter despair until the day comes when they fade away in silence and are forgotten in death as they were ignored in life. Giving voice to the voiceless has always been one of the great virtues of the rock'n'roll music I love. Springsteen shares that view, and has lived up to it more than anyone: “Music is one of the tools by which the invisible, the people who were born on the margins, have made themselves visible,” he said. That impulse may have come from folk, country, blues, and gospel, giving voice to the voiceless, but I could care less about fighting turf wars here. That's the world Elvis came from. My musical roots are Elvis and rock'n'roll, and whatever promise that tradition ever made, it has been more than redeemed by Springsteen. I don't rate Springsteen highly because he revisited Woody Guthrie and the folk roots of rock. I rate Springsteen highly because he took these roots and 'fluencies and added something of himself to them and took them further. I'll conclude with a thought on Springsteen I had back in the nineties, looking on back on his achievement in the seventies and eighties, which I think is all the more true today – as we enter the badlands of the troubled times that are sure to come, Springsteen's virtues will come to count for more and more.
Springsteen reassures those who are down with the promise of 'better days,' but read the lines in his songs carefully: these promises are often in the form of youthful boasts, sounding like the cry of those psyching themselves up for an escape or a breakout. It's not so easy to escape the traps and snares and compromises of living. That's what I like about this new song, Hello Sunshine. It's for those who know, those who have had little glimpses of the sun, those on whom the sun never shines for long. Who knows where the sun goes. It exists, it comes, it goes, and one day, who knows, it may stay. Or may not. Brel's 'les désespérés' may be given a voice, but that doesn't mean any of them will be saved.
I like Bruce. He’s a poet-singer, yes, but that's just the job description that doesn't capture precisely what he's about and why he appeals. I think we are entitled to call him the patron saint of hopeless hope. He sings for those almost lost in their utter hopelessness, but who are yet still willing to respond to even the faintest glimmer of hope. It’s not that such people no longer have hopes, it’s just that they have had them dashed so many times by so many people in so many ways that they no longer give expression to them for fear of tempting malign fate to do its worst – yet again. But, who knows, one day those better days may come after all.
Springsteen took the facts of living and internalized them in his songs, sending our own experiences back to us in articulate form.
'I know this is idealistic,' he said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 1984, 'but part of the idea of our band had from the beginning was that you did not have to lose your connection to the people you write for. I don't believe that fame or success means that you lose that connection, and I don't believe that makin' more money means that you lose it. Because that's not where the essence of what you are lies. That's not what separates people. What separates people are things that are in their heart. So I just can never surrender to that idea. Because I know that before I started playing, I was alone. And one of the reasons I picked up the guitar was that I wanted to be part of something. And I practised and I studied and I worked real hard to do that, and I ain't about to give it up now.'
Good. More than three decades on, Springsteen is still grounded in human reality and still connected. That's why he still communicates. I'm just interested in the question as to why, decades after he pulled out of the town for losers to win, he's back in lonesome town yet again. No matter where it is you run, you still take your self with you. You can walk a thousand miles to slip your own skin, and you still won't do it. 'God have mercy on the man / Who doubts what he's sure of.' Brilliant Disguise, yet another brilliant Springsteen song. That self-doubt transgresses to others to poison your relations and connections to the world, drawing you back in on your fractured and frail self.
It’s easy to see Hello Sunshine as a companion piece with The Depression from 2012’s Wrecking Ball. That latter song is hugely significant in that it frames a highly personal message within a religious idiom to give us an insight into the sunshine Springsteen is yearning for:
I've been low, but never this low
I’ve had my faith shaken but never hopeless
I haven't always been strong, but never felt so weak
All of my prayers, gone for nothing
I've been without love, but never forsaken
Now the morning sun, the morning sun is breaking
This is my confession
I need your heart
In this depression
I need your heart
But what you need from others and what you receive are often very two different things; human beings frequently let you down; you let yourself down just as frequently, and never more than when you think you are strong enough to go it alone, or so mired in despair that you see no option but to walk alone; there is a Sun that never forsakes you. You are never without hope with that Sun that always stays. Meet me in that Land of Hope and Dreams where 'faith will be rewarded.'
On paper, life is simple, really. You need something and somebody to love, something to do, something to live for, recognition, a place to call home, a place to rest. You need a good mix and balance of those things, not one or two at the expense of all the others. Try it. And tell me, does the sunshine, if it ever comes, ever stay for long? I still think there's miles to go and that home is miles away; it's going to be a 'long walk home,' and you gotta walk that lonesome valley by yourself, because nobody here can walk it for you. People come and go with the sunshine.
But that's a song Springsteen sang a long while ago now:
But you're gonna find out someday ...
