Bruce Springsteen

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin Describing Bruce Springstein as a great American singer songwriter is a massive understatement. He's the boss, and at this point, five decades into his remarkable career, Bruce Springsteen is also a national treasure. His voice is unmistakable. Classic anthems like Born to Run, Hungry Heart, and jungle Land defined to the American working class psyche in the seventies and eighties. Today, Bruce has reached rarefied air. He sold more than one hundred and fifty million albums worldwide, and he's won twenty Grammys, and at seventy one years old, there's still no stopping. He recorded his latest album, Letter to You, with the E Street Band in just four days. The album dives deep into the theme of loss and also includes three songs that Bruce wrote fifty years ago. In this interview with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin, Bruce Springsteen talks about how his Irish and Italian sides have physically manifested into songs over the years. He also describes the moment when Barack Obama gave him the idea for his intimate Broadway show, and how listening to Born to Run forty five years after it was released, made Bruce realise just how good he really is. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's Malcolm Gladwell, Rick Rubin and Bruce Springsteen. Congratulations on the new album. Thank you, my friend. It's really good. Thank you, Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Is it the first time that you recorded live with the band in this way? We have had instances where it was not uncommon for us to get the band and track in the studio and then overdub instruments, replace instruments, and over re sing vocals, and that was a pretty common way for us to record in the seventies, and we would occasionally hit something where it was completely live. The record Darkness on the Edge of Town is completely live born in the USA. That one cut is completely live, but it would it was a bit of an exception, and so we've never had a situation where we've brought the entire band in, restricted ourselves to simply the instruments that are in the band, and then cut everything live, including the lead vocal at one time, and we did three hours a song, two songs a day. Amazing, amazing, and both Darkness and Born to Run took a year more to record. Yeah, they Born to Run was a good six or no, probably a year. Born in the USA was a year. Darkness on the Edge of Town was a year. They were all long records because I was searching for the record. That wasn't the recording that took a long time. It was the fact that I was searching for my album in the midst of say twenty thirty forty songs and trying to find out what I had to say, so that in this case I had basically I think I might have one outtake from this record or something, but it's all bay. These were the songs that I had. They all congealed because I wrote them within about ten days. Wow, is that unusual for that to happen a big group of songs in a short period of time. Had a record Nebraska where I did that about three weeks. I had a record Tunnel of Love, where I wrote most of the songs in about three weeks. But it's also not in common to spend a year and a half trying to find an album. So when the when the when the stars are aligned, those songs come in a conceptual package and you know, the gods are with you and it doesn't take long. Do the lyrics typically come first or did the chords come first? Is there any rule in the way that songs come to you? No? No. When I was younger, I would write the lyrics as poetry. All my first album, almost all of the lyrics came first because I had in my mind that I was that kind of a writer and so, and the lyrics were much more dense and a lot more imagery. And that was the only record where really I would say I wrote lyrics first everything else. Sometimes I start with music sometimes that you know, more often you have a line, or if you pick the guitar up and you know you're lucky. If if you get a title, if you get a good title, you're on your way. But sometimes you just pick the guitar up and it comes out of your mouth. You know that that moment is a moment that I have never heard anyone able to explain. I don't believe it's explainable, you know, And that's why it's creative. That's why it's magic. You know. You take at that moment something that is totally not physical, that is simply emotional, spiritual, somewhat intellectual and in the air becomes physical. It manifests itself as a physical piece of music. But what happens at that moment I've never heard anybody describe. Yeah, it's a miracle. It's unbelievable when you get to witness it happening. And do you experience it? I mean when we hear your words often were moved to tears when they come to you, do they hit you in that emotional way or do you hear them more? As these are good lyrics, this makes sense, I like the story. Do you feel it the way the listener feels it? Or is it even possible for you to know? Now I have one leg being the creator, and I have another one that's the audience, and they're there simultaneously. And if I come up with something that's moving, I think I feel the same response even while I'm creating it, that the audience is going to feel. You know, So you're both you're both creator and audience simultaneously, and partially by being the audience, it's assisting you in judging the quality of what you've done. Yeah, it's a great feeling, that feeling of I guess that's the reason we do it. It's the best feeling in the world. There's nothing like that moment when you go there, it is goddamn. I knew I had one more in me, you know. It's one of those moments. And leading up to this album, how much was planned before the songs came in? Other words, did the songs lead the charge or were you thinking, I really want to make an album. It's been a while. What do you feel like? Well, I may feel like I may go My work with the E Street Band is cyclical, so I'll work on some solo projects, but I will cycle my way back around to feeling like, Okay, I want to work with my band, I want to make an album. For lack of a better word, rock music and timing, you know, so you start to get hungry. It's like getting hungry for a steak, you know. It's like, Okay, I think I'm hungry for a steak tonight, you know. And it's a similar thing. You get hungry to work with the guys. You get hungry to make a certain kind of music, to reach a certain type of audience. And it's more of an inner drive that that that's the first thing that you experience and then