What do you do when hard times don’t go away?
If you’re Bruce Springsteen you put out High Hopes, his punk-influenced 18th studio album (and 11th to top Billboard’s album charts) in a recording career that began in 1973.
Since the century began, the United States has endured the 9/11 attacks and two long, fruitless wars that followed, the drowning of New Orleans, the worst financial collapse in 80 years and two recessions. The median wage for American workers was lower in 2013 than in 1998; and there are fewer jobs now than in 2007. Any euphoria that Springsteen and other Obama supporters felt on Nov. 4, 2008 has long since been ground to dust in the face of an unrelenting Republican opposition and the weakest economic recovery in living memory.
Because Springsteen has consistently—even obsessively—focused on releasing albums that tell a coherent story (rather than just releasing a group of unrelated songs), part of the pleasure of a new Springsteen record is listening for the larger story the songs tell when played in sequence on the album (or CD, or mp3 file). So what story is Springsteen telling this time?
In the liner notes for High Hopes Springsteen writes, “I was working on a record of some of our best unreleased material from the past decade when Tom Morello (sitting in for Steve [Van Zandt] during the Australian leg of our tour) suggested we ought to add ‘High Hopes’ to our live set…. Tom and his guitar became my muse, pushing the rest of this project to another level.“<!–more–>
High Hopes is the first album Springsteen has put together while on the road, performing with his band, and it shows. In its current incarnation, the E Street Band has grown to 18 members with a four-piece horn section, multiple percussionists to supplement drummer Max Weinberg’s powerful beats, and a host of singers for Springsteen to mix and match with his own voice and with each other. Much of High Hopes is music that was meant to be played by a big band to—and often sung with—a live audience.
Unlike its predecessor, Wrecking Ball, or some of Springsteen’s other albums (e.g., Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The Rising), High Hopes isn’t—to these ears at least—a “big” album. Rather, it sounds like what it is: bits and pieces of music that have slowly accumulated over the decades and have, somewhat surprisingly, come together to fit this particular time and place. Springsteen didn’t write and record these songs all at once in a burst of creative inspiration. Rather, the original compositions on High Hopes span nearly 20 years and several separate recording sessions.
With the exception of 2006’s We Shall Overcome, a collection of songs by and associated with Pete Seeger, Springsteen has rarely covered other writers’ songs on his studio albums. Here he covers three: one each by punk-rock pioneers Suicide and The Saints, as well as the title track by Tim Scott McConnell of ’90s roots-rockers, The Havalinas. Along with Morello’s guitar—raucous, scratching, keening, pulsing, full of special effects and harsh noises—these songs shape and define the album’s spirit of anger, despair, defiance, resistance and exuberance.
What do you do when hard times don’t go away?
You tell the plain, unadorned truth about what is going on. Or, in the terminology of American popular music, you sing the blues:
- The desperate man living on the edge of Tim Scott McConnell’s “High Hopes“: “Comin’ from the cities, comin’ from the wild; I see a breathless army breakin’ like a cloud; They’re gonna smother love, they’re gonna shoot your hopes; Before the meek inherit, they’ll learn to hate themselves….“
- The underworld gangsters of “Harry’s Place”: “You don’t f*k with Harry’s money, you don’t fk Harry’s girls; these are the rules, this is the world….“
- The Amadou Diallo-inspired elegy of “American Skin (41 Shots)“, revived on tour two years ago by the killing of Trayvon Martin: “It ain’t no secret, no secret my friend; You can get killed just for living in your American skin….“
- The soul-deadened traveler of The Saints’ “Just Like Fire Would“: “One night in a motel room, eyes cast like steel, I drank the wine that they left on my table; I knew the morning was too far. Just like fire would, I burn….“
- The newly widowed construction worker digging out the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center towers “Down In The Hole”: “Sun comes every morning, but it ain’t no friend…I’m buried to my heart here in this hurt…Down in the hole.“
Together these five songs form a tableau not of high hopes, but of hopes crushed by powerful, often anonymous forces far beyond the control or influence of the narrators and the people they care for. There’s next-to-nothing of hope left in these songs. A half-generation of hard times will do that to you.
What do you do when hard times don’t go away?
As the hushed, almost broken whispers of “Down In The Hole” fade out, the album pivots from what musicologist Craig Werner calls the blues impulse to the gospel impulse.
Over the insistent beat of drums at the opening of “Heaven’s Wall” comes the gospel harmonies of voices singing, “Raise your hand, raise your hand, raise your hand…“. The phrase has resonance that carries from Eddie Floyd’s 1960s soul rave-up “Raise Your Hand” (often covered by the E Street Band in its earlier days) all the way back to Israel’s battle with the Amalekites (Exodus 17:11). And “Heaven’s Wall” has a verse that comes as close to pure gospel music as anything Springsteen has written:
He saw the watcher at the city gates,
Jonah in the belly of the whale;
He watched you walk your ragged mile;
His mercy did not fail.
There’s call-and-response everywhere in “Heaven’s Wall”—in a blistering guitar duel, between Springsteen and the backup singers, between the band and its audience. (As Springsteen has said elsewhere, some songs are written so you can hear your audience singing back to you.) Nobody survives hard times alone, and “Heaven’s Wall” is High Hope’s first summons and lesson in how to survive them together.
