There are so many covers of Bruce Springsteen’s songs out there that I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be able to catalog them all.
Most are the usual suspects: “I’m on Fire,” “Because the Night,” “Atlantic City,” and “Dancing in the Dark” all get lots and lots of love.
Sometimes, though, an artist takes a crack at one of Bruce’s deep cuts, and they don’t get much deeper than “Lift Me Up.”
Bruce recorded “Lift Me Up” for the movie Limbo, and it was released on the soundtrack in 1999. Sung in a falsetto, Bruce’s voice is almost unrecognizable to the uninitiated, but it spoke to Swedish singer/songwriter Jennie Abrahamson nonetheless. Here’s how she describes it:
A beautiful love song about dependence, about letting oneself be lifted by love. That’s how I interpret it… I first heard it when I was on the mat in a yoga class. I remember being still for quite a long while in a quite complex position, but despite the heavy body work my mind just drifted away to this song and I found tears running down my face. It had such an immediate beauty to it, it spoke right to my heart.
Jennie was so taken with the song that she tinkered with it in the studio and created a modern arrangement that preserves and honors Bruce’s haunting, ethereal original. The result was so powerful that Abrahamson chose to close her latest album with it.
Here’s that track, from her 2017 album Reverseries.
Bonus: Here’s Jennie performing Lift Me Up” in concert at WOMAD last summer. Performing solo (and providing her own percussion (which is no mean feat), it’s not quite as atmospheric as her studio version but it’s every bit as mesmerizing.
