![]() ![]() Instead, he says, “My antenna tells me, at best, 2022. It was supposed to start, he reveals, in the spring of 2021. Were it not for the intervention of a once-in-a-century global catastrophe, Springsteen - who turns 71 on September 23rd - would right now be preparing for that world tour with the E Street Band. “When I make music,” he says, “I’m going to put it out.”īruce Springsteen photographed in Colts Neck, New Jersey, on August 4th, 2020, by Danny Clinch Danny Clinch for Rolling Stone There was no point, he decided, in holding it back. Now, there’s “no touring in sight,” as Springsteen puts it, but Letter to You is still coming out October 23rd. In the studio, they all toasted to the tour they were sure would follow. We booked five days and on the fifth day we had nothin’ to do, so we just listened to it.” “We basically cut the album in four days. “We were doing a song every three hours,” says Steve Van Zandt, who compares the pace to the Beatles’ early sessions. They managed to lay down an entire album. On a snowy day last November, just a few yards from where we’re sitting, in the light-splashed, blond-wood studio he shares with his wife, Patti Scialfa, Springsteen gathered the E Street Band for five days of recording. ![]() It doesn’t hurt that Springsteen, who has been open about his struggles with depression, is still taking meds. Some of the uncertainty that the virus has brought with it is something everybody’s got to live with. “As far as my own plans, you know, I think you’re concerned about ever playing again.” (He says this lightly enough, and later takes pains to clarify that he’s far more concerned about “working musicians who go week to week, and all your back-line people in the crew.”) “So that weighs on your mind a little bit because, well, it was fun. So, how’s he doing? “Hangin’ in there, like everybody else,” Springsteen says, sinking further into his chair. For a man who’s born to run but more or less stuck in place, there are worse spots to be. We settle into wicker chairs, six feet apart, across a table of white stone that overlooks a tree-lined field, where leaves are swaying in what’s left of the morning’s wind. I grew up around here, too, so as we head to a covered porch, there’s some local small talk - we mourn a mutually beloved Carvel store, mentioned in his book, that’s morphed into a Dunkin’ Donuts. When you’ve hardly spoken with anyone else face-to-face for months, it’s even odder. It is, as always, mildly jarring to be standing next to him, as though one of the heads from Mount Rushmore peeled itself off the cliff to hang out. ‘The Idol’ Is More Toxic and Way Worse Than You’ve Heard We are six months deep into a global pandemic, and even Bruce Springsteen has been working from home for a long while. He’s in jeans, needless to say, but they’re light blue, in a loose carpenter cut. On his sockless feet - incredibly! - are a pair of leather sandals. His hair is silver and black, cropped short, and on his still-lean torso is a thin white undershirt not unlike the one he wore on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a low, ribbed neck and a tiny hole on the side. (The more time he spends in semi-isolation here, the more he ends up focusing on the weather: “What else is there?”) “It ended up being a halfway decent day,” he says, with real gratitude. It’s afternoon now, and above Springsteen’s farm, the clouds are scattering, with sunshine breaking through. This morning, an early-August thunderstorm straight out of one of his own metaphors rumbled through New Jersey’s Monmouth County, soaking Asbury Park, buffeting Freehold, leaving muddy ground here in the horsey acres of Colts Neck. ![]() Bruce Springsteen is standing on a gravel driveway outside his house, squinting up at the sky. ![]()
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