“Who would have ever thought we’d live in a country with no right to habeas corpus? That’s Orwellian… You get frightened for your family, for your home. And you realize how countries can move way off course, very far from democratic ideals. Add another terrorist attack or two, and the country can turn into a pretty scary place… It happens in a very American way – the flag is flying over civil liberties as they crumble.” — Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone, November 1, 2007
Twenty years ago, most Americans believed their country was headed in the wrong direction.
Still reeling from horrific terror attacks, the United States was in the early days of a pair of wars that would kill over a half million people across two decades.
To make matters worse, it had become clear that one of those two wars was predicated on falsehoods. Convinced of a connection unsupported by evidence, the Bush administration lied their way into an eight-year war in Iraq that exacted a toll not just overseas but at home as well.
In the name of safety and security, the administration spearheaded a rollback of rights and freedoms that chilled the blood of citizens and ignited a tug-of-war over civil liberties that continues to this day.
By October 2003, polls began to reflect the new majority opinion: America had lost its way, and it was straying ever further from its ideals.
Bruce Springsteen was a member of that emerging majority, and he had something to say about it. He’d already been doing so from the stage. At the closing stand of the Rising Tour that month, he admonished:
There’s been a lot of questions lately raised about the forthrightness of the government. I just want to say that playing with the truth during wartime has been a part of both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past, and it’s always wrong when the lives of our sons and daughters are on the line. The question of whether we were misled to the war in Iraq is not really a liberal or a conservative question. It’s an American question that goes to the heart of protecting the democracy we ask our sons and our daughters to die for. It’s our sacred trust as citizens to demand accountability and the truth from our leaders. That’s the meaning of patriotism.
When the tour ended the next day, so did Springsteen’s bully pulpit. Still seething, he turned to his notebook and began writing what would eventually become his fifteenth studio album. (He’d take a four-year, two-album detour before getting around to recording it.)
“I wrote some of [Magic] the minute I came off The Rising,” Springsteen told Joe Levy in Rolling Stone in 2007. “My idea was to pick up with the political and social results of what came out of the tragedy of 9/11. ‘Livin’ in the Future’ I’ve had since then. It’s about how terribly fucked up things have gotten. It’s a song about apathy, and how what you never thought could happen has happened already.”
For such a bitter song, “Livin’ in the Future” sure is bouncy. Its backing track is an amalgam of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and Gary U.S. Bond’s “Out of Work” (which Springsteen wrote), and it has the strut and swagger of both. That’s intentional.
“Livin’ in the Future” is Springsteen’s only 21st-century recording that sounds like it was recorded by the 1970s E Street Band, with both Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons taking generous turns in the spotlight. Even the trademark early E Street glockenspiel is present (although oddly, it’s Bruce rather than Danny on those keys), a dead giveaway that this retro sound is deliberate.
Why does Bruce revive his 20th century sound? In order to take us back in time so that we might better recognize how much the world has changed in the years since.
Lyrically, “Livin’ in the Future” is a companion song to “Your Own Worst Enemy.” (The latter is the stronger of the two both lyrically and musically.) Both are patriot songs in the truest sense: they hold allegiance to the American ideal of democracy and liberty for all, and they hold the nation accountable for falling short of it.
Both are written in the form of relationship songs, a decision Bruce made for both artistic and pragmatic reasons. “I tried to combine personal and political,” he told Levy, “so you can read into the songs either way. You can read the record as a comment on what’s been going on, or you can read it just as relationship songs.”
A letter come blowing in on an ill wind
Something ’bout me and you never seeing one another again
Yeah, well I knew it’d come, still I was struck deaf and dumb
Like when we kissed, that taste of blood on your tongue
Bruce lays it out from the start: You’re leaving. You’re leaving, and you’re not coming back.
The you in question is America. Or perhaps more precisely, the American Experiment that George Washington first wrote about in 1790: “The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil society. It was to be… a government of accommodation as well as a government of laws.”
Through corrosive legislation, and more terrifyingly through fiat (for which Bruce’s “Dear John” letter serves as metaphor), America incrementally betrays its citizens. Each erosion of rights is an omen of the next, and the great experiment seems headed for failure.
Our narrator sees it coming but can’t quite bring himself to believe it. He can sense it in her actions; he can taste it in her kiss. But when he calls his lover out for her gradual betrayal, she soothes him reassuringly:
Don’t worry darling, now baby don’t you fret
We’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet
It’s okay, she tells him. All that stuff you’re worried about down the road? That’s down the road. Worry about today, not tomorrow.
Today. Not tomorrow.
That’s our narrator’s dilemma: tomorrow isn’t anything but a string of todays.
He’s got Boiling Frog Syndrome: Put a frog in boiling water and it’ll leap right out. Put him in lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature a degree at a time, and he won’t sense the danger until it’s too late. His girl is turning up the heat slowly but ever so surely.
Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of grey
Beneath the dirty sun I whistle my time away
Then just about sundown you come walking through town
Your boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning round
The Election Day reference is commonly seen by fans and critics as giving away the game–breaking the metaphor to ensure the listener recognizes the political context. But the verse works in relationship context, too: every day is Election Day, Bruce tells us. Every day is a decision day.
Each day, his narrator is confronted with new evidence of his love’s betrayal, and each day he chooses to whistle his time away and ignore it. At the end of each day, however, he can’t help but sense it, hear it, see it.