if you're lucky, you know you'll catch a metaphor you'll catch a title, You'll catch the lines, and songs start to lead the way. Is there a difference between the way you write for the EA Street Band and the way you do solo things? If you take say my last two records, I made a record called Western Stars, and if you if you looked at the characters on that record, there's a very isolated sort of American persona that I wrote from. And if you, if you judge it, with this record, I'm in the middle of a community on this record. So when I work with the band, very often, I'll be writing from the inside of a community. Outward, when I work on my own, I'm studying that sort of isolated American part of the American character, so it will thematically, I'll move in different places. Can you describe the sort of a little more about the emotional feeling of those two I mean, is writing a song in E Street mode? When you say when you're writing inside a community, is that satisfying in a different way? Does it feel differently in the moment. It's funny because I'm sitting there by myself, but I'm imagining this entire sort of community around me, and I'm imagining a different world than the world that I imagine when I'm writing for a solo project. It's just a different place you put your head, you know. You just travel to a different sort of emotional geography, you know, and you place yourself in that world, and you're relating to everything differently. You're relating to the people in the songs differently, And I know that eventually I'm going to actually physically be in the center of that world, which is when I'm at the center of my band and we're about to perform or about to record this music. And so it's a bit of a preparation for actually initially being in that world within the band and then going out and playing that music and being within that world within your audience. Whereas when I'm performing or writing for a solo project, I may or may not tour. I'm really character driven and writing from a more another part of my personality. I guess the way I would describe it as I'm writing from the Irish side of my personality, which is moodier and darker and gloomier. And when I'm writing for the band, I'm writing from the Italian side of my personality, which is Hale brother. Well you know, well met you know, so uh so useful to have those two sides, it is. I was very lucky, you know. My father was very Irish in personality and my mother was totally Italian, and I sort of absorbed both of their approaches towards life, and when I became creative, I really drew on both of their sort of all of our ethnic background. There. You've talked about your dad's depression, yeah, and that you've you have some of those seeds in you, oh yeah. And what are the things that have helped you to move through those And when was your first experience of recognizing, oh, I have this too. I hit a wall when I was thirty two years old. I wrote Nebraska, And after Nebraska, I traveled across the country with a friend of mine and it was on that trip that I realized something was amiss. I was always able to count on the miles, the music to a suage, whatever my demons were, but on that trip it was the first time for some reason where it felt like it's just not doing the job. And when I got to La I was completely an anxious mess and I had no idea what to do with myself next, and all I knew was I need help. I've hit the wall. I don't know where to go with this. My usual remedies that worked in my twenties, music, this, that, touring, traveling are not working for me anymore. I've got to find another answer. And I began analysis when I was thirty two. I did it for thirty years. Change your life, Yes, absolutely, it gave me the rest of my life, you know, the fulfillment of family, of love and being able to be loved, of delving deeper into your own history and your own essence, and that affecting your creativity. It gave me another The way that I would describe it as you sort of you're standing in front of a brick wall and you think you're seeing all that the world is, and then suddenly you start pushing and suddenly a brick drops out and you look through into this complete other experience and existence and you go, fuck, you know WHOA I've been living on such a limited level and it just expands your expanded my vision. It also helped it helped rid me of my depression. That and also pharmacology has played a big part in giving me my life back, and that's been very important. Also, it affect your writing, I imagine. No, I have never noticed that my depression ever affected my writing, or that any medications I've ever taken affected my writing. When I was deeply, deeply, deeply depressed, I could always still work and write. For some reason, it never affected that part of my creative life or personality. I'm almost asking the other way around, like, do you look at the songs you wrote pre therapy as written by a smaller aspect of who you are, and that through therapy you've expanded your vision. I don't know if that's I'm leading. That's a leading question. Yeah it is, and I can tell you that no, I don't because I look back and I The forty fifth anniversary of Born to Run was about a week or two ago, and so I was with a buddy of mine and I said, Hey, I'm going to do an anniversary cruise. I'm play Born to Run start to finish. I was like, okay. So Sunday morning, we got in a car, put it on, and I realized, that's one of the best records I've ever made. You know, Yeah, if I listened to Nebraska, I go, that's one of the best records I ever made, so the dealing with my own personal depression. The material I wrote previous to that really was unscathed and untouched and did and it did not limit the scope of my writing in any way, in any real way, I wrote. I look back and say, some of my best records were pre pre analysis and post analysis. Has music inspired your writing more than anything else? Or has literature played a role in lyrics and song structure for you? Everything I learned musically I probably learned between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty eight, between when I was fifteen and eighteen, I was a student, an astute student of Top forty radio, where the masters of songwriting and record making were existed at that moment in time. I studied that like it was for my master's degree, and I would say that baby into the early seventies, but shortly thereafter I stopped looking towards music for specific information, and I began in the late seventies to get more inspiration from reading a lot of