When you're alone you're alone
When you're alone you're alone
When you're alone you're alone
When you're alone you ain't nothing but alone.
Me? I'm Waiting on a Sunny Day and Working on a Dream. As ever.
"Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you"
- Walt Whitman
I'll finish on this. It's wrong to pick favourite Bruce Springsteen tracks, for the reason it breaks up his stories and narratives to focus on the highs and the lows, and life isn't really like that. Springsteen is a remarkably solid artist; there is a great consistency to his work. Many of his most significant observations are made in the quiet songs rather than the big setpieces he is known for. Each album forms a single intelligible whole and needs to be heard in its entirety. The same goes for his body of work.
But I'll pick another favourite, just to make my point. I don't know if this song is underrated, I don't know if it is unknown. I do know it never gets a mention among the many eighties Springsteen classics. And I do know that it's a beauty, far removed from the stadium-anthems he's best known for. I could quote any line from this, but won't. You have to hear the whole, as with any poem. I don't have to try and find words to describe how good this song is: Springsteen's already found all the right ones. He's a poet, I tell you. He's rock'n'roll, an entertainer, and a crowd-pleaser. And he's a poet:
Everybody has a neighbour,
everybody has a friend,
Everybody has a reason
to begin again.
nobody goes it alone.
Certain things are set in stone.
Who we are, what we'll do, and what we won't.
It's gonna be a Long Walk Home (Acoustic ) Live 2016
I've been walking my entire life, and it seems there's still miles to go. But I guess I'll keep walking. We'll see what the weather does. I'll wear a nice cap. I'd rather get wet than be seen with an umbrella.
I'll end there. But if you want more from me on Bruce Springsteen, then please read my Bruce Springsteen as a Catholic Troubadour: Bruce Springsteen and the Catholic Imagination.
It's a challenging piece, because it makes a very strong argument in favour of Bruce Springsteen as a Catholic writer. He left the Church when he was young and he never went back. For the reasons I give, however, Catholicism never left him - it went with him and his writing is steeped in it, all the way from sin to redemption. The hope that people respond to in Springsteen's songs is rooted in something more substantial than the need to please the crowd by giving them the happy endings they want.
'I guess there’s a meanness in the world,' Springsteen has the narrator to Nebraska explain, when asked why he murdered ten people in cold blood. That phrase points to the reality of evil. Sin is not a matter of accident or environment, but is something that is ineradicably present in human nature. Springsteen knows this and says this. He gained that insight from reading the work of Flannery O’Connor and this rekindled the old lessons he had been taught. The Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 has a regular feature called What Makes Us Human. It has occasionally been insightful, but has now become tedious. It is full of people talking about themselves and delivering uplifting messages about how good human beings are. Indeed, human beings sound so good on this show I am left wondering why the world is in the mess it is in, and why we are crying out for redemption. That brings me back to Original Sin. True redemption requires that we have the courage and the conviction to see sin in the first place, identify it, and name it loudly and clearly. I say Springsteen does that, and that makes him a Catholic writer. And I long for the day I hear someone who has the honesty and the guts to say, when asked ‘what makes us human?,’ that greed, envy, pride, all the deadly sins, are the things that make us human, because only then are we in a position to be redeemed. By going in at the other end, identifying all that makes human beings good, we are rendering ourselves vulnerable to the reality of evil, presuming in our pride that everyone else is as good as we are. They are not. I hear the frequent objection that human beings can be good without religion, and therefore morality is independent of religion. Try living it. Not everyone is as good as you are. Treat them as you would be treated, and you will often find that others do not respond in kind. What binding morality will you then cite in your defence? You have presumed a goodness that stands in need of activation within a common and binding moral code. Without it, you are exposed to the reality of evil in the world. You may think it’s wrong for a person to kill another, but don’t presume that that will put an end to murder. ‘I guess there’s a meanness in the world.’ Springsteen understands the power and presence of sin in the world. I am still waiting for the day when someone, responding to the question put to them on BBC Radio: ‘what makes us human?’ – has the nerve to answer clearly and forthrightly: sin. Because only then will our deep longing for redemption be truly satisfied.
'I guess there’s a meanness in the world.' There's a lot of it about. Or maybe there's just a whole lot of hurt and pain that goes without healing, and too many people crying for a help that falls on deaf ears.
'Once a Catholic always a Catholic,' Springsteen has said in interview. In some way, he says, he is still on the team. In this article I have gathered all the references to God and Jesus in his songs - they are many and they are meaningful.
The only thing I did was wrong, was staying in the wilderness too long.
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
So have you find your Sunshine, folks?
In the eyes of God, there is no zero.