The songs Bruce Springsteen wasn’t good enough to write
Bruce Springsteen was already held up to a higher standard of songwriter by the time he finished ‘Born to Run’.
The idea of anyone making a song that captured the feeling of the everyman that well had to be working with something more than a few great musicians, and while the press had already christened him the next Bob Dylan, ‘The Boss’ was a different kind of artist. He wanted to make the kind of records that made people dance the way he did when hearing Beatles songs, but that meant that certain songs were off the table as well.
Then again, the first decade of Springsteen’s career saw him covering anything and everything that he could. There are the odd moments where he sounded like Van Morrison at the beginning of his career, but after his masterpiece was made, every other record felt like another reaction to fame. There would be moments where he sounded dejected, but there would also be albums like Nebraska that seemed like a deliberate attempt to paint character portraits of the least savoury characters he could find.
While a lot of Springsteen’s greatest songs are entirely fictional, it’s not like he couldn’t get personal every now and again. If we’re sticking with the Dylan comparisons, Tunnel of Love may as well be his version of Blood on the Tracks, completely with the stark sound and hearing him get more and more despondent over the fact that he threw away his marriage midway through his career.
It was nice for people to see his vulnerable side, but whereas Springsteen was writing for himself, The Rising was the first time he needed to write for everyone. The tragedy of 9/11 was going to do a number on everyone in the New York area, and while a guy from Jersey may not have been everyone’s first choice to talk about their issues, ‘The Boss’ was up to the challenge when writing tunes like ‘My City of Ruins’.
If you look at the characters in those songs, though, it’s not about him trying to lead a crowd of people by example or anything. He wasn’t about to tell people how to live their lives, and a lot of the tunes like ‘You’re Missing’ are there to extend a loving hand to those who have lost people who try to guide them forward to the next phase of their lives.
Because for as great a songwriter as Springsteen is, he knew that he could never get up to that standard, saying, “The Rising would be as close as I’ve come to approaching topical issues. In general, I don’t do that because I can’t write the songs that are good enough for the moment. So you write what comes out of you, and that’s the best you have to offer at any given moment.” But sometimes, what you have in the moment is more than enough.
Going back to The Rising, there’s no way for him to express some social commentary on what that kind of tragedy meant for the state of the world. That was reserved for people far more experienced than Springsteen, and while he could find a way to sit with the victims of the tragedy and grieve over the loss, all he’s trying to do is help them weather the storm rather than try to take them through to the other side.
After all, he knows better than anyone else that music is about one’s ability to overcome all of the intense emotions in their lives, and even if he still struggles from day to day, it’s better to have a song to show for it. He may have been writing as much for himself as everyone else, but he knew that if he wrote about general issues, there were bound to be a handful of people who felt the same way.