film, a lot of noir, James M. Kin, Flannery O'Connor, Jim Thompson, and from watching films john Ford and Howard Hawks, and a lot of film noir. So I began to get a lot more inspiration from literature and film the older that I got. Just talk a little bit about more about this album. Many things fascinating about it, but one was that you include a number of songs from way back when. Yeah, First of all, what was behind that decision? Start with that, why? Why? Why did you? Why did you want to put these? Particularly if I was the priest. As most creative things, it's a non decision. I don't operate from deciding first. I operate from an internal hunger and my decisions come from there. So in this case, I happened to record a song that's on the record called Janey Needs a Shooter, and I recorded it. I said, I'm going to record this for a record day in the United States. You put one song out, but I recorded it with the band the way that we cut darkness on the Edge of Town, and it sounded like darkness on the Edge of Town, and I said, Wow, that's how the band really sounds when we play live. And I haven't caught that in the studio in a long time. And so I'm going to keep this for some future album, and so having one song that was forty five years old. I then was working on a box set of outtakes, the first of which was an entire album of songs I cut for John Hammond when he asked me to make a demo. He produced a demo for me when I first went to Columbia. These songs were amongst those songs, and I said, well, a couple of these might be fun for the band to play. So it just kind of fell into place, and when we played them, they were a lot of fun to play, and the band came up with great arrangements for them, and and that's how they ended up on the record. Why didn't these songs make it onto earlier records just by chance or no? It's like, you know, you're you're so fickle as an artists are so fickle, you know they you know you have this music and then you write something new and boom, you forget about that and you're onto the next thing. By the time I had a chance to record my first album, i'd already made an album that but I put that one aside because I had new music and I wanted to put what was what I had newest out and so there was an album was pre Greetings from Asbury Park that was all of this acoustic music with this type of lyric writing, and more than an album, almost two albums and an album and a half that never got released. How does it feel, too, for the first time release song that you wrote years ago? Yeah, the song, the two songs if I were the priest and song for obums fifty years old, and it felt like I wrote them yesterday, except except I wouldn't write in that style now. You know that very verbose, heavy amount of images. I just don't write that way anymore. I write more colloquially, and so it was kind of fun to wrap my head around, you know, singing all those words again. I realized, gee, this was really a great part of my writing, my writing life, and I kind of left it too soon because of the new Dylan comparisons. I got sensitive about it, and I put it away a little too soon, because really I kind of had my own style of writing in that style, and looking back, I said, I wouldn't have mind making another record or two in that style. But I was very sensitive to I was young, sensitive about creating my own identity, and so I left that style of writing behind rather quickly. You hear it on the first three albums, and you hear it less each album, you know, and by the time I get the darkness, I'm done with it. There's still time to make those albums, you know. I know I got all the materials sitting there. I may do that. So you played if I was a priest for Hammond. You were auditioning for Hammond. Yes, one of the most legendary figures in rock and roll history. Could you take us back to that moment? Were you scared? I was on the elevator going up to what might have been the thirtieth floor in Black Rock, which was with my manager and he John Hammond, to give you an idea what the record business was like. We're seeing no buddies who he did not know at all off the streets of New York City, who simply talked their way through. His secretary Michapelle was very good at that and he did it. So here we have. We've got a thirty minute audition with John Hammond. We go up. On the way up, I'm going, well, it's like this, I have nothing. When I come back, I'm not going to have any less than I have right now, so I'm trying to talk myself into not being nervous. It almost worked, but not quite. What else did you play for him? Do you remember I played? If I were the priest? I played The first song I played for him was It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City, which ended up on my first record, and I believe I played a song for him called Growing Up. I only played about three songs and he and after I played I played one song, and he said, you gotta be on Columbia Records. Wow, oh wow, it was that. It was that sudden. He didn't wait to hear the second one. I played the first, So you gotta be on Columbia Records. I said, okay. We always invite the people we interview on broken record to play little bits of songs that they want to I would love I'd love to hear a piece of whatever you want. But I was going to suggest, if I was a priest, can we recreate the John Hammond audition here? Oh man, I don't know. I don't I don't know if I even know those words. I know, because there's a yeah wait. John Hammond apparently said the minute he heard that song, he knew you were a Catholic. Oh yeah, yeah, he was really excited about it. That's what he loved. He loved the screwed up Catholicism in it. Wait, it was he Catholic? