Bruce Springsteen
Letter to you

I’ll start by saying that we are dealing with an album from the artist I grew up with par excellence, and probably the most representative within the so-called heartland rock genre.

We’re talking about him, the great, immense, Bruce Springsteen. And, precisely, about his latest studio album accompanied by the E-Street Band, Letter To You.

September 10, 2020. Bruce Springsteen's new single, called Letter To You, is released, which I listen to for the first time on YouTube, and which previews the homonymous album in question. As soon as I heard it, I said “beautiful song,” then I listened to it on the CD more than a month later… And it’s truly a whole different thing, I appreciate it infinitely more. But the album in general is no less. It's the return of the Bruce that a rock lover like myself desired, certainly much more in the classic Springsteen style compared to Western Stars from the previous year. It curiously contains three songs that Bruce originally wrote in the 70s, at the start of his career.

The ship's log opens with One Minute You’re Here. The only acoustic piece of the album, very beautiful and also very realistic, whose main theme is the transience of life. It is followed by the excellent, already mentioned title track, and the rock present in it is repeated – indeed, it becomes even more powerful – in Burnin’ Train, a delicious rock ride, among my favorites of the album, which between the rather restless drums and guitars, repeats in the lyrics the train motif so frequent in Bruce's texts. The subsequent Janey Needs A Shooter, the first piece of the lineup dating back to the 70s, is perhaps a bit too elaborate and playful for my taste. Let's be clear, I would not reject any track of the album in the slightest way, we are in any case on excellent quality levels, but there are always pieces that may be more or less in my tastes. The following Last Man Standing and The Power Of Prayer have sometimes been criticized for their similarity, but in my opinion, they work well. In particular, the latter was a decidedly spot-on choice as the third single of the album, and it achieved much success on Italian radio. House Of A Thousand Guitars is a song that greatly divides opinions, and although surely beautiful, it is not among those that within the album excite me, I find it a bit repetitive. I do not list the last pieces of the tracklist in order, but I say that Rainmaker, If I Was The Priest, and Song For Orphans – among which the last two date back to the 70s – are all three valid rock ballads in Springsteen-style, while Ghosts, the second single from the album, is another of the album’s leading songs. Great song, I’d say my favorite along with Burnin’ Train and the title track, it’s a nearly 6-minute powerful and compelling rock that in the lyrics recalls the people who were dear to Bruce and his E-Street Band in the past, members of the group who made history. I’ll See You In My Dreams, another powerful and very well-executed rock track, perfectly closes the album. It is, leaving aside the fact that it is the last track released as a single – just recently, by the way – another of the album tracks that I am definitely appreciating. Death is not the end, we see each other again in dreams: when people dear to us die, the memory inevitably becomes eternal.

It is in this simple way that I want to close this review: THANK YOU, BRUCE!