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'Maybe I was born to run . . . and run and run' (Sunday Independent 3rd July 2005)
BRUCE Springsteen's current album Devils and Dust is soft, introspective and spiritual. Mostly acoustic and intimate in scale (just like his concert at the Point the other week), it's not the kind of album that was expected to sell in vast quantities (unlike his mega-selling straight-out rock stuff); yet it managed to top the charts in 15 countries, spending three weeks at number one in Ireland.
Maybe that's one reason why he's prepared to grant a rare interview. There are conditions: he wants to meet for a long chat before the gig; he wants to make sure I see the gig and the interview will take place after the gig.
Springsteen is 55. Both on stage and on record he's alternated between large-scale rock records followed by more introspective material since 1982's Nebraska was released two years after The River . As always, he continues to do it his way.
Dave Fanning: Your music is moving these days from Woody Guthrie to gospel - is this something I haven't seen before?
Bruce: Well, I'm not sure. A sense of human community that's connected through spiritual goals somehow connects with my own music. . Early on, I'd say by the late Seventies, I was interested in connecting gospel and country music. Gospel had the spiritual core; country music had adult themes and questions and issues in it and then the physical vitality of rock 'n' roll. I was interested in turning those things into my own particular brand of rock music I guess, and it came very naturally. Also I was brought up Catholic, so a lot of my schooling was filled with religious and spiritual imagery. Some of those things got distorted, but some had resonant meaning for me when I went to interpret the world myself. I used religious imagery going back to the beginning of all my writing, Lost in the Flood, Saint in the City. It was something I naturally gravitated to.
DF: The title track of the current album - confusion, difficulty of a young US soldier in Iraq?
Bruce: Yeah, that was just a song about being placed in a situation where your choices are untenable: you have to make them and then you have to live with them for the rest of your life, under very murky circumstances. It was just something I came up with, a title, Devils in Dust . I said, that's it, what am I seeing? Am I seeing what's really there, am I seeing my own inner demons or devils? It's a land of moral uncertainty and consequently it has turned the US into its mirror image by the responsibility we all have as citizens for the actions of our government.
DF: The new migrant population in the American south-west - is this new subject matter for you or a logical extension of what you've written about in the past?
Bruce: Actually you can trace it back. I grew up in a very integrated neighbourhood - there were Spanish people and Puerto Ricans and black people - and that's "Spanish Johnnie", he's from 57th Street . . . So I think I was interested in updating some of the issues that Steinbeck wrote about in his books. You know, California was being transformed into some new kind of state when I was living there in the early Nineties. It was written about every day in the newspapers and it was there before your eyes.
That since has migrated to my hometown in New Jersey, where there was an enormous influx of immigrants who work on the farms, and it mirrors what was going on in California. It took 10 years to move 3,000 miles, but you could feel it in California that it was coming and that all of these issues were going to be current, and how we addressed them was important so I started to write about it on Tom Jode.
DF: The first time you ever played a real outdoor gig was at Slane 20 years ago. With no real idea of what you were letting yourself in for, you were scared, weren't you?
Bruce: Yeah, I was shocked at the time because it was our first open-air show, and I wasn't sure about the safety of the seating - of which there is none of course on the big shows.
I've since come to enjoy them enormously, but when I first came here to Slane there were so many people and the crowd was wild and listing from one side to the other, and I simply was afraid that someone was going to be hurt. It was a wild and ecstatic crowd. But it was a shock to the system in '85, it was a great memory. [Laughs.]
DF: Before the gig we were talking about U2 and how they've always thought big and how they generally do 'big' very well. You had all that around the time of Born in The USA - but I get the impression that if Devils and Dust sold 20 million copies, it wouldn't necessarily make you happy.
Bruce: [Laughs.] Well I don't think you should ever say you wouldn't be happy if your record's selling more [laughs], that's inviting a jinx I suppose, but eh, it's the kind of record that I make and I assume it's going to have a more limited appeal than some of my other records, so I was excited back home when they told me how well it was doing here. Martin Scorsese says it's the job of the artist to make the audience care about his obsessions.
These kinds of records are records that are filled with my obsessions, my own personal things that I'm deeply interested in. I mean The Rising too but just in a different way. These characters are just a bit of a harder core experience so it's exciting when people respond to it. Also I think there's a good deal of Irish in a lot of these characters on this record because the dark stuff of my music I got from my dad - you know he was half or three-quarters Irish - and was very intense, so it was fascinating to watch how people respond to it. You can feel a slight difference. I wouldn't know how to explain it, but it was an exciting night because I've only played this music to audiences in the States so far.