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so it's funny that he could spot it right away. Yeah, but you're a You're a double cat, like you're a special breed with Italian one side, Irish on the other. You're like a You're like the most powerful kind of Catholic hybrid. Yeah. We're steep steeped, steeped, steeped in it. So it's my lot in life. We'll be back with Bruce Springsteen after a quick break. We're back with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Springsteen. How is your spiritual life now? What's your spiritual life like? Uh? I don't think about it very much. I guess if if I look at it, i'd say it comes through in my music, you know. And and then and just the general your general behavior during the day. Uh, and what you see reflected in your children as to how well you've done and how well you've lived over the years. You know. I got some solid citizens that we've raised and makes Patty and I proud, And they got good inner their inner core is strong and and and righteous, and uh so we go, well, we must have something right, you know, we must be. We didn't. We had no dogma or religion, but we just had a way of living that I hope passed on a little bit of righteousness for them. And so uh if I if I observe it in any way, it's purely through listening and looking back at my songs and seeing where they were influenced by my Catholic faith and and or by a spirituality in general. I basically consider myself a spiritual songwriter in that primarily I want you to dance. I want to entertain you. I want you to listen to my music and wash your clothes and and and vacuum your floor. And I'm also trying to address your soul. So beautiful and this album, I mean, it's a powerful steam of loss in this album. Yeah you talk, I mean you you have lost a lot of people close to you over the last few years. Well, you know, death is funny because when you're Italian and Irish, you get very used to death. When you're very young because of the wakes, you know, I was too many wakes when I was six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old, where the body is just in the room for days at a time and people are drinking and laughing and visiting and everyone's excited to be together. And I went through a lot of that as a child. And then you leave home, you reach your twenties, and for a long time, unless there's something unusually tragic, death is not a big part of your life twenties, thirties, even forties. But once you get into your fifties, sixties and seventies, it rears its head again and people begin to die from natural causes and from illnesses, and it becomes once again at a part of your life. And so it's become a natural part of my writing life. Also, is there a song? Do you have a favorite on this album? I like the House of a Thousand To Tell Ours is one of my favorites. How do you choose a favorite song? Like? What is it that? What are the criteria that in your own mind makes something a song special? I knew when I was writing it. I knew that, uh, there was just something to it that spoke to me, you know, Uh, and while I was writing, I said, oh, that's a great title. Yeah, I just said, House of a Thousand Guitars is a great title. If I can write a song and make that title work, I'm good, you know. So so I got very excited about it and finished the song. You know, it addresses the world that I've attempted to create with my fans and audience and amongst my band and and uh and and and just the world at large, you know. And so it was it's just my it's it's just one of my favorite songs. Record as your relationship to any of the songs changed over time, like you said, you did ah listen to Born to Run recently for the forty fifth anniversary, and when you listen back, I know you liked it. Did it did anything strike you as surprising or did any of the meanings change? What was the experience like? The experience was like, damn, I was good when I was twenty four years old, you know, it was like and sort of being surprised. One thing I was surprised at is how well it was recorded. It really, when I played it back, it sounded quite modern. And then I was a little shocked at the depth and detail of the music that I was writing at that age, because I didn't really play that well. I mean I had a little Aolian Spinnett piano that was half out of tune, and I wrote all of those introductions to jungle Land to Backstreets, Meeting across the River. Born to was written largely on piano, which is why Roy Bitten plays such a stellar role on the record, because I wrote most of the songs on the piano, and so I think I went back and it was it was just fun to realize, Wow, I was really, I was really. My musical tastes and abilities were quite sophisticated for when I was so young, because I probably wrote most of Born to Run when I was just twenty four, and we recorded it and released it when I was twenty five. And you play those songs, you play many of those songs live over the years, but you probably don't have much opportunity or reason to go back and listen to the album. No, I probably I didn't listen to the record. I think I listened to it on its fortieth anniversary, but before that probably not in twenty years was there any moment in listening to it where you were taken it back, where you heard something that you don't remember it was there, or something it took you by surprise. No, I think it was just when I listened to the thing, to listen to it and its entirety, how complete and full it was, and how well conceived it was, given how young I was. You know, if I hear one of the cuts, I go, yeah, it's pretty good. But if I hear the album and its entirety, I go, it's a little better than that. Do you do you ever realize anything about yourself looking back on the songs? Yeah, your songs are generally out in front of your personal development. They're like a divining rod. You know. What you write about is something you sort of you're the self realization can come a year or six months or two years. Oh fuck, look I knew this back two years ago, but it was in this song, and I didn't really realize that about myself, you know, for that period of time. So your inner life, you're subconscious, tends to be out in front of your self awareness, which is pretty much the same with everybody. In my case, I record it, I actually record that subconscious and then have a chance to go back and and and literally look at it and realize that it took me a while to get there personally. Would you say most songs start from the subconscious and then work their way up or or do some songs just start intellectually for you? Uh? Anything that starts intellectually usually sucks. Uh. You know, I almost I almost always depend on uh some on some inner life sending a message to my brain to get active and to employ the mechanics that I've learned over and the craft I've learned over the years. But it always comes out of the heart and soul first. So Uh, that's that's that's generally the process of my writing. Have you ever kept a dream journal? Um? I never kept a journal, But I'm an active and dreamer, and I dream and remember what I dream easily four nights a week or so. You know. Always been a very active dreamer. And the only time I kept a bit of a journal was when I was doing some dream work with my therapist. Would you say that a song comes up like a dream comes up? Is there a relationship? No. All the years that I've followed my dreams, I've written one song