On every album of original music he’s put out this century, Springsteen has included a love song of one kind or another. It’s as if he’s reminding his audience (and perhaps himself) that in the midst of everything else that’s going on in the world, love happens. On High Hopes, that song is the delightfully goofy “Frankie Fell In Love”. (How goofy? It comes complete with Einstein and Shakespeare having a barroom debate; that’s how goofy.) It’s mostly just a fun and silly song, but it’s also a gentle reminder that humor is a survival skill too.
Then, for the rest of the album, Springsteen assumes the voice of a village elder passing on hard-earned wisdom, and doing so because he’s aware that however much time he has left on this earth, it’s less than what he’s already had and it’s dwindling fast.
In the Celtic-inspired ballad “This Is Your Sword”, he warns, “In the days of despair you can grow hard; Till you close your mind and empty your heart“, and instructs, “If you find yourself staring in the abyss, Hold tight to your loved ones and remember this…. This is your sword, this is your shield; This is the power of love revealed; Carry it with you wherever you go, And give all the love that you have in your soul.” *
The haunting and lovely “Hunter Of Invisible Game” is, I think, the first 6/8 song Springsteen has ever released. It’s also as close to a religious affirmation of faith-in-the-midst-of-destruction as he’s ever come. After singing about empty cities, burning plains, and empires of dust, the narrator-searcher states softly but firmly something his decades of experience have taught him: “There’s a kingdom of love waiting to be reclaimed; I am the hunter of invisible game“. The game may be invisible, but it’s no less real than any physical object.
“The Ghost Of Tom Joad” offers the most powerful example of what Springsteen means when he calls Tom Morello his “muse” for this album. Originally released in 1995, “The Ghost Of Tom Joad” was the title track for Springsteen’s most hushed, folk-infused, and—at times—almost pulseless solo album. He’s since said that he originally wrote the song with the E Street Band in mind but wasn’t able to come up with an arrangement that worked with the whole band.
Rage Against The Machine didn’t have that problem. The seminal 1990s rap-metal band developed a blistering cover version that more than meets this blog’s First Rule of Cover Songs* and whose influence can be heard in the E Street Band’s version on High Hopes. Behind Morello’s swirling, frenetic lead guitar, “The Ghost Of Tom Joad” comes across as an anthem of solidarity with the oppressed.
What do you when hard times don’t go away?
Throughout much of Springsteen’s work over the past decade, death is ever-present, hovering nearby, ready to draw closer at any moment. In recent concerts and recordings, he’s paid tribute to deceased band members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, as well as to longtime friend and security chief Terry McGovern, and to a neighbor-friend whose children went to school with his.
“The Wall” fills that slot on High Hopes. It’s a soft-spoken, hard-edged song created from memories of a hometown musical mentor, Walter Cichon, who went missing in action in Vietnam in 1968. “I read Robert McNamara says he’s sorry….(but) apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall.” Inspired by occasional musical partner, Joe Grushecky, “The Wall” is mournful, elegiac, and stubbornly, unyieldingly bitter. Change a few words in the verses and you’ll be able to sing it at the memorial that gets built for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What do you do when hard times don’t go away?
Dry your eyes.
Keep the fire burning.
Open up your heart.
Punk pioneers Suicide first recorded “Dream Baby Dream” in the 1970s as an edgy, nervous, young man’s song. Nearly 40 years later, in Springsteen’s hands it’s an old man’s prayer, infused with the hard-earned wisdom of his life’s ups and downs.
This isn’t dreaming as fantasy, or as escape from reality. This is dreaming as commitment to a deeper, more powerful reality—that “trouble don’t last always“, that hard times don’t go on forever, and that the way to overcome hard times is with solidarity, and love, and memory.
The Book of Exodus begins with the enslavement of the Israelites because “then there arose a pharaoh who knew not Joseph” (Ex. 1: 8). And because that pharaoh didn’t know Joseph, did not know the debt of gratitude he and his family and kingdom owed to Joseph and his descendants, the Israelites were pressed into labor for, some scholars say, hundreds of years.
What’s important in the story of Exodus is not that pharaoh forgot Joseph; it’s that the Israelites did not. Through all their hard times, they kept alive the memory and story of Joseph and their other ancestors, the story that reminded them that though they were slaves now, they were a people meant for freedom, meant to live in a land flowing with milk and honey. And so are we.
High Hopes doesn’t tell the story of arriving in the promised land. Rather, it tells a story of persevering through hard times—the years spent making bricks without straw.
What do you do when hard times don’t go away?
You tell the truth about what’s going on. You pass on the wisdom and survival skills of your people. You keep alive the memories of better days.
You keep singing.
You stick together.
You keep singing.
You don’t give up.
You keep singing.
Give me help, give me strength; Give a soul a night of fearless sleep;
Give me love, give me peace; Don’t you know these days you pay for everything?
Got high hopes; I got high hopes….
*Along the way Springsteen answers one of his own lifelong questions. In 1975’s “Born Too Run” his narrator had asked “I wanna know if love is wild, baby I wanna know if love is real“. In “This Is Your Sword”, having spent his 40 years in the wilderness, the old man answers his younger self: “Should you grow weary on the battlefield; Do not despair, our love is real.“
**You’ve got to bring something new to it.
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com