Telling stories
Every Bruce Springsteen song is open to interpretation. What mysteries lurk in the darkness on the edge of town? Or Jungleland?
Surely Springsteen’s lyrics mean something different to every listener. But what do the songs mean to The Boss himself?
Like most songwriters, he has always been reluctant to discuss this. But he does just that for an episode of VH1’s “Storytellers” airing tonight at 10 (cable channel 62 in Spokane, 42 in Coeur d’Alene).
It’s part of the build-up to the release of his new album, “Devils & Dust,” on Tuesday.
Springsteen performed for an audience of about 350 people at the Two River Theatre in Red Bank, N.J. He accompanied himself on acoustic guitar, piano and harmonica, and was joined on one number, “Brilliant Disguise,” by his wife, Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals.
The show included only eight songs. After finishing each one, he talked about the lyrics, line by line.
Ever wonder why he would write a line like “Maybe we ain’t that young anymore” (from “Thunder Road”) when he was just 24? The country had just gone through the Vietnam War, Springsteen said, so “nobody was that young anymore.”
On a lighter note, he called the line “I got this guitar, and I learned how to make it talk” from the same song “probably the hokiest line I ever wrote.”
The “Indians in the summer” phrase from “Blinded by the Light” refers to his Little League baseball team, he said, and the “silicone sister” in that song was “possibly the first reference to female breast enhancement in popular music.”
He said he wrote the song with the help of a rhyming dictionary, and that it and “Spirit in the Night” were the two songs from his first album (1972’s “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”) that he penned with the intention of producing a hit.
He said he was listening to a lot of Roy Orbison music while making the “Born to Run” album, and that his singing on those songs was “my pathetic attempt to come close.”
The central guitar riff of his new single, the tragic soldier’s story “Devils & Dust,” represents “the sound of resistance,” he said. And the wordless portion of “The Rising” (the part that goes “Li, li, li, li, li …”) is meant to invite listeners to “sing with me … stand alongside of me.”
“Nebraska,” Springsteen’s chilling look at mass murderer Charles Starkweather, is a universal statement, he said, because “everybody knows what it’s like to be condemned.”
“Jesus Was an Only Son” – a solemn ballad from “Devils & Dust” that is full of biblical references – has a strikingly different premise, he explained: that “everyone knows what it’s like to be saved.”
The evening ended with a 20-minute question-and-answer period. Springsteen absent-mindedly strummed his guitar as he answered queries about the effect that the Beatles and other British Invasion acts had on him, his Catholic upbringing (“I’m a runaway Catholic and I’ve got pagan babies at home”), the influence of movies on his songwriting and other subjects.
The questions were good, but Springsteen’s answers tended to be vague. He turned back into a rock star trying to find diplomatic ways to answer difficult questions.
But for the previous two hours, he had given fans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of his songs – and hear some fine acoustic versions of them in the process.