out of a dream that was worth anything, and it's just a little sleeper on a record called working on a Dream as a matter of fact, called Surprise Surprise. It's a nice little song, and I actually came up with it. Usually when you're dreaming, if you write something, you think it's phenomenal, and then you wake up and you actually play it and it's not very good at all. You know the dream, and the dream enhances your experience of it. There was literally just one song where it paid off in the end. How much of who you are came from what you've learned versus inborn, that's probably a fifty fifty. I'd say you know nurture and nature, I would I would say that you come out with a certain personality, and that personality infects everything you do, your behavior, and what you create for the rest of your life. Then you learn your craft, and you process who you are through your craft and through the mechanics of what you've learned. But I think the essence of who you are comes is with you at birth. I think it can be distorted. You can irreparably harm that person and you can do great destruction to it, and in which case your life will take different paths. But if it's even remotely nurtured. I believe that there's such a it's such a strong force that it's going to push through and you're going to find some expression for it in some form as as as life goes as your life goes by, you know. But I kind of go half and half with that because I got into, say a lot of noir writing and film noir, and there you get Nebraska and goes to Tom Jod and Devils and Dust where I write a lot of noir stories in my in my narrative writing and the kind of narrative writing that I do, So uh, that comes from just what I was attracted to. But but also then I'd have to say, but that really came out of the Irish part of my personality. That that that I was was given from my father, So you can trace it immediately back to your your birth. Also, what was the music playing around your house when you were growing up? No music, real music, No no music, no books, no films. It was strictly television and Top forty radio. When did you first start playing piano? I was really young. My my aunt had a piano in her fourier and we would visit my Italian grandmother who lived to be a hundred years old, every Sunday. And so when my mother was upstairs with her mother, because they only spoke Italian, I was downstairs in the fourier tinkling around on my aunt's piano and I started to make some noise out of it, and so she said, here, I'm going to give you a key to the house, and when you leave school, if you want, you can come into the house and play the piano. And so I started to come home from school and I go to my aunt's house. Nobody was there, and I would just start practicing the piano. I was in my teens, and I became a relatively proficient accompanyist. You know, nothing special, but I can accompany myself relatively well. You said you wrote the songs were born to run on the piano. Is that typical for you or is that unusual to write a whole album on piano. I haven't done it in a long time. This record, A Letter to You was primarily on guitar. Back in that time, I wrote Racing in the Street. A song called Racing in the Street was on piano. I probably that was That was a bit of a unique record in that I wrote a lot of but if you go back and hear all the musical introductions and things, you'll see how it was piano based. How many songs have you written that you haven't released. Oh, at least a hundred. Wow, you know, and we already put out a big six to seventy box set of stuff from the vault, you know, ten years ago. But I still have tons of stuff left. Are you writing all the time? No? I write very rarely, and I didn't write a rock song in seven years before I wrote this batch in ten days. So I write when the writing is there and when I'm sort of inspired, and I don't worry about not writing. You never had that kind of crisis moment, panic moment you think the well is dry. Of course you have that all the time. But you said you never worry about not writing. You manage your anxiety. Well. Is that it? Yeah, I've I have that all the time, and I'm used to that feeling, you know, so so in a sense when I feel like that, and you always feel like that, after you've written a good song, you go, oh, I hope that's not the last one, you know, But I've kind of gotten used to that being part of the natural state of writer's consciousness, you know in that Uh, it's such a magic trick and you and you and you are it's so out of your control, even after all the craft that you've learned, that you know, you just don't know how you do it. And so, uh, you know, I can sit here and say, gee, I'd like to write another album, you know, but uh, I know it'll come along at some point. I don't know how or when, So I'm both. I guess the best way to explain it was, I'm comfortable with the anxiety. Does it usually come with one song? Is that? Is that how it starts? If you haven't written for a while, will a song come? It'll come with a song, and if it's a good song, and if it's if it's working around a theme you haven't worked before. Like what I did on this record, I took as my subject music itself and rock and roll itself as an idea, and uh, the ideas of bands themselves as an idea. And I've never written about that subject before. So when I locked onto that first thing, I realized there was a small but deep well of other songs that I that I had and things I had to say about that idea and about the passing of time and losing band members and losing old friends, and what it's like at this age to be doing in my line of work. So uh yeah, if you're lucky, you know you'll you'll lock onto something and more than you will tap a little vein and more than one song will come out. Did the subject matter come before the first song or did the song come and give you the subject matter? The circumstances came before the song. I had a very close friend who passed away who was the last besides me, was the last member of my first band, so that left me as the only surviving member. And I thought about that a lot. I didn't think about it in the sense okay, now I'm going to write some music about this. But I thought about it a lot, and then a song came out. You know, little strange things happened. I had a kid give me a guitar outside of the Broadway Theater and an Italian kid was standing there one night and he had a guitar in his stand and I thought he wanted me to sign it. So they said no, no, no, no, no no, no blues blues, this is for you. We had a made for you, and I