Bruce Springsteen’s State Of The Union

After that, the record ends with “We Are Alive.” How did that one come together?

When I got there, I needed one more song ”“ I needed a strange kind of party. And “We Are Alive” provides that. It’s a party filled with ghosts. It’s a party filled with the dead, but whose voices and spirit and ideas remain with us and go on and on. That’s why I talk about the girls in Birmingham, the workers in Maryland and the new immigrants crossing the southern border. It’s just the recurrence and how the blood and spirit of all those people regenerate the country and what America is, generation after generation, so I end the record with a party of ghosts. Ghosts who are speaking to the living.

Throughout this album, you get a taste of many different Springsteen flavors. You have so many different constituencies that want so many different things from you. How do you deal with that?

Generally, I do what I like at any given moment and let the people find out where they fit in. The only thing I do keep in mind is that I’m in the midst of a lifetime conversation with my audience, and I’m trying to keep track of that conversation. Martin Scorsese once said that “your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.” So if the artist loses track of the conversation he’s having with his audience, he may lose us forever. So I try to keep track of that conversation, while giving myself the musical freedom I need.

You don’t want to shut people out.

No. I see the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the conservative guys, the Republicans, the Democrats. My family is filled with Republicans and Democrats, every Sunday night at the table, and so it’s not hung there on anybody’s political hat. I want people to just experience it as their own, and see where their ideas and their feelings fit inside of it. Its independence means a lot, because I respect the audience that comes to see me. I want them to be able to hear it as clearly as they can. I don’t want the horse to follow the cart.

Has that gotten harder as the times have gotten more divided? As you find that the partisan voices are getting more shrill, is it harder to put something out and feel like it lives beyond that conversation, and it can be the conversation you want to have?

The conversation I want to have with the audience is just the one that I want to have. There’s also the one they’re having with themselves, the one they’re having with their buddy, the one they’re having with their wife. It’s a wide-open playing field. We’ve been onstage and we’ve been booed by our own crowd.

I’ve been there.

I mentioned Bush being impeached at the Meadowlands in 2000-something, and some people booed, and that’s fine.

A conversation can be an argument. That’s the thing I don’t understand. That’s what Thanksgiving is for ”“ you sit and you and your family argue out all different points of view, but you still love each other.

Yeah. I’m proud of our band in that we’ve maintained an audience who want to listen to us, in the sense that they’re interested in not just what you were saying in ’85 or ’80, but interested in what we’re saying right now ”“ what’s the next step we’re going to take together, what are we going to argue about, what are we going to debate the meaning of?

How consciously did you translate some of your political ideas into songs?
It’s not something you can do when you push a button. You sit down, and if you’re lucky, the planets have aligned to the point where that anger and the craft you’ve learned combines with whatever that mysterious X factor is that allows you to scoop some of it up ”“ and it turns into a piece of music. Before this record, I recorded almost 40 songs for another record I was working on that had nothing to do with any of this, and at one point, I threw it out. I said, “This is the wrong voice for me right now.”

[Deliberately meek] Can I hear that one too, sometime?

[Laughs] I hope so. I hope I wasn’t wasting my time. I spent a good amount of time doing it. I spent almost a year writing and recording it. But the songs had nothing to do with what was going on out there at all. They were more like, for lack of a better word, solo, a little quieter, and at the end of the day I sat back and looked at it and couldn’t get an album out of it. So I put that aside and cut this record, basically 10 songs in 10 days. You hit something, it’s like a visitation, you are up at night, the guitar sits at the foot of the bed, you’re up at 4 a.m., you have the book nearby, you have the tape recorder, and this goes on for maybe a week and a half or two weeks, and then it stops, it’s done. Once in a great while, that happens. So this record, I went in every day and recorded a different one of these songs, 10 days in a row. It was because I felt I really had something, once I asked the right questions, the questions of “We Take Care of Our Own.” Once I asked those questions, it helped me lock into the rest of the record. You know it when you catch a wave.