The album Bruce Springsteen created “to feel like a live show”
In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and his trusty partners, the E Street Band, were experiencing a creative purple patch. They’d been touring endlessly since 2007, which included two album cycles. This extended run also included the 2008 inaugural concert for President Obama, major festival appearances, and a set at the Super Bowl in 2009. These were only the tip of the iceberg, too.
Ramping up the heat in the studio, in that two years, the two albums he released were 2007’s Magic and 2009’s Working on a Dream, critical hits seemingly unimpeded by such a lengthy stretch on the road. Most remarkably, though, during this chapter, Springsteen acknowledged the brilliance of his past efforts by playing sets comprised only of a classic album. When speaking to Billboard in 2009, Springsteen was in Nashville, Tennessee, and that night, his 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run, was to be brought to life in its entirety.
Asked by the interviewer “when and why” he decided to perform full album sets, Springsteen replied that it came as a part of trying to do something he and the band had never done. Playing the classic albums in their entirety was also a welcome choice, as he and the E Streeters collectively “built them to last”, meaning they hadn’t lost potency.
He said: “We had done so many shows and were going to come back around one more time, so we were like, ‘OK, what can we do that we haven’t done? Let’s try to play some of the albums.’ There were some people who were starting to do it, it sounded like a good idea, and my audience fundamentally experienced all my music in album form. People took Born To Run home and played it start to finish 100 times; they didn’t slip on a cut in the middle. And we made albums — we took a long time, and we built them to last. The idea is, ‘There’s no stinkers on this thing,’ and we spent months or years or whatever it took to try to make sure that was so.”
The New Jersey native continued: “So the albums play real well, and I think when you hear them you go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe all those songs were on one record,” whether it’s Darkness on the Edge of Town or The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Those records are packed with songs that have lasted 30-35 years. It simply was a way to revitalize the show and do something appealing and fun for the fans, but it ended up being a much bigger emotional experience than I thought it would be.”
It was then put to Springsteen that it must have been a “marathon” to tackle the 1980 double album The River. Here, the rocker revealed that he originally “sequenced it to feel like a live show”, meaning it was perfect for this new configuration. He even went as far as to describe the experience of playing it in full as “a trip”.
Springsteen said: “That was a trip. It’s basically a rock band record, but it went on for 20 songs. I sequenced it to feel like a live show, so you have four fast songs and a couple of ballads. It played real well when we went to play it. We learned ‘Cadillac Ranch’ and ‘I’m a Rocker,’ which I remember always worked well on the record, and bang, they just whiplashed us on stage. So we were kind of having a first-time experience the same way the audience was.”
