The 1974 album Bruce Springsteen called the best in America: “Beautiful”
There’s always been a certain romance to the way that Bruce Springsteen paints a picture in his songs.
As much as people like to think of Bruce Springsteen as ‘The Boss’, the man who celebrates the redemptive power of rock and roll, his convictions come from a deep understanding of the America he grew up in and a desire to make it better for those who never had the same opportunities. His music has always been about offering hope. But for all his strengths, he was the first to admit that there were other songwriters who captured the complexities of love and heartbreak better than he ever could.
And if we’re being completely honest, Springsteen’s love songs didn’t always end up working out alright. Nothing does the job for songwriting quite like heartache, but even by the end of landmark albums like Born to Run, the characters of that story don’t get a happy ending. They are left wounded and stranded in ‘Jungleland’ with no hope of ever getting out, and while Springsteen was one of the lucky few who did escape, that didn’t mean that everything was sunshine and roses.
His journey to the top of the charts already had more than a few moments where he had to do some soul searching, and when he did talk about love, lines on an album like The River are enough to bring tears to your eyes. He knew that a lot of his best friends didn’t get everything they wanted when they grew up, but if he didn’t know what that was like, he could at least write from his own experiences.
Becoming one of the biggest rock and roll stars wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and there were many moments when he wished he could go back to the days when he was hashing out his songs. Nothing made him feel better than listening to people like Marvin Gaye and Van Morrison shaping his musical taste, but if they were considered his heroes, Jackson Browne was a young kid who was writing the songs that Springsteen wished he could have made.
Browne left nothing to the imagination when he wrote a lot of his songs, and when looking through the biggest pieces of his career, he was looking to make tunes that had a lot more to say than puppy love. Late for the Sky was where singer-songwriters officially grew up, and while Springsteen could get the most that he could out of his audience, he was dumbfounded by how Browne could hit the nail on the head so perfectly.
He captured the experiences that everyone was too scared to talk about, and Springsteen felt that there was no better way of capturing love in America at the time, saying, “There was no album that captured the fall from Eden, the long, slow after-burn of the sixties; it’s heartbreak, it’s disappointments, it’s spent possibilities better than Jackson’s masterpiece, Late For the Sky. It’s just a beautiful body of work. When those car doors slam at the end of the record, they still bring tears. And there was no more searching, yearning, loving music made for and about America at the time.”
So, for someone who had spent his days talking about his own issues growing up in Jersey, this was the moment for Springsteen to step up his game. He knew that he couldn’t capture romance quite like Browne did, but when you listen to a song like ‘The River’, Springsteen was at least trying to capture the same kind of intimacy between two partners in the same way that Browne was doing.
Whether or not he actually got there is up to interpretation, but Springsteen didn’t want to spend his days playing exactly like Browne, either. It was just another tool in the toolbox for him, and any chance of him making anything as loving as Late for the Sky came down to whether he was ready to open himself up like that to the rest of the world.
