The singer Bruce Springsteen carries with him all the time
There’s a certain weight to almost anything that Bruce Springsteen touched in his prime.
He didn’t carry himself as one of the most important musical figures to walk the Earth by any stretch, but when listening to his tales of loneliness and abandon, there was something undeniably human about the way he painted pictures of average people. But even if he had a lot more to say about how everyone treats each other, he knew that he could only thank those that made his world feel that much bigger whenever he played them.
As much as ‘The Boss’ loved the idea of turning any stadium into a musical place of worship whenever he performed, he didn’t get there without the first rock and roll missionaries coming before him. The biggest names in music were all about trying to give the kids a good time, but there was a certain magic in between grooves of those Chuck Berry and Beatles records that lit a fire in him that has been burning ever since.
But when looking at how Springsteen approaches it, not every one of his songs is about that kind of happy atmosphere. A lot of his best moments actually come from when he’s downtrodden, but even if albums like Nebraska are dark as hell, it’s not always about him wallowing. Those characters are in dire situations, but the power of the songs come from the fact that there’s always a way for things to get better as well.
Because even if Springsteen can make happy records, a handful of greatest albums always thrive from a struggle half the time. Born to Run was no walk in the park to get off the ground, Born in the USA had to wait years before it was finally ready to come out, and when the US was going through a massive recession, hearing an album like Wrecking Ball helped let everyone know that things were going to be okay.
Then again, the greatest performers of all time are the ones that acknowledge both the light and the dark sides of life. Not everyone can make happy music every single time they walk into the studio, and while ‘The Boss’ did have a lot of demons to confront in his songs, he knew he could get through them whenever he heard what Roy Orbison could do whenever he sang his classics.
Although Orbison was a lot darker than what people were used to, Springsteen knew that his music would be a saving grace for him whenever he heard it, saying, “He did something nobody else did. And he always had that distance and that loneliness [about him]. I always have his music with me all the time.”
But when listening to Springsteen’s songs, not a ton of them sound like Orbison knockoffs by any stretch. He carved out a name for himself as one of the faces of heartland rock, and even if he didn’t have the same mannerisms or even the vibrato that Orbison had, that never mattered to him as long he made people experience the kind of feeling that he did when he heard tunes like ‘Only the Lonely’.
He could have tried to copy the formula and make the kind of music Orbison did for the rest of his life, but it was never about trying to read from his playbook. If there’s one thing Orbison taught all singers that came after him, it was that people reacted to how the artist felt, and if ‘The Boss’ wanted to move people, he had to be able to open himself up and be willing to be that emotionally vulnerable with his audience.
