I was able to push Bruce to the sidelines until "The Rising" permeated culture as the antidote to the fog that was hanging over the country. I was not caught up in the swell, but it was notable in hindsight that I was not offended the same way I was when younger. Bruce now felt harmless instead of a threat to my ears, perhaps because he sounded like an elder statesman relic of the past, and not a future I was going to be living with for years to come.
How I came to listen to his "Magic" album alludes me, but that was when the tide began to turn. With his pop influences on display, and not masked with the sound of a decade I hated even as it unfolded, I began to understand the appeal. That album piqued my curiosity, and I started to ask myself if I had been mistaken all along. Slowly, I went through Springsteen's catalog, trying to uncover if I had been contrarian for the sake of being difficult, or if I had been wrongly convinced through the worst possible introduction to Bruce's music.
As I listened to his older albums, what became clear to me was Bruce had never been the villain I had made him out to be, nor the hero the critical enterprise told me he was. Bruce was a songwriter who told stories through his words and his sounds, but he did not always draw full enough character sketches to keep my attention. His stories about freedom and desire had the cinematic scope to make the world feel exciting enough for this introvert to explore, but the small town ethos he championed was more predictable than profound. He wrote of people with no ideas or passions, praising them for muddling through without much criticism directed at all of us for creating a society that grinds us to nothing as if it is noble.
When things clicked for me was hearing "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" during a period of my own darkness. That was when I fully understood Bruce's ability to paint a scene that connected with an audience who were extrinsic rather than intrinsic. That was the difference between Bruce and myself; he was writing stories about other people and the ways life beat them down, while I was writing stories about myself and the way I beat myself down. In that way, he was a mirror image to myself, a plain-speaking truth teller who translated some of my penchant for metaphor into a more relatable form of language.
That record told stories about the way the expectations of small town life would choke the life from us, while I was interested in the way the confines of my own mind were doing the same thing to me. When Bruce sang about his belief in "the promised land", it was a declaration I wish I could make for myself, although I was not able to lie as the curtain of darkness turned opaque. The "badlands" of the mind cannot be as easily paved over as the asphalt that tore our skin as we were dragged through the streets. Metaphorically, of course.
After that moment, my bitterness toward Bruce began to soften. I did not find the same sense of wonder in "Born To Run" that others did, considering it Bruce's most overrated album by a wide margin, but there were songs from every era that slowly started to sound more familiar and comfortable. During every binge of "Because The Night", I told myself it would be foolish to stay mad at someone responsible for a song I loved that much.
"Thunder Road" was beautiful, "Atlantic City" fit neatly into the blueprint of songwriting Elvis Costello had been teaching me, and "The River" was a song that made a tragedy sound tragic both if it happened, but also for me because it couldn't. I even heard in "Devils & Dust" elements of guitar playing I was striving for in my own ham-handed attempts with the instrument. I hadn't realized it, but Bruce was not that far removed from what my imagination was conjuring for my own self-image. Years later, when it was pointed out to me that my own writing had elements of country to it, I laughed to myself knowing it was not that, but the effects of Bruce (and Elvis Costello's "King Of America") seeping through as a second-degree influence.
The older I got, and the more I wrote music for myself, speaking about the human condition took on increased importance. I did that by writing about the ghosts and demons in my head, and the ways we try to exorcise them. Bruce was doing it by telling stories of others, and even if I did not identify with the lives of his characters, the underlying truth was rising to the surface. While much of the rock and metal I had been listening to began to feel trite with its fantasy and hedonism, I found more in Bruce's grounded psychology that I needed more than I knew.
I am by no means a full convert, and many of Bruce's tropes still grate on my ears, but I now realize and appreciate what he offers when he is at his best. I may never love the whole of the "Born To Run" album, and I grow tired of his forays into folk songwriting, the fact that I have mostly come to terms with why "Born In The USA" was the phenomenon it was is a telling statement. Maybe it's just because I can now look back at my own "glory days" with the blend of nostalgia and regret Bruce wrote about, but the older version of me is more understanding than I was when I was young.
Luck is being in the right place at the right time, and our musical taste involves more luck than we like to admit. You have to hear the right song at the right time, when you're in the right mood, for it to hit you in just the right way. We aren't always ready to hear a voice, or a song, and sometimes we don't get the chance to go back and see what we have missed. I happened to get that chance with Bruce Springsteen, and for better or worse it opened a door I hadn't been ready to open when I first heard his music. Now, the feelings are more complicated, but I'm learning to deal with that.
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