The “important” album Bruce Springsteen said was like hearing God
The art of any good Bruce Springsteen song is that sense of escape.
Nothing that he ever did was meant to be bright and sunny all the time, but all the characters that occupied his tunes always held onto that sense of hope that there was something better on the horizon for them at every turn. And when ‘The Boss’ found the right track, he knew that it was as good as witnessing a musical version of God.
While it does feel like a stretch for artists to embrace the ‘music as church’ mentality, it’s not like it’s that far off from how many of Springsteen’s concerts feel. You can call him a singer with a huge messianic complex if you want, but he never once tried to make it seem like he was above anyone in the audience. There was no way that he was going to be performing miracles every single time he got up onstage, but when looking at his track record, it was far better for him to make music that made it feel like musical heaven in whatever venue he played than to treat it like a job.
And judging by his record collection, a lot of what he felt were his hallmarks all came from an almost otherworldly force pushing him to make those records. There was something more than drive that forced Born to Run out of him, and that kind of mentality goes all the way back to the days when people were still working with the basics of rock and roll.
Elvis Presley certainly had the same feeling on those early Sun recordings, and Bob Dylan could get that kind of presence in his voice when he had the right songs, but it was about more than simply playing what felt right. ‘The Boss’ needed to write songs that he felt captured a feeling, and listening to someone like Van Morrison stopped him in his tracks the first time he heard him.
While an album like Astral Weeks wasn’t put together in the traditional way by putting every in a room to hammer out multiple takes, it’s the spontaneity that sticks out half the time. It’s hard to even figure out what Morrison is singing on some pieces of the recording, but nothing can take away from the pure emotion that he’s feeling as he’s strumming away on that acoustic guitar throughout every track.
Although Springsteen always held a firm belief in the holy Church of Rock and Roll, he felt that Astral Weeks was the closest thing he came to seeing God in music, saying, “Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me. It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine. The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive.”
A lot of Springsteen’s early records may have been trying their best to sound a little bit like Morrison in places, but it’s not like every single one of his songs had the same kind of fire. If anything, Nebraska was the first time that he seemed to tap into that musical energy, which is probably why the whole thing sounds better on the demo tape that he made rather than the full band arrangement.
What ‘The Boss’ created on his own is already unique, but if you look at Morrison’s track record, you can hear the bones of that sound already festering. The Irish legend was far more eclectic in his later career, but whether it was delving into jazz or making a three-chord rock and roll song, Springsteen and Morrison were always aware that it wasn’t the instruments that moved people; it was the people playing them.
