The Bruce Springsteen song Phoebe Bridgers “fell in love with”
No modern artist has done a better job at touching people’s hearts than Phoebe Bridgers. Although there have been a handful of more lighthearted songs in her catalogue, albums like Punisher have the power to take the listener’s heart, stomp it into a million pieces, and put it back together again by the time the record’s over. Then again, Bridgers would have been nothing without the fantastic songwriters that have come before her.
When talking about some of her first lyrical inspirations, Bridgers cited Bruce Springsteen as one of her first starting points, telling Line of Best Fit, “I’d been listening to Bruce Springsteen forever because of what people recommended or what I was exposed to and then somehow I happened to come across this song on my iPod shuffle”.
While the heartland rocker has been an integral part of American culture for years, it’s not hard to see the commonalities between Bridgers’s approach to songwriting and what ‘The Boss’ delivers every night. Instead of delivering the same lineup of hits to every paying customer who bought a ticket, Springsteen has prided himself on giving his perspective on life through his songs, occasionally changing the arrangements to suit where he is at the moment.
The same could be said for how Bridgers portrays some of her most significant work. Even though there are pretty straight-ahead rock songs in her discography, her knack for making subtle tweaks to her material on the live stage is about staying true to the artist inside rather than becoming a commodified product.
When talking about Springsteen’s best material, Bridgers gravitated towards the song ‘Highway Patrolman’ off Nebraska. Being one of the first albums that Springsteen made without the help of The E Street Band, most of the takes come from different 8-track demos that he decided to release raw instead of fine-tuning them.
Across ‘Patrolman’, Springsteen tells a story of a lawman who’s caught in a moral dilemma when he has to take a call about a barroom fight that turned ugly. Although it would work as any routine call, the man is thrown for a loop when he realises that he has to turn in his brother for what will most likely be life in prison.
While Bridgers marvelled at Springsteen’s songwriting across Nebraska, she had a soft spot for this tune, recalling, “It was the first Bruce Springsteen song that I personally discovered, and I fell in love with it. It’s obviously fictitious, but he had such an interesting angle. It’s casually sad, which is my favourite kind of sad and with ‘Highway Patrolman’, he doesn’t even have to say why it’s sad”.
Going forward, it’s also easy to see where Springsteen’s approach to production had a drastic effect on Bridgers’s style. Although there isn’t much going on in the mix on ‘Patrolman’, the stark silence and background noise make the listener feel like they’re hearing the intimate details that no one else gets to hear. It might not be the easiest listen all the time, but Bridgers’s approach to her songwriting takes Springsteen’s forlorn tales of loneliness to a new level.
