The album Bruce Springsteen said was “resonant with history”
With a career spanning 50 years and millions of record sales, Bruce Springsteen has been persistently praised and pedestalled as ‘The Boss’. He’s honed a stage presence almost as huge as the audiences he attracts, but even as he’s grown as an entertainer, he’s never let go of his everyman status. His blue-collar lyrics and heartland soundscapes continue to resonate with fans in their masses.
Springsteen’s ability to connect to his fans isn’t always dependent on them being in the same room as him. On record, too, his melodic rock and fantasies of open roads have endeared him to fellow Americana dwellers, and 2012’s Wrecking Ball is no exception. Marking Springsteen’s 17th studio record, Wrecking Ball resonated with audiences and critics alike, securing Grammy nominations and a number one, but it also resonated with history.
The songwriter himself once deemed Wrecking Ball “as direct a record as I ever made” during a conversation with Rolling Stone, suggesting it might only be matched by Nebraska. The record found its roots in folk before producer Ron Aniello introduced Springsteen to a huge new sound library ranging from “a hip-hop drum loop” to a “country-blues stomp loop”.
“There was no preconceived set of instruments that needed to be used,” Springsteen recalled, “I could go anywhere, do anything, use anything. It was very wide open.” Alongside delving into hip-hop and more modern music, Springsteen retained his heartland and folk focuses. He also adopted a historical one, utilising sounds from the past as well as the present.
“I used a lot of music from the 1800s and the 1930s to show these things are cyclical,” he once stated, “The album is resonant with history.” This resonance with the music of the past can be heard throughout the album, as Springsteen uses it to discuss contemporary issues from mental health to financial crashes.
On ‘Death to My Hometown’, for example, the sonic influence of Celtic music is clear. Violins and organs cut through Springsteen’s distinctively gruff vocals while he sings words of protest and economics. Dire financial times are equated to brutality and death as Springsteen declares, “They destroyed our families’ factories, and they took our homes, they left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones.”
Somehow, Springsteen blends hip-hop and Celtic folk with ease, fusing the new and the old to represent the cyclical nature of both music and the world. It’s this ability that allows him to not only resonate with history but with audiences worldwide, earning his own place within it.
