A Long Road To 'High Hopes': NPR Interview With Bruce Springsteen

Audio file and the remaining transcription to Bruce's NPR interview: 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/01/14/262485987/a-long-road-to-high-hopes-an-interview-with-bruce-springsteen

Bruce Springsteen walked into SIR Studios in Manhattan with the shearling collar on his chocolate-brown bomber jacket popped up. He cracked a joke about the traffic he encountered on the way from New Jersey, tacitly hinting at the Chris Christie-eviscerating skit he and Jimmy Fallon would perform the next night on the comic's late-night show. In the flesh, he looked exactly The Boss, ready for action in an impeccable grey sweatshirt, black jeans and brown boots, his athletic body moving efficiently into the chair opposite his interviewer. He'd made time for a chat before a rehearsal with the E Street Band, to let people know about the new album, High Hopes, out this week.

Springsteen had some things he wanted to say, about his producers and his bandmates, including new member Tom Morello, and the decade or so of recalibrating his own creative style that has resulted in this collection of re-imagined older material and no-longer-lost tracks (listen to the complete interview, with selections from the album, at the audio link on this page). But he was also quick to laugh and ready to listen. He warmed up while talking about other artists — peers like U2, elders like Dylan, and relative newcomers like Jason Isbell and Savages (at one point he got so excited talking about the musicians he's listening to lately that asked for his laptop so he could read names off his playlists) and gave careful consideration to big issues like mortality and more day-to-day matters, like figuring out which new songs work within his legendary live sets.

Careful while discussing the biographical and musical touchstones of his persona, Springsteen didn't show much interest in shoring up the myth of Bruuuuuce. When this overly enthusiastic lifetime fan compared him to Picasso, he raised his eyebrows and mentioned Abbott and Costello instead; when he mentioned that many of his neighbors were affected by the destruction of the twin towers, I interjected, "First responders," but he reminded me that in his wealthy New Jersey township most people work in high finance. Springsteen is aware that he lives among the elite. Yet as a musician, he's still a skilled worker — maybe more so than ever. Our conversation ended with talk of plans, plans, plans: to maintain a steady stream of new releases; to use the Internet for archival and other purposes, and and to keep the E Street Band on the road, if not forever, for a good long time. Until he drops, Springsteen will pay his audience in sweat equity. Though again, he'd deflate any praise for that. When it comes to music, he reminded me, "musicians don't call it working; they call it playing."

Let's start by talking about the title track and how the title track frames the album in a way. It's a cover; it's a song you've done several times in your career. And the album as a whole, it's a new album through which you reflect on a period of your career which I would sort of mark starting around The Rising, maybe.

Yeah, it's a bit of a mixture of things, you know, where it's just music I had that I liked. And I've always got many, many songs running around looking for homes at all times. And I'm always trying to figure out how to give them one, you know. And you know the process: You make a record, and like I said, over the past decade, we've recorded quite a bit but not quite in the style that we had in the '70s and '80s where there were enormous bodies of work that never saw the light of day or songs that never came out. I mean, there's just so much stuff still in the vault, you know. So, [over] the past decade, Brendan [O'Brien, Springsteen's frequent producer] had a more structured environment. In other words, we didn't record something until we were sure we were going to use it on the record or very, very sure. So we didn't go down, record 30 songs or 40 songs, you know. I might have fooled around — well basically I would demo things at home, see if they were worth bringing to his attention and then I would bring them down to Atlanta where we recorded or he'd come up to New Jersey sometimes. And we would select a relatively small body of songs and decide — and usually anything we selected we already knew we were going to be able to make good records of — so that really changed the process a lot.

YouTube

I think The Rising was 15 songs and there may have been a few outtakes, you know, not many. The same thing with Magic and Working On a [Dream]. Those were all records that we just simply didn't have a large body of outtakes. So these groups of songs were songs that sort of, you know, this one would have got on except ... "Down In the Hole" would have got on but "Empty Sky" got on or "Harry's Place" would have got on but — I'm not sure, I think we were considering that for Magic — but you know so these were songs that just sort of, just slightly slipped out.

Audio file and the remaining transcription to Bruce's NPR interview: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/01/14/262485987/a-long-road-to-high-hopes-an-interview-with-bruce-springsteen