E Streeters assemble! This month, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN returns with Letter To You - a new album that fuses autobiography, music and faith, as Springsteen reflects on his enduring relationship with his trusted cohorts. Here, Peter Watts speaks to every member of the E Street Band about life inside “a benevolent monarchy”, the rigorous discipline behind Letter To You’s “Beatles schedule” and honouring the departed. “It’s a celebration of music and the joy of it.”

Snow surrender: Bruce Springsteen in New York, 2018

Photo by DANNY CLINCH

WHEN Bruce Springsteen gathered the E Street Band at his home studio in New Jersey last November to record Letter To You, he told them they were doing this one the old-fashioned way. He wanted to bottle the alchemic magic that happens when the E Street Band take the stage, something that hadn’t been captured on record since Born In The USA. They were going to take all that experience, intuition, respect and mutual musical understanding and distil it into a studio album made by a band playing live in the same room. This was something the E Street Band had been eager to do since they reformed in 1999, but now Springsteen felt the time was right - partly because his new album was all about what it means to be in a band for 50 years.

“Bruce got in touch and told us to get ready to record,” recalls Stevie Van Zandt, who first joined the E Street Band in 1975. “I stopped my own tour on November 6 and we met up right after that. I thought we would be in the studio for a month, break for the holidays and return to the studio. I didn’t know we were going to make the whole record in five fucking days.”

For the members of the E Street Band, anticipation ran high. Since The River Tour ended in February 2017, Springsteen had returned increasingly to his past. There was his memoir Born To Run, his 236-date run on Broadway - even Western Stars, his 2019 solo album, came from a place of introspection, exploring the popular culture of his youth through lushly orchestrated cowboy sagas. But in all this rumination there was no role for his trusted cohorts. To cap it all, he hadn’t written any new material since 2012’s Wrecking Ball.

If the E Streeters thought they were running out of road, none admit it. By now they are comfortable with their role in Springsteen’s life, a regular presence but not welded to him. Perhaps it’s that phlegmatic self-determination that makes Springsteen so willing to return to the band - a mutual bond that doesn’t edge into neediness. For Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, it’s part of what makes the relationship work. “They’re close on stage, in the studio and when they travel, and they leave each other plenty of space when we’re not working,” he says.

So even when Springsteen revealed during an interview with Martin Scorsese in May 2019 that he had written some new E Street songs, the band remained sanguine. “Sure that got me excited, but just because he says he’s written some rock songs, I’m not going to bug him,” says Nils Lofgren. “When he’s ready to reach out, he will.”

Recording Letter To You (Jon Landau, seated, third from left): “They’re close on stage, in the studio and when they travel”

ROB DE MARTIN

As the band discovered, the songs Springsteen wrote for Letter To You followed the wistful pattern established in recent years. But he had found a way to combine personal nostalgia with the scale, emotion and universality that comes with the E Street Band. As with much of his recent output, it’s a step forward inspired by the past. “It’s the fourth part of an autobiographical summation of his life,” confirms Van Zandt.

Amid new songs that explore Springsteen’s life as a musician from the perspective of a man in his seventies, he sprinkled three older tracks that tap directly into the deep currents of his past. These are songs he wrote as a younger man, but now interpreted by men in their sixties and seventies. “Janey Needs A Shooter” is an organ-fuelled saga the E Street had tackled several times in the ’70s, but never nailed. Now it was time to try again.

“When he presented ‘Janey’, in my head it was 1977 so I played like it was 1977 - but better,” says Max Weinberg, who joined the band in 1974. “For Letter To You we had largely the same individuals who had spent hundreds of hours in the ’70s figuring out how to do this thing. So when presented with a song of the era of Darkness On The Edge Of Town - musically and in your mind you can go back there. There are many threads in Bruce’s music and we were there for a lot of the sewing. When you record like this it’s extremely close to the soul of what you do. You are laying it out on the line and that is what we are good at. It was a very special week in the life of Bruce and the E Street Band.”

ROY Bittan, E Street’s pianist for 46 years, heard that Bruce Springsteen had written new songs for the band straight from the horse’s mouth. He was having lunch with The Boss in New York, he thinks during summer 2018, while Springsteen was performing at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway. Like the rest of the E Street Band, Bittan had attended the opening night, and he was bowled over by the experience. He’d read the autobiography - he had even watched Springsteen write it, scribbling down notes on planes, tour buses and dressing rooms - but that didn’t prepare him for the emotional weight and thematic subtleties of the one-man show.

“I needed a drink,” says Bittan. “I watched that show and was so overwhelmed that this guy could get up there and be so bare, so raw, no defences or insecurities and be able to just splay himself out like that. When it was over, I needed something to calm my nerves, especially knowing him, this guy who has had difficulties with his personal life. It was amazing.”

“THIS WAS AS GOOD AS WE EVER WERE IN THE STUDIO”
JON LANDAU

The difficulty Bittan is referring to is Springsteen’s depression, which he first revealed in his autobiography. For many, this was one of the most surprising revelations of Born To Run. One of the most well-adjusted, self-aware and hard-working men on the planet suffered from periods of intense darkness that sometimes saw him confined to bed for months at a time. Furthermore, Springsteen discussed it openly on stage on Broadway. It was typical of what was to come in this period, as Springsteen started to pencil some autobiographical detail into his life’s work, allowing theatregoers to see where the man and the performer overlapped. At times, it felt like live action therapy.

This was so personal that it required an extended break with the E Street band for the first time in years. The group had worked together solidly since 2012’s Wrecking Ball, releasing HighHopes - the album of offcuts, covers and reworkings - in 2014 and touring consistently until February 2017. When that tour ended, the band and Springsteen kept in touch, exchanging texts on a semi-regular basis - sadly, there is no E Street WhatsApp group - but band members were now left to admire Springsteen’s accomplishments from a distance, in print, on stage, on film and on record.