SOUL SURMISE

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball song by song - Land Of Hopes And Dreams

(here is my song by song on Land Of Hopes and Dreams... It takes excerpts from my book The Rock Cries where an entire chapter takes the title of this song... and adds my up to date thoughts of the Wrecking Ball version...)
 

The first time I heard Springsteen's Land Of Hopes and Dreams was way back in 1999, thirteen years before a studio version would be released. At that concert in Dublin it was the epiphany, the surprise, the twist in the tale. Land Of Hopes and Dreams, the brand new encore became more like a closing hymn and left me reassessing this gig and Springsteen’s career in the most spiritual of ways. The song has two much older brothers. Curtis Maysfield’s People Get Ready has been the subject of cover versions from Bob Dylan to U2 to Jeff beck and Rod Stewart and Springsteen was readily acknowledging the relationship by dropping bits of it into Land Of Hopes and Dreams on his 2003 tour. Woody Guthrie starts and ends his book Bound For Glory with the template the Springsteen uses. Interestingly though Guthrie’s train “don’t carry no gamblers/Liars thieves and big-shot ramblers.” Bruce gets his Christian grace theology a whole lot better as his train picks up passengers on its road to glory, heaven, another land where, saints, sinners, losers, winners, whores, gamblers and as Dylan put it in another sibling of the song, “every hung out person in the whole wide universe” would hear the chimes of freedom crashing. Springsteen of course sang that Dylan song as the theme tune of the 1988 Amnesty Tour.

...

This train…
Carries saints and sinners
This train
Carries losers and winners
This train
Carries whores and gamblers
This train
Carries lost souls
This train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train
Faith will be rewarded
This train
Hear the steal wheels singing
This train
Bells of freedom ringing…

Springtseen's train is actually full of every character and song that Springsteen has ever written about. Between him and Tom Waits they have been the two songwriters to most poetise the kind of marginalized people that Jesus sought out and had most time for. They have on the whole given these characters the very sympathy and hope that Jesus did. Just as Jesus never judged them or damned them to hell the way he did the religious and self righteous. And here they all are filling the carriages and heading towards the light leaving all that darkness in albums gone by, heading for the place where the character in The Ghost Of Tom Joad was waiting for a time “when the first would be last and the last would be first.”

...

The soul call start and the addition of Gospel choir in the studio version on Wrecking Ball sets the song beautifully into its genre. This was Springsteen looking back at the Negro Spirituals before he he got to singing all the songs from that genre during The Seeger Sessions in 2005. Like the Spirituals it conjures an alternative imagining of the future that chnages the dignity of the marginalised in this world. It is where eschatology meets rock n roll and those two things could never have got onto the same tram line without the Negro Spiritual. It reverberates with hope and justice and God's good grace. It is I believe one of his finest moments and it took a long time for him to find a place on a record for it to fit. It fits wonderfully on Wrecking Ball as we have come out of the record's darkness and through Rocky Ground we head for the

"People get ready

You just thank the Lord"

repeat to fade...

Wow!

 

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball song by song; Rocky Ground

This is Bruce’s most ambitious stretching of his musical template on Wrecking Ball. With its hip hop Fugees-like sound and Gospel-like samples, choirs and singer Michelle Moore this is as far out an experiment as Bruce has ever done even including the horrendous 12” mix of Cover Me in the mid 80s. Does it works? Well even where it doesn’t I’ve been so disappointed with Springsteen-by-numbers these past twenty years that I’d say fair play for the courage!

I also forgive all the fancy sounds because of the content of the lyric. The record has moved through the rocky ground of a people getting battered by the thieving of bankers and though Christianity leaves shards of light across the first two thirds of Wrecking Ball it is in the last three songs where it becomes the bedrock of all hope. In Rocky Ground the call is for the shepherd to guide the people to higher ground. It is full of prayer and angels, judgement and Jesus who is overturning tables in the Temple. The song is not without some doubt and rocky ground but you sense that Wrecking Ball has turned a corner and found something to hope in that might give it confidence in what to hope for.

