Roll of the Dice: Souls of the Departed

Even when Bruce is happiest with his lot in life, he grapples with the systemic social inequality that made it possible.

There’s probably no better example of this duality at work in his music than “Souls of the Departed.”

“Souls of the Departed” sticks out like a sore thumb on the otherwise bright and shiny Lucky Town. (Yes, there’s also “The Big Muddy,” but that song is more cautionary tale than personal confession.) It’s overtly political and deeply unsettling, a far cry from the romantic love songs and self-deprecating humor that characterizes the rest of the album.

Let’s take a listen, and then we’ll break it down:

The first thing–literally–that we notice about “Souls of the Departed” is that its musical backbone is virtually copied and pasted from the album’s opening track, “Better Days.” That’s almost certainly intentional: although “My Beautiful Reward” serves as the album’s epilogue, “Souls of the Departed” functions as the album’s true closer, and as such “Better Days” and “Souls of the Departed” serve as bookends, mirror images–the first a confession of contentment and the last a confession of complicity.

Sonically, “Souls of the Departed” is as angry a rocker as the lyrics demand, so it’s a shocker when we find out that the song is a solo track–Bruce plays every instrument that we hear except for Gary Mallaber’s drums.

Lyrically, the song is a triptych, a series of vignettes in the vein of “Reason to Believe.” We start in a far-away Iraqi battlefield, travel back to the mean streets of Compton, and finally end up in little Evan Springsteen’s bedroom, a setting so unexpectedly intimate that we’re completely unprepared for it after the geopolitical scale of the first two verses.

On the road to Basra stood young Lieutenant Jimmy Bly
Detailed to go through the clothes of the soldiers who died
At night in dreams he sees their souls rise
Yeah like dark geese into the Oklahoma skies

For such a raw song, that’s a beautiful opening verse. In his typical fashion, Bruce manages to convey a lot of information about Lt. Jimmy in some very subtle ways: we know he’s from Oklahoma, a place about as far removed from Basra as one could imagine. We know he’s young, so young that he still goes by the childish nickname “Jimmy,” and young enough to be haunted by the horror of his detail. As he dutifully scavenges the clothes of the slain soldiers, we can imagine the discovery of photographs, lucky charms, little personal items that make it impossible for Jimmy to think of the fallen anything other than individually distinct human beings, whether or not he knew them in life.

As the first chorus kicks in, we can’t help but wonder: are we praying for the souls of the slain, or the soul of Lt. Bly, who may have a family back home in Oklahoma that he left when he departed?

Well this is a prayer for the souls of the departed
Those who’ve gone and left their babies brokenhearted
This is a prayer for the souls of the departed

Maybe we pray for both.

Bruce continues, closer to home this time:

Now Raphael Rodriguez was just seven years old
Shot down in a schoolyard by some East Compton Cholos
His mama cried “My beautiful boy is dead”
In the hills the self-made men just sighed and shook their heads

The gut-wrenching emotion of the scene anchors us to Raphael’s mama, but it’s that last line that foreshadows the rest of the song: the “self-made men” in the hills… their ranks include the singer.

This is a prayer for the souls of the departed
Those who’ve gone and left their babies brokenhearted
Young lives over before they got started
This is a prayer for the souls of the departed

What’s unspoken here is the link between Lieutenant Bly, his company, and Raphael Rodriguez. A world apart, they were all caught up in deep-set and complex social and political forces beyond their ken much less control. But Bruce knows that somehow those forces trace their way back to the self-made men.

Bruce sets aside formula for the bridge, reflecting now on his own first-born son, barely a year old at the time he recorded “Souls of the Departed.”

Yeah tonight as I tuck my own son in bed
All I can think of is what if it would’ve been him instead
I want to build me a wall so high nothing can burn it down
Right here on my own piece of dirty ground

That’s a sentiment every parent empathizes with. We’ve all had those same thoughts, every time we hear about a drive-by or mass shooting. What if it had been my child? The urge to protect our children is so strong, so innate, that we want to protect them any way we can. And one of the most elemental ways to do that is to build a wall, an instinctive urge that eerily foreshadows our most controversial American political debate today.

Bruce knows that won’t solve the problem; it merely isolates him from it.  But he can’t help but feel the urge, and for a self-made man like Bruce, it’s an urge that’s feasible if he wanted it to be. He knows it, and he confess it via his “dirty ground” reference.

In the final verse, Bruce leads us to where we’ve known we were heading since the end of the second verse:

Now I ply my trade in the land of king dollar
Where you get paid and your silence passes as honor
And all the hatred and dirty little lies
Been written off the books and into decent men’s eyes

There’s a case to be made that “Souls of the Departed” isn’t personal at all–that the final verse reveals the narrator as an American businessman, or perhaps a politician well-compensated by lobbyists. But I think that at the very least, Bruce intends for this verse (as well as the song) to resonate autobiographically. It’s a “Man in the Mirror” moment that’s intended to wake us up to the way we accept the wars, the guns, poverty, the social inequality that leads inexorably to untimely deaths.

We, the decent ones, may not feel the hatred and we may not tell the lies. But we carry them in our acceptance of The Way Things Are. That final couplet ranks among Bruce’s most powerful closing lines.

With so much care and control exercised over the content and sound of the song, “Souls of the Departed” simmers and seethes throughout–but the eruption we expect never quite materializes (on vinyl at least–on stage, his band would predictably cut loose), and that’s deliberate as well. “Souls of the Departed” is a song of complicity–of knowing that things are wrong, knowing how to protect yourself, but not knowing how and therefore not really trying to correct a deeply entrenched system.

“Souls of the Departed” was a nightly staple during both World Tour 1992 and World Tour 1993, and as is often the case, the song grew in power as the tour progressed and the band made the song their own. A few of these performances were captured professionally on video, so we can fully appreciate the power of the performance.

Here are two of my favorites: first, from Bruce’s appearance on MTV Unplugged (for which he famously refused to stay unplugged). A foreboding “Star-Spangled Banner” serves as the lead-in, fading out as Bruce begins the song accompanied only by a soft drone and barely perceptible percussion. The band explodes into action following the first chorus but recedes at the critically intimate final verse.

…and from the final weeks of the tour, a performance from Verona, Italy.

One of my favorite performances of “Souls of the Departed” is the sole time Bruce played it solo and acoustic on his twelve-string slide guitar at one of his benefit shows in Somerville in 2003.

The arrangement is so stark and powerful that you probably didn’t even realize he left out the bridge. Whether he did that intentionally or by accident, I don’t know, but the song somehow retained its full power regardless.

Here are two final clips, from the few performances with the E Street Band (there have only been six). The first is from the Rising Tour:

…and finally from the following year’s Vote for Change Tour, an on-point performance featuring not just Bruce and the E Street Band, but Neil Young as well:

Souls of the Departed
Recorded: July-December 1991
Released: Lucky Town (1992)
First performed: June 15, 1992 (Stockholm, Sweden)
Last performed: April 27, 2008 (Charlotte, NC)

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