Roll of the Dice: One Minute You’re Here

“There were trains–passenger and freight–that came through Freehold in the fifties during long summer afternoons. We waited for them to jump and ride from one end of town to the other, or just to lay our pennies down on the rails and pick them up hot and flat. Those trains came and went as sudden as death.

 

“Back home you knelt at home at your bedside and recited [The Lord’s Prayer]. ‘For if I die before I wake…’ I never cared for that part. It impressed upon my young mind that someday we will close our eyes and the gray evening sky will unfold above us, bringing that long and endless sleep.” — Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You (2020)

For a good long stretch, Bruce Springsteen was a searcher, starting each new album with a question.

What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?
Is there anybody alive out there?
Can you hear me?
Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?

And then something changed.

When Bruce began his eighth decade on the planet, his songs stopped seeking answers. Western Stars and Letter to You, his two most recent albums, couldn’t sound more different musically, but thematically they couldn’t be more similar.

Western Stars is full of lush, orchestral, finely-drawn character studies; Letter to You is intimate autobiography with a classic E Street sound. But both collections are keenly aware that the past holds more answers than the present, and the future is shrinking with each passing day.

Letter to You opens with “One Minute You’re Here,” which sounds like an epilogue to Western Stars and might actually be one. A “source with direct involvement” reports (to Brucebase) that Bruce first recorded it in September 2004, and it’s very noticeable in the film version of Letter to You that the E Street Band is never shown performing it, even while Bruce is recording his vocals. Bruce himself has called the song “transitional.”

“One Minute You’re Here” has different engineering and mixing credits, too, which lends support to the theory that Bruce’s vocals are 2019 overdubs on a previously recorded backing track.

Regardless of its origin, “One Minute You’re Here” is notable for opening a Springsteen album on a fatalistic note for the first time since “Born in the U.S.A.” opened the album of the same name 36 years earlier.

It’s worth noting that not only does Bruce open the album with “One Minute You’re Here,” he bookends it with “I’ll See You in My Dreams” — two songs about death, the first resigned to it and the other looking forward to the reunions it offers. In between are a series of vignettes, remembrances, and celebrations that punctuate a life well lived.

Stitched together, Letter to You presents an artist looking back on his journey, with appreciation for the days still afforded him. But we start with a reckoning that those days are numbered.

Big black train coming down the track
Blow your whistle long and long
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone

I lay my penny down on the rails
As the summer wind sings its last song
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone

Like many of Bruce’s finest songs, “One Minute You’re Here” employs a lyrical simplicity and economy that belie its craft. Even when discussing the song in interviews, Bruce is coy about the imagery in this song, marginalizing the train-and-pennies incident as a memory from his childhood.

But the train is clearly a metaphor–in fact, it’s one of Bruce’s favorite and most versatile ones–and this time it represents death.

In the first verse, Bruce sings to the train. He can see and hear it coming from a long way off, but it passes in a moment, claiming an extra passenger in the passing–whether a friend, a lover, or a child, we never learn.

The second verse is  more significant than just a childhood reminiscence. It’s long been an urban legend that by placing a penny on a railroad track, you can derail a train. (It’s such a commonly held belief that scientists still have to occasionally refute it.)

When Bruce’s narrator lays his penny down on the rails, that’s a metaphor for trying to cheat death. And it’s significant that the last summer wind is blowing–that’s Bruce telling us that we’re at the moment when the narrator realizes the prime of his life is ending. But there’s no stopping this train–try to do so, and one minute you’re there, the next minute you’re flat.

The narrator realizes this, though–which is why he croons with powerless anguish in the Orbisonian bridge.

Baby baby baby I’m so alone
Baby baby baby I’m coming home

We flash backward now, to the recent past and a happier, more vibrant time. (We know this, because the rest of the E Street Band enters at this point, joining Bruce and Roy to add color to a previously lonely track.)

Autumn carnival on the edge of town
We walk down the midway arm-in-arm
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone

I thought I knew just who I was
And what I’d do but I was wrong
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone

Red river running along the edge of town
On the muddy banks I lay my body down, this body down

It’s significant that Bruce sets the carnival in autumn–that’s how we know that the narrator is mourning a recent loss, as he’s in the autumn of his own life. And whoever he’s grieving for, it’s very likely a longtime companion, because he’s both unprepared for that loss and unable to re-center himself without them.

Note also the dual use of “edge of town.” That’s neither laziness nor accident, especially since the rhyme scheme doesn’t even require the first one. It’s Bruce telling us that these two characters travelled far together, but the narrator hasn’t moved forward since he lost his companion–he’s still on the edge of town.

The final verse is a thing of simple beauty:

Footsteps crackling on a gravel road
Stars vanish in a sky as black as stone
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone

That gorgeously understated couplet contrasts the sound of the narrator’s footsteps on his own road with the sight of mighty stars all but swallowed up by the void. It’s more than just another reminder that each footstep takes us closer to the end of our journey.

It’s also a reminder that against the vast reach of the universe and the march of time, even the stars are insignificant, let alone each one of us. Within our own lives, though, even a single footstep makes an audible sound. They matter to us, if not to anyone or everyone else. The narrator may not yet realize it, but the songwriter certainly does.

We may be gone in a minute, but this minute we’re here.

One Minute You’re Here
Recorded: Unknown (as early as September 2004 for the backing track, and likely 2019 for the vocals)
Released: Letter to You (2020)
Never performed

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