It's actually a privilege to be able to get on stage and have that kind of intensity and attention coming out of the crowd - where you're there at the end of the night and just hear the overwhelming sound of silence, but that's the sound of your communion at that moment, you know. You're asking people to invert the concert experience that they have with the E Street Band; instead of the physical release, you're looking for the emotional release, and instead of communicating physically you're communicating in an emotional fashion. You get to a similar place where hopefully there's a cathartic experience. It was a great opening night here. I'd just like to thank all my fans here in Dublin. They're just a terrific audience.
DF: In its first month Devils and Dust sold five times more than the album it's most compared to (Tom Jode from 10 years ago) but maybe three times less than the more rocked-up The Rising from three years ago. Do you like mixing the big with the small knowing the bulk of the fans will follow?
Bruce: Well you know you can't be sure of anything. Sometimes I tell young bands that have had success that it's easy to forget you won that audience and they can be lost at any point in their career, and to be worth something you have to risk losing them, you have to take risks. That's a part of it, otherwise what new are you going to say to your audience?
I like making the music that I like, I like doing the kinds of projects . . . whatever moves me at a given moment, and I let the chips fall where they may. I think that I tend to like to do not necessarily a big project because I don't really know what's going to happen, what was going to happen when The Rising came out. I thought people would be interested in a record with the E Street Band.
We'd been playing a long time and you never know, and then it just feels natural for me to make if you look throughout my history I kind of done - I've kind of see-sawed back and forth between those two kinds. Whether it was Tunnel of Love or Nebraska or the Ghost of Tom Jode. those kind of records come up regularly, and I think they allow me to have a deeper and a fuller communication with my audience - and that's what I'm interested in.
DF: After Born in The USA you brought out Tunnel of Love. Was it important for you to reintroduce yourself as a songwriter rather than a star?
Bruce: I think that the main thing is that it gets you away from the things that can be dangerous - which is trying to run first in the horse race all the time. You know, to me, you're looking at the wrong thing and so I always enjoyed it when we made records that had big audiences. I still like to have them if they come my way but the minute you have that you've gotta do something else. I mean, for me, it's almost automatic. You know the minute that happens I'm looking to take a turn and to throw a curved ball and do something slightly different. It's the way that you stay vital and alive and survive. You can't worry if you're going to be selling fewer records. You probably will, you know, but it's what creates the foundation for a long career constantly introducing something new or different to your audience. Otherwise what do you have to say to them.
Tonight is like I'm asking people to come in and have a new experience, not the same old experience. I'm asking, please come in and let's have a new experience. Let's do something new that we haven't done before, let's communicate in a way that that we haven't communicated that often and that's how you stay awhile, that's also how I fulfil my responsibility to the people who have come to listen to me for many years.
DF: OK, finally was there a down side to the commercial success in the PR bonanza that was Born in the USA. I get the impression that you didn't really like an awful lot of what happened there.
Bruce: I liked a lot of it. There's parts of it that I didn't really like. I tend to be private, so I don't mind the attention when I'm on stage, but off stage I tend to keep relatively private and to myself, so some of that gets screwed. But at the same time you don't make the rules, you know you make your music, you take your chances and you step into that arena and you take what comes. You have an opportunity to alter that through your musical release and your actions, if you choose, to a certain degree.
Where I think it happens, when you're young and in the spotlight and all of a sudden you're the thing this year or this month. I had it happen a couple of times, and it was rough the first time, a little less rough the second time and now I just take it as it comes. I dealt with that part of it and just kept my eye on the ball, which was making music and communicating with your fans. Everything else you have to push it to the side and not let it get in your way.
DF: Sure, but in 2004 you did kick a political ball - anti-Bush, pro-John Kerry. Would you get back into it in 2008?
Bruce: Oh gosh, you make me sound like a politician but, eh, I don't know. I think you have more impact, you are more useful, if you're very, very cautious about your involvement at that level. That's what makes it mean something.
I would prefer to address it in some other way but we've had a very rough eight years in the States. The country has gone very often in a very distorted direction - it's still very distressing if you're interested in a reason and basic sort of human values, it's a very tough time in the States right now.
Dave Fanning's interview with Bruce Springsteen will be broadcast at 6pm tomorrow (Monday, July 4) on 2FM
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