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball song by song - Wrecking Ball

This is where the record reaches as far into the deep and thorny thickets of the dark before the turn towards some light and hope. The America that doesn’t care and the fat bankers who have left the workers poor and the towns desolate are asked to being on their wrecking balls because the ordinary man and woman are made of stronger stuff. Wrecking Ball is a defiant look into the eye of his hometown coming down and saying, ”bring it on, knock it down and see if you can take away my soul.” Though strong in attitude there is not the glimpses of hope we found in previous songs to help stand up to it but stand up we will nonetheless!

In the middle of the dark some wisdom is discovered...

“Yeah, we know that come tomorrow, none of this will be here
So hold tight on your anger, you hold tight on your anger
Hold tight to your anger, don't fall to your fears
Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust
And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust
When the game has been decided and we're burning down the clock
And all our little victories and glories have turned into parking lots
When your best hopes and desires are scattered through the wind
And hard times come, and hard times go”

This is the same wisdom as U2 filtered in Walk On when they realised you had to leave all the material worldly things we make and do behind as they headed for a place that needed to be “believed to be seen”. It is the message of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes which tells that all that we do under the sun makes no sense unless we have a perspective from above the sun (thank you Charles Swindoll); the momentary under the spotlight of the eternal. It is a wake-up call to what we are investing are lives in.

Bruce Springsteen' Wrecking Ball song by song - This Depression

 

A love song in the middle of all this dense and, for the first two thirds, dark piece of writing is almost a welcome break. But it isn’t an ordinary love song. This is a love song where love is the resource that sees the protagonist through this depression. It is a bluesy kind of love song laced once again with the guitar of Tom Morello who plays a blinder. There is a Darkness On The Edge Of Town kind of intensity of mood. This is a blues song where love is not lost but is actually the salvation of the singer. The blues comes from the context the love is living in; a vibrant love that can see them through. Like on the rest of the record, faith is never far away. Prayers don’t seem to be being heard but, “I’ve had my faith shaken/But never hopeless,” being hung on to.

Song For A Healthy Soul - Victor Jara by Christy Moore

Christy Moore is an Irish singer who sings of Irish ways and Irish issues but he does not limit himself to songs of oppression at home. He has collected, performed and recorded songs about various freedom fighters across the world. Biko Drum about Steve Biko and a nod to Mandela in South Africa, The Disappeared mentions the martyred Catholic Bishop Oscar Romero and this song that seems to be a live favourite of Moore’s Victor Jara. Jara was a Chilean singer songwriter like Moore. He used his art to speak out for the socialist leader Salvador Allende who won the Chilean elections in 1970. A coup set up by right wing dictator Pinochet with the help of America overthrew Allende in 1973. Allende featured with Jara in a Moving Hearts song Allende. Many of Allende’s supporters including Jara was taken to the Chilean national stadium  where they broke the bones in Jara’s hands so he couldn’t play guitar and asked him to sing, similar cruel fun poking humiliation that Christ experienced at his cross. Jara sang We Will Win and they beat him some more before riddling his body with 44 bullets and dumping his body in the streets. In 2003 the stadium was renamed Victor Jara Stadium. Christy Moore’s sings it with a beautiful defiance full of dignity and inspiration.  

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball song by song - Death To My Hometown

Well we are really into the thick of it now. Musically Bruce heads into Irish knees up territory; Shane Magowan’s Pogues through the more modern conduit of the Dropkick Murphys! Of course it is not the first time and the deluxe edition includes Bruce’s first foray into this territory, American Land, which he unveiled as an original song during the Seeger Session phase. Though sounding  similar, there is a huge difference in the content of the songs. American Land, and we’ll get to it later, is about immigrants arriving in New York to create a whole new free and brave world. American Land is the birth of America, all hopeful and celebratory. Death Of My Hometown is the exact opposite; it is a funeral dirge to the buildings and communities of a town dying. I wonder if Bruce considered that Death To My Hometown might have been the kind of sentiments sung by the native American Indians as the Europeans sang American Land!

