The most apocalyptic song ever written, according to Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen is one of those artists who seems doomed to be misunderstood. For so much of his career, his songs have been mistaken for something else, with the power of their meaning often getting lost. Take ‘Born In The U.S.A’ as the ultimate example. The song is a protest song, a rallying cry for the working class, but yet as Donald Trump constantly tried to co-opt it into his political campaign, a campaign that stands at complete odds with the song, the weight of the work was misunderstood or ignored. That’s not something he ever wants to see happen to an artist.
While Springsteen’s songs are undeniably easy-listening, stadium fillers designed with a hooky chorus and a marching melody that could sweep anyone up, they’re also so often pretty heavy. He has always been a political songwriter. From the start, he’s written songs touching on the topics of warfare, the trauma soldiers face, poverty cycles, nuclear attacks, racism, and so much more. These are songs with real weight and that real thought has gone into, far beyond just wanting to craft a hit.
As someone with an ear for exactly that, hearing the heaviness and the meaning under the melody, he spots it in the work of others and witnesses the same thing happening time and time again as artists get brushed off as being light or breezy when there’s really more to it.
“I think what feels Christian about your music is that it’s apocalyptic and puts things in a very religious context, like Roy Orbison,” Springsteen once said in conversation with Win Butler, talking about exactly that; heavier, weightier meaning being written into music. In this context, the idea of apocalyptic means several things as both music that feels like an emotional rapture, but also music with a macabre to it or a darkness underneath.
He sees Roy Orbison as the ultimate example of that. Much like Springsteen, he’s another artist often brushed off as light hits, especially when his track ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ came to dominate his career. It epitomised the easy-listening rock and roll tune that is nothing more than a love song. But just like ‘The Boss’, there’s a need to look deeper.
In particular, Springsteen picks out one track as a song with staggering weight, “What’s the song title? ‘It’s Over.’ Doesn’t get more apocalyptic than that,” he said. It’s easy to understand the label given that when reading the lyrics like a poem, you’re met with instant gloom as Orbison wrote, “Golden days before they end / Whisper secrets to the wind / Your baby won’t be near you anymore.”
As he repeats “it’s over”, the track feels like more than just a heartbreak song. It feels, exactly as Springsteen deemed it, apocalyptic, as if the end of this love truly is the end of the world. “Roy Orbison is the king of romantic apocalypse,” Springsteen declared, and perhaps David Lynch agreed, with that being part of the reason why Orbison’s music was so essential to Blue Velvet and the strange apocalyptic suburbia he dreamt up there.
“I think if the end of days is present in your music, however it got in there, you’re involved in a spiritual world,” Springsteen said and just as how he’s brought that idea into his own music, he heard it in Orbison’s, clearly taking pointers from the man he saw as the king of the form.