took it and on the way home I looked at it and it was made from beautiful wood. It played gorgeously and sounded wonderful, and I left it in my living room. And that was the guitar that most of the songs came out of. So, uh, you know, it was another bit of lucky happenstance, you know. Would you say most of the albums had a triggering moment, like either some life experience that starts the first song that leads to the journey of the album. Yeah, I would say that perhaps, you know, But also it's sort of like there's car. You start your car and it runs, Oh great, an album comes out. You start your car, it runs for half an hour, breaks down, doesn't run for two weeks, started again, written nothing again. Nothing. Records have made like that, you know, where I've written a song, I've written six songs that I think are really record worthy, and then I spent a year trying to write six more. You know. So it's simply not predictable, and you have to get used to withstanding that anxiety, and you have to get comfortable with it. Because born in the USA, I think I wrote eight or nine of those songs, and then and then spent a year waiting for Dancing in the Dark, Bobby Jean and No Surrender, and Wow, that was just the way it went. I didn't have an album until I had that music, even if I had nine good songs sitting there. We'll be back with more from Bruce Springsteen. After a quick break, We're back with the rest of Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell's conversation with Bruce Springstein. How many people were in the original E Street Band? The original E Street Band was a five piece band. There was one keyboard, No, yeah, one keyboard, and then I played keyboards. Sometimes there was a keyboard, a guitar, a bass player, a drummer, and a saxophonist. It was a little club rock and soul band. And when did it start expanding? The last time I saw you play, I think there were It felt like there were more people on stage than I could count. The last time. We might have carried horns, horns and singers on that tour. Generally, the band, the stable membership of the band is myself, Steve van Zette on the guitar, Nils Lofgren on the guitar, Gary Tallon on the bass, Max Weinberg on the drums, Charlie Jordano on the organ, Roy Bitten on the piano, and Jake Clemens on the saxophone. I think that's nine people, and that's the hardcore of the E Street Band. Now do you recall what was going on the first time you decided not to make an album with the East Street Band. Let me think that would have been Nebraska, I guess. And I was planning to make Nebraska with the East Street Band, but what I ended up with came about us being such an accident. I ended up with a cassette that I had in my back pocket that I carried around for several months while trying to rerecord that music with the E Street Band in the studio, and everything we record it sounded too slick, it sounded too bright, you know, and and I lost all the mystery that came out of the happy accidents that occurred in my little bedroom. So eventually, after trying for quite a while, I just pulled the tape out and said, this is it. This is the record. It's either going to come out on cassette or on vinyl. And that's and and that's the way it was. And then after that, solo records came up, just to get some relief from working with the band. Initially, the next solo record I made was Tunnel of Love, which I made in my garage with me and another guy, and I played all the instruments, but it was just the relief to sort of get away from the pressure of having to record with the band and having to just use this these particular musicians, this set of instrumentation. I needed to have more freedom than that, and so it just came around very naturally. Is Nebraska the only album that you ever made that you didn't know you were making the album while you were making it? Uh? Yeah, yeah, I've I've made other There's a record called Devils and Dust that but no I knew I was recording for something then. But Nebraska was really where I was just trying to make a demo to see if the songs were any good, and I ended up making an album amazing. I remember, as a fan of yours, the album that took me by surprise was Nebraska because it was the first time I had seen the Irish side of you and the adoption of this quintessentially America. I mean I thought of you as you know, ethnic New Jersey, immigrant kind of America, and then all of a sudden you were playing Heartland character. Yeah, and that took me by I mean, I was blown away by the album, but it took me by surprise. I'm curious did it take lots of people by surprise? Did you? Was that in retrospect? Was Nebraska a hugely important kind of transition album? It was for me because I studied a whole I came upon a whole type of writing that really began on the River album. With the River and with a song called Stolen Car, there was a narrative type of writing, a storytelling type of writing that that maybe would go back to Woody Guthrie or or Talking Blues or but basically it was it was inspired by by books and cinema that I was interested in at that moment, and also of creating a character that was wider than just the character that came out of New Jersey, that was just a broader American voice I was interested in at that time. So, yeah, the record came out, people didn't know what to make of it. It got a little bit of airplay. It got a lot of nice reviews, and I didn't tour on it, and it disappeared rather shortly. I'm very surprised to how you say it disappeared, because I feel like it's one of the records that has had the greatest long term Yeah, I'm just me sort of commercially, you know, uh, but but it has. If I meet young a lot of young people, that's their record for one reason or another. Maybe because it came up shortly after the punk revolution, and I've seen it described as one of the first punk acoustic albums. You know, so's it sort of is in a funny way, and that it was completely done at home. Do it yourself cost a thousand bucks little four track tape player mixed onto a beatbox through a Gibson guitar. Ecoplex that was that was running slow, and just this mysterious creation came out of it. You know, do you think that the kinds of people who are were attracted to that record and to the subsequent iversh side, if you want to use that paradigm, are different kind of fan for that music than you are for your for the other kinds of music. Yeah. Yeah, When I play I have a lot of different types of audiences, you know, And I believe I have an audience that's probably interested in that sort of