The singer Bruce Springsteen called the true voice of New Jersey: “Basically owned the place”
While Bruce Springsteen‘s music has trotted across the globe, touching people from all walks of life, his music remains crucially geographic.
A proud New Jersey native, Springsteen’s tales are born from the cobbled streets of its working-class towns. Much like Sam Fender, who has unashamedly taken inspiration from ‘The Boss’, Springsteen represents his town proudly and shares it with the rest of the world through a deeply universal outlook on day-to-day life.
A key distinction Springsteen is keen to make in that regard is that New Jersey is not New York. Despite their relative closeness to the uninitiated, they represent two very different ways of life and ultimately, showing loyalty to the former meant that Springsteen could write the sort of music that would land with a universal audience.
“When I was recording my first album, the record company spent a lot of money taking pictures of me in New York City. But… something didn’t feel quite right,” The Boss explained, when lamenting on the importance of his musical geography.
Adding that New Jersey is “a repository of my time on Earth. My memory, the music I’ve made, my friendships, my life… It’s all buried here in a box somewhere in the sand down along the Central Jersey coast. I can’t imagine having it any other way.”
Maintaining that humility in the face of glamorous temptation was something that Springsteen did well. But he took inspiration from fellow New Jersey native Frank Sinatra. A man who embraced the opulence of New York City a little more obviously, donning the black tie and clutching a martini glass, but not wholly abandoning the bluesy undercurrent that made working-class New Jersey music so compelling.
“He is the patron saint of New Jersey,” Springsteen boldly claimed. Adding, “And since his rise from the streets of Hoboken, Frank has basically owned the place, but he has been gracious enough to loan me a small piece of it by the beach.”
You would be forgiven for questioning just how Sinatra could be considered the voice of New Jersey, when he represents somewhat of a contrast to Springsteen. On the surface, Sinatra had no grit, no pain or humility even, as he dangled the carrot of the American dream to his listeners, through the lens of New York.
But Springsteen would contest that point. Arguing that what lies beneath all of that is inherently New Jersey. He explained that Sinatra had “a voice filled with bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world. Every song seemed to have its postscript, and if you don’t like it, here’s a punch in the kisser.”
Adding, “But it was the deep blueness of Frank’s voice that affected me the most. And while his music became synonymous with black tie, good life, the best booze, women’s sophistication, his blues voice was always a sound of hard luck and men late at night with the last $10 in their pockets trying to figure a way out.”
I suppose Springsteen highlighting the gritty undercurrent of Sinatra, despite his slick appearance, just goes to prove all of his own music right. Daily life doesn’t look the same. All walks of life can look and feel wildly different, but what lies beneath can be more commonplace than we might realise.
