Roll of the Dice: Letter to You

I had to completely re-write this essay.

I had it written, prepped and ready to go before the holidays, but I dreaded publishing it. So I punted, hoping I’d feel better about it in a week or two. Or at least less guilty.

But I didn’t. In fact, as time passed, I only felt worse.

When “Letter to You” debuted as the first single and title track for Bruce’s new album, the novelty of having new Springsteen music carried me for a few days. But even at first listen, I knew something was off, and as time went on I felt indifference turn to dislike, to the point where I even edited the song out of my playlist and skipped the track whenever I played the CD.

“Letter to You” became the first Springsteen track since “Cover Me” to leave me stone cold.

I hated that realization. And I hated even more having to confess it in writing–especially because:

a) I’m incredibly grateful to have any new music from Bruce at all right now

b) I’m genuinely moved by the sentiment he conveys in the song

c) I really enjoy the album–it’s just this one track I don’t like. The lazy rhymes, the musical recycling (am I the only one who hears Max playing “Land of Hope and Dreams” the entire time?), the vocals strained to overwrought…

Yeah, I wasn’t kind in my original essay.

But then I caught Bruce’s winter solstice appearance on Stand With Teachers, where he played an acoustic arrangement of “Letter to You.”

And I fell instantly in love.

You’d think after three years of examining Bruce’s catalog song by song, I’d be attuned to how changing just one ingredient can completely alter the outcome of the recipe, but I was still dumbfounded at how tender and beautiful I found “Letter to You” when it was stripped of its bombast.

It was as much of a revelation to me as “Real World” was when I first heard its magnificent original Christic version many years after I dismissed it as one of the weakest songs in Bruce’s catalog. In other words, I had to relearn a lesson that should have been obvious to me by now: the song and the track are two different things, and it’s possible to love the former while disliking the latter.

That’s the position I found myself in with “Letter to You.”

So I went back and rewrote this essay through a much more appreciative lens, and that original article will never see the light of day.

But I’m gonna need you to indulge me in order to make this work:

From this point forward, I’m considering “Letter to You” to be an intimate solo acoustic song, not a full-band rocker. To me, Bruce’s Stand Up for Heroes performance is the definitive one, and the album track is the alternative version–it’s interesting, but I don’t need to ever hear it performed again that way.

Please humor me.

Let’s take a listen (acoustic version!) so we can appreciate Bruce’s heartfelt lyrics together. (Skip to 1:38 to bypass the dirty joke.)

It’s actually a challenge to analyze most of the new songs on Letter to You—not because they’re laden with metaphor and symbolism, but for the exact opposite reason: Bruce writes so straightforwardly on this album and draws so much from his personal history that the songs call more for annotation than analysis.

“Letter to You,” the album’s title track, barely even calls for that. The word summational can be overused in music journalism and criticism (present blog included), but it truly applies here. Heck, it almost sounds final.

If “Letter to You” were to be the last song Bruce ever wrote, it would be a fitting period at the end of a long-running story. As Bruce readily admitted in promotional interviews (not that we needed him to, so obvious is the song’s meaning), we are the you his letter is addressed to, and that letter is his metaphor for his life’s work.

‘Neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread
Got down on my knees, grabbed my pen and bowed my head
Tried to summon all that my heart finds true
And send it in my letter to you

That opening line seemed to generate a lot of head-scratching discussion among Springsteen fans when the song debuted, but while it includes the only real metaphor in the song, it’s still a relatively straightforward one.

“A crowd of mongrel trees” is just a fancy way of referring to a mongrel forest, which is itself another way of referring to a dense forest comprised of many varieties of trees.

In “Letter to You,” the mongrel forest represents all of the many influences and influencers on a very young Bruce Springsteen–musical, political, societal. As a teenage boy in the 1960s, he was buffeted and fascinated by these forces, and they dislodged something deep within him.

Or maybe unraveled would be a better word to use here, because when Bruce refers to pulling that bothersome thread, he means that he indulged his muse. He realized that something deep within him was struggling to make itself known to his conscious mind, so he surrendered to it: he grabbed his pen, bowed his head both to write and in submission, and allowed his subconscious to make itself known.

In other words, this is Bruce’s origin story as a songwriter.

Lyrically, this is the only verse that impresses in “Letter to You.” Each remaining verse adds little other than length, but I don’t mind, because the telling is so beautiful.

Things I found out through hard times and good
I wrote ’em all out in ink and blood
Dug deep in my soul and signed my name true
And sent it in my letter to you

In my letter to you I took all my fears and doubts
In my letter to you all the hard things I found out
In my letter to you all that I’ve found true
And I sent it in my letter to you

I took all the sunshine and rain
All my happiness and all my pain
The dark evening stars and the morning sky of blue
And I sent it in my letter to you
And I sent it in my letter to you

In my letter to you I took all my fears and doubts
In my letter to you all the hard things I found out
In my letter to you all that I found true
And I sent it in my letter to you
I sent it in my letter to you

There’s nothing really that I can add to the verses and bridges above as far as analysis goes. It’s pretty much all there on the surface.

Lyrically, “Letter to You” reminds me of “Surprise, Surprise” — a simple but heartfelt and unpretentious sentiment. I think the reason the album arrangement turned me off is that rather than pairing his lyrics to a simple arrangement, he tried to transform it into a rocker. The full-band arrangement is so powerful that it stomps Bruce’s sentimental message into the dirt.

There’s no better point of comparison than the bridges. Take a listen to the album version, and how Brue stretches out “In my l-ehhhhhhhhhh-ter to you…” for no real reason or effect that I can discern. It distracts more than it underlines. (It’s probably the element of the song that turns me off the most.)

Compare with the acoustic version now–see what I mean? Bruce extends the “letter” just a beat shorter than on the album, but it makes all the difference.

It’s not the only example though. There are many such grace notes throughout the acoustic version, and ending the song on that final, tender “letter… <pause> to you” is so much more effective than an entire extra minute of the admittedly sublime E Street Band jamming their way toward a fade-out. (I go misty-eyed at the end of that video every time I watch it.)

Knowing that Bruce wrote the songs on an acoustic guitar and brought them to the band to transform them, I can’t help but think back on the lesson of Nebraska: some songs don’t easily translate to the band.

I realize I’m almost certainly in the minority in my assessment of “Letter to You,” and I’m fine with that; I long ago realized that many of my favorites and least favorites in Bruce’s catalog run counter to most of E Street Nation.

But if I had a wish to ask Bruce for on what I hope is an inevitable (but delayed) tour, it would be:

Please play “Letter to You,” Bruce. Just play it solo acoustic.

Letter to You
Recorded: November 18-22, 2019
Released: Letter to You (2020)
First performed: December 21, 2020 (Colts Neck, NJ)
Last performed: September 3, 2022 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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