what I do and maybe a little less of the electric side of what I do. Though, I think I've an audience that pretty much follows me through through both iterations of my creative life. But but I'm very conscious at night, when we come out in the stadium or in an arena of the fact that i'm playing. I'm playing to casual listeners, I'm playing to hardcore listeners, and so I try to build a show that sort of addresses those things, you know, but I play to I have to be aware that I'm playing to a lot of different audiences at once. Do you remember what the first song you wrote for Nebraska was? I believe it was Nebraska itself. This is an a side, but I love I love Nebraska so completely, and it was my moment when I came for the Italian and stayed for the for the irishman um and but with Nebraska, the Frankie and Johnny song redeems the whole album. Oh it's I always it was always the one that stuck up a hit because it's the one where the guy does the he does the moral he's the he does the morally right thing. Man stick like man gives up on his family, he ain't no good whatever the whatever that line is. The rest is about these people who have somehow kind of fallen away or and then and then in the middle of it you have the sheriff who understands it is his connection to his brought up is more important than his badge. And it's just I just thought that was suddenly this like this ray of sunshine comes through in that and it just put that album on a different level for me. Well, the the whole record is about a fallen world. You know, we all have to live in that song. You're right, there's a little bit of redemption in it, and it's one of my favorite songs on the record, Highway Patrolman. More than a little bit, wait, Bruce, more than a little bit. A lot of it it is. There's a whole lot of redemption that's Jesus on the Cross in that album. That's like, yeah, yeah, I hear you on the subject of Catholicism. Since we're s dancing around it, you said in a conversation with Martin Chris scrase. Last year you were talking about how much of your work is informed by having gone to Catholic school, and then we have that John Hammond comment about I knew you were a Catholic. Can you put your can we can you put your finger on what is the what is the Catholic part of of your music? Well, you know, I guess if I look back, it was great fear of a spiritual darkness is impressed upon you when you're very, very young. That's one thing. Perhaps the ability to work towards a spiritual light is also impressed rest upon you. So these those are very high stakes. And if you live your life with with with those stakes on the table, it'll be an interesting experience, you know, And that may be at the center of what my Catholic upbringing does for my music and perhaps for me also, you know, that might explain some of it. I was gonna I was gonna ask Bruce if you if you wanted to play another song off this Thist album and give us a little bit of the of the backstory. Okay, let me let me see what I can find here. This was the song that kicked off the writing for the entire record because it was most directly about my friend George who passed away, and about those particular time in my in my playing life. Everything everything came out of that song. All the rest of the songs came out of the world that I began to create in that song. You talked earlier about writing for the band, and you imagine the song in your head before you record it with the band, is the mission to get it to sound like what you hear in your head or you sometimes surprised by what the band contributes in the process of making the record. Well, I try to get it to sound like I hear it in my head, but I don't limit it to what I'm hearing in my head. Usually you don't get it to sound like you hear it in your head. You know. It's sort of a guide, you know, But when it works, as it worked on this record, all I knew is like, yeah, these are rock songs. I want them to sound kind of glorious. And so when the band came in and performed them, this was a case where I got more out of you know, we have I have a good producer, we have good recording technique right now, and the sound of the record is really quite lovely, and so I got. I got a little more out of it than I might have been imagining when I came in, and that's always a sweet surprise. I think it's it's the best band record I've made with my band in a in a very long time, you know. So I'm I'm very, very excited about it, and I can't wait to get out in one of these days and actually play it for my fans. Once knock on Wood COVID passes, it will be how many years since you and the band have been touring. I believe we haven't toured now in two going on three, so I think the last time we toured was twenty seventeen, perhaps, you know, counting our lucky stars. I'm looking towards twenty twenty two. I can't imagine there's really going to be anything going on this next year, and I'm hoping if I think, if things work out ideally, twenty twenty two is would be the earth earliest that you could expect people are going to feel comfortable going shoulder to shoulder again anywhere. Yeah, and you've you've never gotten tired of touring? No, I love to travel. I like staying in hotels I like being in strange in different towns, and I still like it as much as I did when I was young, though I'm very happy now to actually have a real home to come back to. Yeah, beautiful. You mentioned in the I think it was in the Broadway piece you talked about blank pages and the feeling of having nothing when you were young, the sense of not having anything to do, and feeling this freedom going forward even though there was there was nothing really to look forward too, but you just had a sense of freedom. So sure, do you ever want to re embrace with that and stop working and create a new blank page and imagine a life of just whatever that would be freedom. I would have to ruin my entire existence to do that, which I'm sort of not exactly willing to do at this late date, you know. But but I still have that sense of my life makes room for those blank pages within a certain set of limitations, and that satisfies me. You know that this whole album and experience with the band was an entirely blank page that we got to fill from absolutely nothing, So I'm satisfied with that. It's kind of this kind of a personal question. I love the Broadway Show. I really love the Broadway show, and I want to talk about how that came about, what gave you the idea. But the personal part of it is you talk a lot about being a con man of sorts or a phony