{"id":31074,"date":"2022-01-10T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/?p=31074"},"modified":"2022-01-10T05:23:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T13:23:23","slug":"roll-of-the-dice-brothers-under-the-bridge-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/10\/roll-of-the-dice-brothers-under-the-bridge-95\/","title":{"rendered":"Roll of the Dice: Brothers Under the Bridge ’95"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1983, Bruce Springsteen recorded a song called “Brothers Under the Bridges ’83<\/a>” about a pair of fourteen-year-old boys who dream of the freedom and adventure that await them at eighteen.<\/p>\n

In 1995, he revisited his fourteen-year-old narrator–now thirty–in a song called “Brothers Under the Bridge ’95,” and he put both songs on his 1998 box set collection of unreleased songs, Tracks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By all accounts I’ve ever read, the two songs are unrelated. But they are very<\/em>\u00a0related. They are bookends, and one cannot fully appreciate the depth and nuance of either song without the reflection cast by the other.<\/p>\n

In between the two songs, a war happened. And a life happened.<\/p>\n

Our narrator from “Brothers Under the Bridges” did his best to soldier on, returning home from war to the girl we’d only just met in the last line of the earlier song and starting a family. But he didn’t come back alone–he brought his trauma back with him, and it ate away at him until he found himself divorced from his life, from society, and living homeless and remote in the San Gabriel mountains, out of reach of both the law and anyone he ever knew and loved.<\/p>\n

Until the daughter he fathered upon returning home comes to the homeless camp in the mountains in search of him and some answers. “Brothers Under the Bridge” is the tale he tells her.<\/p>\n