Anyway, that’s another story, maybe another song. Death To My Hometown draws Springsteen’s focus in from a nation to a town. Springsteen has written about his hometown before, My Hometown and My City Of Ruins taking on similar themes to this one. This one however has that anger building up across these songs. It starts by a declaration that war, or foreign nations, are not to blame for this destruction. Perhaps Springsteen is still angry about how America were dubiously overseas, fighting wars they maybe had no right to, while their own in New Orleans were being left helpless by Hurricane Katrina. He certainly was preaching about this during those often mentioned Seeger Sessions. Here, he puts any doubts that there might have been that We Take Care Of Our Own is not a “the most sophisticated piece of puke-inducing, syncretistic, jingoistic, narrowly nationalistic, deluded myth-propogating propaganda of the year” as my friend Kevin Hardagen mistook it for! This song is emphasising the exact opposite. America’s movers and shakers are leaving the country desolate and destroyed.

Springsteen goes after the same protagonists:

“Send the robber baron’s straight to hell

The greedy thieves that came around

And ate the flesh of everything they’ve found

Whose crimes have gone unpunished now” 

Hope is not so forthcoming though the catharsis and consolation is in the songs; “Now get yourself a song to sing /and sing it ’til you’re done/Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well” Songs have kept many oppressed communities with hope in their hearts throughout history and it is what Springsteen asks his people to hang on to. Wrecking Ball is a record full of such songs!

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball song by song - Jack Of All Trades

Jack Of All Trades is the song that many are declaring their favourite on the record. It is a great tune and perhaps a more familiar sound for Bruce. You can hear this song on Nebraska, Ghost Of Tom Joad or Devils and Dust, though that doesn’t mean the instrumentation is not once again original with its brass and  Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello giving the whole thing a moody guitar crescendo of an ending.  

The song continues to rage against those under judgement through this record, “The banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin.” On this one Bruce’s voice is very weary and the song itself brings you back to the real heroes and heroines on this record; the working men and women of America. We have a working man making  his way through recession doing anything he can to get by. The song is very much related to Nebraska’s Reason To Believe. Jack Of All Trades does find reasons to believe, “There's a new world coming, I can see the light.” That light has been declared earlier in the song, “I'll take the work that God provides” and “We'll start caring for each other like Jesus said that we might”. This is a hard working, God fearing, Jesus following kind of man. He is trying to find contentment in his hard situation and is determined to work his way through the storm. He is however, only human, and is not dishonest about the anger and frustration inside him. This head down, hard working, authentic American man concludes,  “So you use what you've got, and you learn to make do/You take the old, you make it new/If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight.”

Song For A Healthy Soul - North and South by Christy Moore & U2

The coming together of Christy Moore and U2; that is an imaginative thought in itself. When they finally got to write together a song about the Irish Troubles came out. Actually not so much its Troubles but more Ireland’s peace process. U2 released it first on the B-side of Staring At The Sun. In their hands it is like a mature older brother of Sunday Bloody Sunday, quieter, ambient and deeper. Sunday Bloody Sunday was an innocent almost naive first cry from the heart on the Irish problem. North and South is more measured and cerebral; it comes with years of thinking and more awareness of the complexities, the conditioning, the fears and the courageous decisions needed to “turn history around” as a theologian once described “repentance.” U2 played it live only once and that was on an RTE Late Show for the victims of the Omagh bombing in 1998.

Christy Moore eventually released the song on his King Puck album and Christy has had the song as a regular feature of his live show ever since. The definitive version, for me, is Moore’s version on his Live At The Point 2006 album. On this version Declan Sinnott’s lonely electric guitar sets the song apart, giving the whole thing a serious ambience and weightiness. On top of Sinnott’s genius, every line has an image that takes you back and forth and forward and back. It’s a song based in the premise of division but then reaching out across that metaphorical river to understand, to confess, to repent and to be changed into a better day.