in you start. You start the show that way, and you talk about how the songs are not necessarily representative of your life, but more maybe if your dad, or of things that you've seen, the situate, your situation growing up. With the stories, the news stories that you told in the play, are they all really your experiences or are those also embellished? Well, I would say that I have a funny job, and that when you write and sing something and you do it really well, it's so credible that people simply believe it's you. Of the time. There is an emotional truth, a spiritual truth that you have to draw up from inside of your essence for that piece of work to be credible. But how you said it, the incidences, the details, the story itself can be something a complete work of imagination, you know, So you have to be able to draw on your own inner truth. But at the same time you can dress it up in any monkey suit that you want. And I often do you know and So writing is largely an act of the imagination, but which is where you get your your your geography or your detail of character. But for that character in geography to come to life into a real, breathing world, you've got to tap into your own true inner life. So if you when you're doing both of those things, you're writing well, beautiful, beautiful. So tell me about how the Broadway Show came about. Broadway Show came about by accident. I was invited to the White House by Barack Obama to perform in his last two weeks that he was at the White House. And so I said, I don't want to bring the bands too big a hassle. I'll play some acoustic songs. And then I said, well, what am I gonna do. I'll read from my book and I'll play some acoustics songs. And so I came into the studio here and I spent about two hours picking out segments of the book and then a song to go with it. And then I realized I had to slightly rewrite the book so it sounded colloquial. Prose writing and speaking are not the same thing. So I rewrote the pieces a little bit, so it sounded just like I was speaking off the top of my head. I went and I performed it at the White House, about ninety minutes of the play, which I put together in about four hours here in the studio, and at the end of the play, Barack Obama got on The President got on stage and he says, hey, I know you did that just for us, but that should be a show, you know. And so on the way back from Washington, I was with my manager, John Landau and my wife Patty, and we said, yeah, that should be a show. So well, and we started talking about a venue, and I realized if it was going to be a show, I played the two hundred people in the East Room, but if it was going to be a show, I needed a very small audience that was very controllable or I could get an enormous amount of cooperation and silence. And it had to be a very intimate environment. And those jewel Box theaters are on Broadway. So that's how I ended up there. Was it a fun experience, best experience of my life, one of the greatest. Wow. Wow, was it difficult doing the same material day after day. I loved it because I always first of all, it was a world that I loved entering. It really got me in touch with my past, and it was sort of summational as sort of this is a little bit of what I've learned up to now. And I enjoyed inhabiting those characters every night, and I found something in it every night, and right up to the very last night, I was having the time of my life. Were the audiences consistently reacting in the same spots or might depending on the night? Did different things move people differently? Yeah, the audiences would vary night to night. You know, some nights a little roundy, or some nights you know a little more expressive, other nights listening a little deeper. There was a level, a general level of consistency that I found comforting and good to play too. But there's no I've never played the two audiences that are alike, not on any night of any night of my work life. I've never seen two audiences that are the same or where the alchemy is the same two nights in a row. It just doesn't. It's impossible to happen. Did you feel more of a sense of direct communication with the audience than you would in a concert set up? No, not necessarily. The mechanics are very, very different, but you still have to connect your mind. You have to meet mind to mind and heart to heart and soul to soul. Whether you're at Giants Stadium or whether you're in a nine hundred seat theater on Broadway, the mechanics of connection are the same. You know, you've got to draw on your emotional life, your spiritual life, your intellectual self, your physical self when you play with the band, and you know you've just got to meet that audience face to face as intensely as you can. So even though the situations are very different, the fundamental act is very similar. I'm so happy that you made it. I really am. It's like, thank you. It feels good. Thank you. What's your favorite and least favorite part of your job. I suppose the least favorite would be the prying into your private life, which I don't experience much anymore because I'm pretty much old and people are in and people are a lot less interested in you, you know. But when I was younger, I really raise the level of my anxiety, and I uh, I resented that a little bit, but I learned to live with it because that's that this as they say in the Godfather, this is the life we've chosen, And uh so that would be my least favorite. My most favorite is simply getting on stage and playing. That's that's the you know, and having that moment with the audience and with my band and or with or with the on on Broadway, with the situation like that. That's that's the thing I love to do best. Beautiful, Well, how do we do, guys? I think we did great. I can't tell you how how much fun this has been and an honor great man. I I'm a fan of both you guys, and I had a great time doing it. Thanks to the Boss for taking us deep into his writing process and for planes and music. You can hear his new album Letter to You, along with all of our favorite Springsteen songs on my playlist at broken podcast dot com, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcasts. There you can find extended cuts of new and old episodes. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Artine Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and his executive Produced by Melobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and If you like Broken Record, please remember to share, rate, and review our show on your podcast staff. I'm Justin Richmond bass