“Everything dies, baby that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

— “Atlantic City” by Bruce Springsteen

I’m a rather recent convert to the musical greatness that is Bruce Springsteen.  Sure, I’ve known about him for the longest time, but what average American kid grows up not knowing about him in one way or another?  If nothing else, they have heard their patriotic celebrations graced, ironically, with “Born in the USA,” which is surely one of the most interesting examples of misappropriating a song that I’ve ever heard.  Nevertheless, Springsteen is a living American rock legend, and I finally came to this realization myself just recently.

I would have to say that he came across my radar more noticeably when he and the E Street band played the Superbowl halftime show back in 2009.  Strange, I know.  I suppose it was the fact that, amongst the litany of recent Superbowl performances, Springsteen’s was actually decent and enjoyable.  I still have nightmares sometimes about Mick Jagger’s belly-shirt and his flailing attempts at groovy dancing (“Is he trying to fly?  Did he take too many muscle relaxers?”).  I was waiting to be impressed by somebody, or anybody, and Springsteen and E Street definitely caught my attention.  I made the mental note that I would have to listen to some of his music.

Earlier this year, I was at Borders, scrounging through the $7 CDs rack like the music junkie I am, looking for a new hit, when I came across Springsteen’s greatest hits album.  Here it was, a nice selection of songs from across his career, and for an amazing price.  Considering it my treasure for the day, I purchased it and popped it into the CD player as soon as I got in the car.

I have to admit, some of the sound was definitely dated to my ears, but once I got past that, I was actually quite impressed with the profundity of The Boss.  What I mean is that Springsteen comes across as no Sting, all smooth and intellectual; Bruce Springsteen is blue-collar American and proud of it. But beneath the crusty veneer of New Jersey grit, there are some deep spiritual themes that grace his music.

Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern Gothic writer, observed,

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Springsteen’s songs are littered with fallen people who have suffered evil, or seen it in themselves, and they long for the restoration of their dreams, or release from their hard labors.  Their regrets appear throughout the stories of Springsteen’s songs, like “Thunder Road,” where the glories of youth lie scattered: “There were ghosts in the eyes/Of all the boys you sent away/They haunt this dusty beach road/In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets/They scream your name at night in the street/Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet/And in the lonely cool before dawn/You hear their engines roaring on.”  Or in “The River” where a man whose life and marriage has hit hard times “remembers us riding in my brother’s car/Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir/At night on them banks I’d lie awake/And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take/Now those memories come back to haunt me/They haunt me like a curse/Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/Or is it something worse.” Nebraska alone is chock full of people on the run, at the end of their rope, or on the wrong side of the law.  The inexplicable nature of evil is highlighted in the words of the serial killer from the title song: “They wanted to know why I did what/I did, well, sir, I guess there’s just/a meanness in this world.”

Springsteen’s characters are also aware of their flawed status.  In “Born To Run,” which mixes youthful idealism with an already growing awareness of life’s hard edges, the man is “just a scared and lonely rider” who is on a “highway jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.”  In “Thunder Road” the main characters are past their youthful, high school glory days, and the man realizes  “Well now I’m no hero/That’s understood/All the redemption I can offer, girl/Is beneath this dirty hood.”  In “Dancing In The Dark” the main character expresses the frustration of being “tired and bored with myself…. I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face/Man I ain’t getting nowhere.”  “Atlantic City,” my favorite Springsteen song, is also permeated with this sense of desperation.  The main character has “debts that no honest man can pay,” so he’s come to Atlantic City with his girl for one last desperate bid.  In the last verse, he reaches the point of uncomfortable compromise: “Now, I been lookin’ for a job, but it’s hard to find/Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t/Get caught on the wrong side of that line/Well, I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end/So, honey, last night I met this guy and I’m gonna/Do a little favor for him.”  Likewise, Joe Roberts in Nebraska‘s “Highway Patrolman” struggles with the act of bringing his own brother to justice because a “man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.”

If Sprinsteen’s songs remained here, in the darkness at the edge of town, they’d simply be depressing.  What makes Springsteen’s music truly great is that it often reflects the redemptive act, or offers the hope of redemption, which O’Connor says is so important to us as humans.  In “Thunder Road,” although the two characters are past their glory days, the man still offers Mary a second chance at love: “We got one last chance to make it real/To trade in these wings on some wheels/Climb in back/Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks/Oh, oh, come take my hand/Riding out tonight to case the promised land.”  Similarly, in “Born To Run,” the man offers the girl the chance to escape the “death trap” of “this town” to find out if love is real.  His offer is to partake in a pilgrimage of sorts: “Someday girl I don’t know when/we’re gonna get to that place/Where we really want to go/and we’ll walk in the sun/But till then tramps like us/baby we were born to run.”

In the iconic “Atlantic City,” in the midst of verses clouded with desperation and compromise, there are the haunting but hopeful lines of the chorus that ring out: “Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” This resurrection-like hope reflects the accumulation of religious imagery that peppers the songs of Springsteen, reflecting some memory of the Catholic upbringing of his youth no doubt.  This kind of religious reflection of redemption is nowhere seen more powerfully than in “My Father’s House,” which almost serves as a retelling of the story of the prodigal son from the New Testament.  The protagonist in the story is lost in a dark forest at night as a child, hearing the whisper of the wind and ghostly voices, trying to find his way back to the light of his father’s house and his father’s arms.  The last verse creates a powerful contrast that is both beautiful and chilling: “My father’s house shines hard and bright/It stands like a beacon in the night/Calling and calling so cold and alone/Shining ‘cross this dark highway/where our sins lie unatoned.”

A sense of hope seems to grow stronger in some of Springsteen’s more recent works, particularly Working On A Dream, where in “What Love Can Do” he contrasts pain, trouble, and sorrow with the power of love:

Darlin’, I can’t stop the rain/Or turn your black sky blue/But let me show you what love can do/Let me show you what love can do.

Here our memory lay corrupted and our city lay dry/Let me make this vow to you/Here where it’s blood for blood and an eye for an eye/Let me show you what love can do/Let me show you what love can do.

Here we bear the mark of Cain/We’ll let the light shine through/Let me show you what love can do/Let me show you what love can do.

Springsteen’s music is great because it is an effective mirror of all of life.  In it we see all the darkness, the grime, the insanity and desperation of humanity’s darkness.  But in it we also see resilience, bravery, hope, beauty, love, and mercy.  Let our hope and faith be that of Springsteen in “Badlands”: “I believe in the love that you gave me/I believe in the faith that could save me/I believe in the hope and I pray that some day/It may raise me above these badlands.”