Calming Cacophony: Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You

There's an old saying, "sometimes you don't know what you had until it's gone."

There's a corollary, I think: "sometimes you don't know what you need until it shows up."

Bruce Springsteen's next album, "Letter To You", won't be officially released for another 8 days, but in the finest internet tradition it leaked today. And, just a few seconds in, I realized just how much I needed this record.

From the opening notes of the first track, "One Minute You're Here," I could feel the world melting away with all its stresses and turmoil. The very first line in "Big black train comin' down the track." This is not a mystery ride; we've been around long enough to know exactly where the train is going. The track is melancholy; someone has disappeared, maybe forever. The singer may be next. Bruce is singing in his lower register, first with guitar, then the arrangement builds, and I'm immersed. And calm. Turn up the volume.

This record is an homage of sorts, to what has come before personally for Bruce, and to the magic, mystery and yes, the ministry of rock and roll. After that first track, it's a full E Street Band assault.

It took me a little while to unlock what Bruce meant by the key phrase of the album's title track: "'Neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread."

I was watching TV and a car commercial came on. Pete Seeger was singing "Hard Times in the Mill." For all of the Seeger records I've listened to (and I listened to a lot, especially after Bruce came out with "The Seeger Sessions"), I didn't know that one. But I recognized it right away as a variant of an old folk song called "Down on Penny's Farm." In 1962, Bob Dylan used that song as the basis for his own song "Hard Time in New York Town"; a few years later Dylan twisted it more to become "Maggie's Farm." I thought through this, and understood: Dylan, Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Rolling Stones and more, they're his mongrel trees. And here's Bruce, he's been pulling on that thread.

Songs such as "Last Man Standing" call back to Bruce's salad days as a musician, when he played for hot dog money. "Ghosts" is a joyous ode to those days, of guitars coming back "from the mystic far," and though Bruce is now the last surviving member of his first band, he's not done.

Nine new songs on this album stand alongside three much older songs. "Janey Needs a Shooter" is pretty much a note-perfect recreation of Bruce's late '70's demo of it. "If I Was the Priest" is a riotous new take on one of Bruce's most important audition songs for John Hammond in 1972. And "Song for Orphans," another early '70's song, is revved up in a mid-60's electric Dylan arrangement. All 3 are punctuated by Bruce playing harmonica. Bruce doesn't shy away from any of the lyrics either, never mind that they're nothing like anything he's written in the past four decades. The three older songs are also the three longest on the album, each clocking in at more than 6 minutes. It's almost as if Bruce is lingering on them, not entirely wanting to come back fully to the present tense. All three are followed by tribute songs.

But the present is where this record firmly resides. Listen to this record, and hear echoes of many older songs wound in to the new. Hear Little Steven's handiwork on many of the arrangements. Hear the guitar ring out on "Burnin' Train." Hear Jake Clemons sound eerily like his late uncle. Hear the crystal clear sound, hear the full E Street treatment. Also hear the most awesomely scary song Bruce has released in some time, "Rainmaker," that addresses current times with the simple summation above a slide guitar: "we've been worried but now we're scared."

The album concludes with "I'll See You in My Dreams," a final call-out to those no longer here. The road, seeming without end, inevitably does. We're just not going to go quietly, "for death is not the end." Tonight, that's something I needed to hear.