Orel Family

A soft snare drum part, coming in like a rail car going down the tracks, then a bass line, a rhythm guitar. Then the lyrics: "Had enough of heartbreak and pain," and we know we have a Bruce Springsteen song. The lyrics and melody call back many references. I hear Glen Campbell (take your pick, I'll go with "Gentle on My Mind" ), I hear Danny O'Keefe ( "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" ), I hear Harry Nilsson ( "Everybody's Talkin'" ). "Hello Sunshine" is the first song off Bruce's album Western Stars, due out in mid-June. A couple years ago, Bruce told "Variety" magazine that the "album is influenced by Southern California pop music of the ’70s: Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, those kinds of records." So it's not especially surprising to hear those elements coming through in the first released track. Ron Aniello , who produced "Western Stars," told "Ro...

Since Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last played in Cincinnati in March, 2008 , the United States has gone through two presidential elections and a great recession. Two cherished members of the E Street Band have passed away. Bruce has released two powerful studio albums and, along the way, has enabled new voices and new sounds for his Hall of Fame-bound band. During those six years, while the rest of us aged, Bruce somehow became younger. We can conjecture from what or where his fountain of youth came. Was it from the booty shaking? The love making? The earth quaking? Perhaps it was the Viagara taking. He has mentioned Viagra taking. Whatever the elixir, whoever the alchemist, the results have been spectacular. But what about Cincinnati? Bruce's 2008 Cincinnati show didn’t pass the two-hour mark until the evening’s last song. Tonight’s show could have come with a warning label: For a show lasting longer than 3 hours, audience members should call their doctors...

Jay-Z, Barrack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. Columbus, November 5, 2012.  A few days ago, I read an article posted on the  Rolling Stone  website. Springsteen producer Ron Aniello was talking about Bruce's latest album,  High Hopes . Talking about how the project began, Aniello said, "I remember that Bruce called me on my birthday, so it was December 9th, 2012. He said to me, 'I have some songs. I want to get together.'" Aniello went on to talk about how Bruce tends to work, and how the process unfolded. I keyed in on the date. On November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as President of the United States. The next evening, Bruce introduced  Badlands  by saying, "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night but I think it's pretty frightening. You guys are young, there's gonna be a lot of people depending on you coming up so this is for you." The song performance, without the spoken introduction...

Earlier today, Bruce Springsteen's latest album, High Hopes leaked far and wide across the interwebs. The official release isn't due until January 14th of the new year. The album is a hodgepodge of "our best unreleased material from the past decade," as Springsteen explains in the liner notes (already published at brucespringsteen.net ), where he adds, "I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing." Bruce previously wrote liner notes for Devils & Dust , which perhaps not coincidentally was also an album mainly of older unreleased material. As with the notes to that album, there are some poignant notes here: The Wall, a song that Bruce premiered in concert in 2003, was inspired by Walter Cichon, a member of a '60s Jersey Shore band called "Motifs." This is the best part of the liner notes, and arguably the best of the previously unreleased songs on the album. Much of the album has been heard before. Springsteen recorded  High Hopes,  w...