‘There Goes My Miracle’: Bono on Bruce Springsteen’s greatest lyrics of all time
If any band outside of America could claim to channel the stirring, anthemic power of heartland rock authentically, it would have to be Irish stadium rockers U2. Forged in punk’s aftermath with a sprightly new-wave pep at the turn of the 1980s, their unabashed Christian spirituality and paeans to humanist affirmation cut a distinctly brighter run of albums at odds with the post-punk crowd they shared early live bills.
This earnest energy only grew stronger as they slowly turned to the USA’s musical foundations and immersed themselves in the blues and country that informed their seminal The Joshua Tree in 1987, an album with such hefty presence in their discography it spurred its own quasi-live come studio LP Rattle and Hum, before looming so large they hit reset as the ’90s arrived and embarked on their electronically coated subversive alternative rock for the remainder of the decade, as Bono put it when describing Achtung Baby‘s ‘The Fly’: “The sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”.
Jump to thirty years later, and U2 frontman Bono was celebrating his 60th birthday in 2020 with a unique feature for Rolling Stone, ’60 Songs That Saved My Life’, a lovingly assembled compendium of songs he treasured from Elvis Presley to Lady Gaga, accompanied by a short fan letter to each of his selected heroes. “The ones I couldn’t have lived without,” he said. “The ones that got me from there to here, zero to 60… through all the scrapes, all manner of nuisance, from the serious to the silly… and the joy, mostly joy.”
Naturally, the one artist who boasts a virtual monopoly on American heartland rock features in Bono’s personal collation. New Jersey blue-collar troubadour Bruce Springsteen is the recipient of high praise, but curiously, Bono shed light on a later cut away from his Born to Run heyday and selected 2019’s Western Stars‘ second single: “I don’t know if this is about a father saying goodbye to his daughter as she sets off to find her own life.”
He added: “I don’t need to know. It’s about everybody who has to let go of something perfect. ‘There Goes My Miracle’ is the greatest singing and writing of your life, I guess it took your whole life. And yes, some of us feel like we’ve lived it with you.”
In keeping with Western Stars‘ orchestral-powered exploring of the human drama at the centre of Americana’s prairies and highways, ‘There Goes My Miracle’ sees Springsteen stand apart from his famed E Street Band and evokes his love of Burt Bacharach for the song’s lament over lost love.
It’s an unabashed romanticism that eschews any of The Boss’s lyrical cynicism or sombre desolation that could rear its head in earlier albums. It’s an obvious arrow straight into Bono’s sentimental affections which struck him deeply upon listening.
The feeling was mutual. Signing up to induct U2’s 2005 entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen offered high praise to Bono’s showmanship: “He’s one of the great frontmen of the past 20 years. He is also one of the only musicians to devote his personal faith and the ideals of his band into the real world in a way that remains true to rock’s earliest implications of freedom and connection and the possibility of something better.”
