Album Companion: Letter to You

By now, the story is almost as legendary as the origin of Nebraska.

Five years ago this week, Castiles founder George Thiess passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. Lifelong friend and long-ago bandmate Bruce Springsteen said his farewells during George’s final days.

Returning home to his New Jersey farm and Broadway residency, Springsteen found himself profoundly affected by the realization that he was now the last surviving member of his very first rock and roll band.

It wasn’t the first time he had pondered his mortality–he’d been doing that in song since Working on a Dream a full decade earlier. This was different, though, and as summer turned to autumn turned to winter turned to spring, Springsteen found himself unable to shake the spirits that were haunting him.

His Broadway show had ended in December, and no tour was on the horizon. It had been some time since he’d been visited by any sort of muse. But one day in April 2019, one came knocking.

He reached for the closest guitar, which happened to be one gifted to him by an anonymous Italian fan as he exited the Walter Kerr Theater one night. It was a fine guitar, and Bruce was intrigued by its quality and mysterious origin. He kept it in his living room, where it sat neglected until the moment that inspiration struck.

With his mystery guitar, Springsteen wrote “Last Man Standing,” the song that serves as the emotional centerpiece of his current world tour. That one song broke the logjam that had blocked his songwriting for years.

Over the next ten days, the story goes, he wrote the collection of songs that became Letter to You and recorded them with the E Street Band during an even shorter period of time that autumn.

That’s the legend. And as the saying goes (to quote one of Bruce’s favorite movies), when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Springsteen didn’t write Letter to You in a burst of creativity any more than Nebraska was recorded on a single day in January 1982. In fact, a full six of the twelve songs that make up Letter to You had been around long before… in some cases for decades.

• “One Minute You’re Here,” the metaphysical musing that opens the album, sounds like a holdover from Western Stars but dates possibly as early as 2004.
• “Burnin’ Train,” the raging, “Gypsy Biker“-ish rocker, was first demoed in 1993 and was likely recorded long before the Letter to You sessions.
• “Rainmaker” dates back to the Rising era; the track itself is likely from the Magic sessions. It fits tonally with either album and is as good or better than anything on them. It’s also a contender for best track on Letter to You, even though it sticks out like a thematically sore thumb.
• “Janey Needs a Shooter” has the most storied history of any track on the album. Originally recorded for The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, and briefly a contender for The River, it also inspired a classic Warren Zevon song.
• “If I was the Priest” is one of Bruce’s earliest “epic” songs, and although it aspires to greater heights than it achieves, it’s a remarkable composition for so young a songwriter, and it deserved an official release (somewhere).
• “Song for Orphans” is probably the least of these six tracks that cried out for an official release. Also dating back to the early 1970s, It’s nowhere near as finely constructed as its contemporaneous album-mates.

There’s nothing wrong with a mix of vintages per se. Springsteen’s more obsessive fans (hi!) have long understood that virtually every album since Lucky Town has included songs written (and in some cases recorded) years earlier.

But there is a problem with Letter to You, one that has everything to do with its song selection and sequencing.

Bruce’s best albums are thematically tight and powerful: Western Stars, Nebraska, Tunnel of Love, Wrecking Ball. Even Darkness on the Edge of Town—which long-time readers know I find the least enjoyable in Bruce’s catalog–is undeniably an artistically great album.

Cohesion doesn’t always have to be lyrical. The River succeeds as a work of high art in its ability to conjure the cadence and emotional ride of a live E Street Band show, even while its tracks run the gamut in style, theme, and tone.

Letter to You lacks any sort of through-line, however. Of the six “extra” songs, only “One Minute You’re Here” fits the album’s theme. The three oldest songs (“Janey Needs a Shooter,” “If I Was the Priest” and “Song for Orphans” are all fine documents of a young songwriter’s work, but all three pale in comparison to the poetry and power of Bruce’s 21st-century output.

It would have been more effective had Bruce issued Letter to You as an EP with only his new songs and saved the other worthy tracks for a future box set.

I realize it probably sounds like I’m knocking the album. I suppose I am–but only the concept of it as an album rather than a collection of songs, which are uniformly excellent.

Perhaps that’s unfair in this age of streaming and playlists, but I’m old school. Bruce has trained me over the years to listen to his albums as albums, and by that yardstick, I find Letter to You to be a head-scratchingly inconsistent and at times jarring experience.

Let’s experiment. If you care to indulge me, try listening to a playlist of just the new songs on Letter to You. You can even add “One Minute You’re Here” as an overture. The result is a much tighter album, one that tells a real, cohesive story and packs a much greater emotional wallop.

• “Letter to You” opens the set, but it’s also a summation statement for Bruce’s entire body of work.
• “Last Man Standing” gives the album its origin and heart…
• …. and “The Power of Prayer” gives it its soul. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that they’re musical sound-alikes.
•  “House of a Thousand Guitars” is Springsteen’s mission statement and invitation to his concert audience…
• …while “Ghosts” is his on-stage reckoning with the ticking clock.
• “I’ll See You in My Dreams”  is a parting benediction, a fitting bookend not only to the title track but to each and every one of the five songs above.

I’ve thought about abridging Letter to You in this fashion for a while now. As preparation for writing this essay, I finally tried it.

I was expecting to be moved and impressed, but I wasn’t prepared for just how incredibly powerful this collection of songs is without the distraction of unrelated songs from a less mature songwriter. It’s uplifting and transporting, and I find myself re-evaluating my consideration of the album as a result.

Letter to You is a fine twelve-song LP, although I’d rank it toward the bottom of Bruce’s catalog. But as a six-song EP, I’d rank it among his very best output and a harbinger of great art still to come.

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