When the world first met him in the mid-’70s, Bruce Springsteen might have seemed like a throwback. He sang about first loves and teenage runaways; he dressed like a greaser and worshipped at the altar of jukeboxes and summer nights on the boardwalk. Many of his influences—Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Phil Spector—were at least a decade past the peak of their cultural impact. A glowing early review by Jon Landau claiming to have witnessed “rock and roll future” at a Springsteen concert helped define his mythology, but the opening words of the next sentence were just as crucial: “On a night when I needed to feel young....”
Springsteen has spent much of his career wrestling with this penchant for nostalgia. (“I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it—but I probably will,” he sang in “Glory Days,” 36 years ago.) Some artists evolve through reinvention and others through refinement, but Springsteen has often compared the span of his career to a long conversation: He can revisit certain themes, even repeat himself, but the idea is to keep it moving. Springsteen turned 71 last month, and his 20th studio album, Letter to You, indulges in his past like never before. Following the autobiographical thread of his memoir and Broadway show, it seems to feature Springsteen himself as the narrator, observing the ways that music can sustain us, with a tone pitched between deep reverence and loss.
That simple but elusive power forms the thematic heart of the record, and it also informs the sound. Last fall, Springsteen enlisted his longtime accompanists in the E Street Band to record the whole thing live in the studio during a snowy week in New Jersey. The goal was to approximate the untappable energy of their concerts and classic albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town. Working again with his 2010s collaborator Ron Aniello, the plan might have also been to avoid the obsessive tinkering that has distracted from his straightforward, earnest songwriting on recent records.
Flourished with organ and saxophone, music box piano and glockenspiel, surf guitar licks and driving rhythm, Letter to You is bold and self-referential, using the sound of Springsteen’s own catalog the way he once treated the entirety of rock history. The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation. It is a welcome return after two decades of E Street records that, even at their best, tended to downplay the band’s strengths.