The song is about the desire for a new day when the two sides will reach for each other, find companionship, empathise with each other and stand side by side without either side having to give up the best parts of their identities. The lines, “I want to meet you where you are/I don't need you to surrender,” are a provocative play on the Protestant slogan No Surrender! The song lends a robustness to this idea, an idea unthinkable twenty years ago and still a brave choice today. Though coming with that weightiness of Sinnott’s electric atmosphere there are chinks of hopeful light, “There was a badness that had its way/But love was not lost/it just got mislaid” or as U2 sang on The Late Show, “love will have its day.” There is a spirit of regret for “hurting your own.” There is a sieving of those things to be kept and those things to leave behind in the new day and Christy’s voice makes you really believe that that day is here and to go out and walk in it. There is something about great songs when they are written and performed about your home that creates an emotional energy and this song does that. It is a clarion call of hope for tomorrow without ignoring or dismissing  the painful past. It is not glib to call it prophetic.

 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Wrecking Ball - song by song - Shackled and Drawn

Track 3 and Bruce is getting into the heartland of the album in sound and the case against the respectable criminals. The sound goes straight into an toe tapping country/folk sound. They were not kidding when they said that this was much more folk than rock in Bruce’s original vision. Producer Ron Aniello, new to Bruce, has given it this musical context that is perfect for the record’s theme but also for Springsteen’s career as he nudges into his sixties.

As for Bruce’s indictment that goes deeper too. The character in this song is not dressing up to roam the streets seeking Easy Money. There’s more of a fatalistic understanding, “Trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong/Woke up this morning shackled and drawn.” The idea that the world is not how God originally intended is not a new concept to Springsteen but here it gets a very contemporary out working as he points the finger and accuses: -

“Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below we’re shackled and drawn”

It is powerful in a very Amos chapter 5 or indeed various other indictments by Old Testament prophets. The Bible makes it clear time after time that God hates and is most angry when the wealthy are wealthy at the mercy of those they are ripping off. Springsteen is right on the up-to-date of the prophetic succession right here.

Hope? Well you might feel that that is a little absent in this particular track. Listen closer though and you hear the sound of the negro slaves in the plantations of the nineteenth century. There was a people shackled and drawn and one of the things that fortified them was the song. Seven of the songs that Springsteen sang on the Sessions Tour were from this tradition and when Bruce sings, “What’s a poor boy to do but keep singing his song” he is awakening the ghost of the slaves to share wisdom with the modern day shackled and drawn! The substance of these songs will be spelled out later on the record.

Wrecking Ball song by song We Take Care Of Our Own

Wrecking Ball song by song Easy Money

Wrecking Ball review

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Rock's Catholic Bishop

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Wrecking Ball song by song - Easy Money

It is on the second track Easy Money that you realise that this is not the typical E Street Band rock record. The raw roots drive with the handclaps sets the entire record into musical spaces that Springsteen has never been before. If you’re looking in Springsteen’s catalogue for similar musical template then Atlantic City comes close which is quite appropriate because the protagonists of Easy Money live in very similar social, economic and spiritual terrain as those on Nebraska.  

Having set up the case against his nation in the opening track, Easy Money now leads the record into the heart of Springsteen’s case. The recurring theme of this record gets its first proclamation when Springsteen sings, “When your whole world comes tumbling down/And all the fat cats, they’ll just think it’s funny...”   Easy Money is a sarcastic piece of art that sees a couple caught up in the recession seeking the easy money that the bankers and big institutions have found at the cost of the ordinary family. The couple’s easy money is without doubt going to be the result of crime, reminding us of the true story couple Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate from the actual song Nebraska who went on a killing spree, that became the movie Badlands starring the future President Ged Bartlett (Martin Sheen)!!! The crime aspect to this easy money soon becomes apparent... “I got a Smith & Weston 38/I got a hellfire burning and I got me a date...” Springsteen is asking the difference between the two crimes, the one carried out on the street at gun point with all the legal implications and the more respectable yet even more of a crime as the rich rob the ordinary man in offices and getting away with their inhumanity for their easy money.