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GW—
69
‘Y
ou can never gowrong in
rock ’n’ roll when you’re
p***ed off,’ says Bruce
Springsteen. In Paris to unveil
his new album,
Wrecking Ball
, to
the world’s media, Springsteen
admits it was written in a spirit
of political anger. ‘My work has
always been about judging the
distance between American
reality and theAmericanDream.’
Right now, he says, that
distance is greater than it has
ever been in his lifetime. With the
financial crisis, ‘an enormous
COMPLAINT FROM THE BOSS
Bruce Springsteen’s 17th studio album is his most overtly political yet.
At its launch in Paris, the blue-collar icon reveals why
fault line cracked the American
systemwide open and its
repercussions are just beginning
to be felt’.
As befits troubled times for
the workingman,
Wrecking Ball
is Springsteen’s most overtly
political collection of songs to
date. The title, he says, reflects
‘the flat destruction of some
American ideals and values over
the last 30 years. It seemed like a
goodmetaphor.’
While the album is
underpinned by a dark fury, in
person Springsteen is relaxed,
amusing and philosophical.
Asked if he feels that his role as a
voice of protest is a burden, he
laughs out loud. ‘I’m terribly
burdened at night when I’m
sleeping inmy big house. It’s
killingme. The rock life is brutal,
don’t let anyone tell you different.’
He concedes that just to be a
musician is ‘a charmed life. That’s
why they call it playing.’ But he
speaks eloquently about howhis
family background – growing up
in a householdwhere his father
had been ‘emasculated’ by long-
termunemployment – fuelled his
interest in the underlying
political causes, describing his
songwriting as ‘having a
conversationwithmyself ’.
If so, it is a conversation that is
taking a bleak turn. Springsteen
has long chronicled the
underbelly of the American
Dreambut this time he sounds
sad, angry and even, at times,
close to defeat. It is his
Grapes of
Wrath
, an album for the New
Depression.
B R U C E S P R I N G S T E E N