Bruce’s use of Western imagery suggests a pivotal confrontation is coming. (Hilariously, it also betrays Bruce’s unfamiliarity with firearms: the barrel of a pistol does not spin. He’s thinking of the pistol’s chamber.) But again, she reassures him:
Don’t worry darling, now baby don’t you fret
We’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet
And again, he heeds her words instead of his own instincts. He is complicit in his own gaslighting.
In the bridge, our narrator has a moment of clarity: he feels the ground shift beneath his feet; he feels a giant wave looming. He’s tried his best to keep his faith and belief, but he’s reached a tipping point.
The earth it gave away, the sea rose towards the sun
I opened up my heart to you, it got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run
Naming his ship Liberty is a bit on the nose; the sudden metaphor shift in the last line is clumsy, too. It’s a rare instance of lyrical laziness from Bruce, and there’s another one coming. Still, the verse is effective in conveying that the frog is boiling, and the frog knows it.
For a moment, our narrator can see the future clearly, and it is bleak. It’s a moment of full awareness, but only a moment.
For the final verse, Bruce reverts to Old West imagery as the frog adapts to the boiling water. (Hey, if Bruce can mix his metaphors, we can too.)
I’m rolling through town, a lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash, got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder, tell me is that rolling thunder
Or just the sinking sound of something righteous going under
It’s the song’s second reference to sundown, a deliberate repetition to imply impending darkness. Or as Bruce would say each night in concert during the Magic Tour, “it’s early… but it’s getting late.”
Our narrator feels it latening, but in spite of it (or perhaps because of it), he chooses to heed his lover’s words and live for today.
Don’t worry darling, now baby don’t you fret
We’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet
Still, he knows tomorrow isn’t that far off. He hears the ominous sound of rolling thunder, and he knows what it signifies. Something righteous is dying (point deduction for “righteous” when “sacred” would have scored a quadruple alliteration), but he takes comfort in his partner’s words.
It’s 2003, and the future is wide open. Today is just today. Surely in twenty years, America will be as strong and true as ever, with all rights and liberties and transparency restored.
Maybe we don’t know what 2023 holds in store for us, but we at least know this: none of it has happened yet.
—-
“Livin’ in the Future” was the first song written for Magic, and it was the centerpiece of every show on the tour. Each night (even during his European shows), Bruce took a moment during the song’s introduction to make sure his audience understood his message.
More than any other song on the album or in the set list, “Livin’ in the Future” carried Springsteen’s message for the tour: Don’t think it can’t happen here. It already has, but it’s not too late. Wake up.
When the tour ended, Bruce put his money where his mouth was, hitting the road with presidential candidate Barack Obama to galvanize swing state voters in the hopes of a better outcome in 2008 than in 2004.
Obama won that election, and Bruce retired “Livin’ in the Future” and hasn’t performed it since.
For years, it probably didn’t feel relevant anymore. President Obama ushered in an era of sweeping progress and restoration, and Bruce returned to his more traditional songwriting themes.
There were hints of unrest to come, of course: a polarized electorate, a nascent disdain for non-biased media, the corruption of the legislative process for political purpose, and even a soured reality star turned populist gadfly with an injured ego and an axe to grind.
Looking back from today, we can clearly see the breadcrumbs. But back then…. well, none of this had happened yet.
Livin’ in the Future
Recorded: March 2007
Released: Magic (2007)
First performed: September 24, 2007 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: August 30, 2008 (Milwaukee, WI)
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Springsteen’s politics are reflexively leftist and his attitude toward those who are conservative are demeaning. This is the only thing I find alienating about him. I have heard him in interviews and of course in several songs convey his poorly informed and cynical views on many things. And few of his songs express gratitude for what he has been able to achieve by living in this country, about which he finds little good to say (just like his buddy Barack Obama). Springsteen’s enormous talent and hard work alone would not necessarily have gotten him where he is in most other countries. And I imagine that many of the average Joes and Janes out there working those dreary jobs which Bruce has never had a day in his life and about whom he has written endlessly over the decades would also resent him for these attitudes as well.
Not politically related, but I have also wondered and been disappointed by never having heard a single song in which he writes about being a father. Given the hugely haunting presence of his own father in his life and some of the incredible songs he has written about that relationship (Independence Day for example) it’s very revealing that he has not written about the experience from the other side. I sure do wonder about that.
I enjoy your blog–while we don’t agree on politics we can happily agree about loving Bruce’s music.
Bruce really isn’t that left wing. He’s a pretty run of the mill liberal. So is Obama. The idea that either of these men are hard left is bogus. Until they advocate for the seizure of the means of production, they’re just liberals. Bruce has made his patriotism pretty clear, and to a man like him, the Republican Party is a threat to democracy. I’m so tired of conservatives complaining that everyone hates them, when they support the things that they do.
Furthermore, Bruce has written about fatherhood. Living Proof is about how starting a family essentially saved him from himself, and Long Time Coming closes the book on the songs about his father and details his own experiences with fatherhood. It’s a really beautiful song.
Whenever I listen to this song now, it really is more impactful than it was back then thanks to a certain maniacal variety of self-described patriots who have power and seem to possess a freedom from, what’s the word? Oh–conscience.
Nice essay.