Saturday, October 01, 2011

Musical interlude

Sorry that I haven't been blogging much here lately. I'm still having some great adventures in Rome, and I'll try to catch you up with those soon.

But tonight, a confession: I'm a little homesick. And this evening, I decided to either combat or indulge the homesickness by playing some Bruce Springsteen music. There's something about the album Born in the USA. In these days of iTunes and shuffle and what have you, we don't often just start an album at the beginning and listen to it all the way through. But that album goes through all the way from the anthem-like title track, through the strange but captivating "I'm on Fire" to the never-say-die "No Surrender" and the we're-not-that-old "Glory Days," all the way back to the quiet American life of "My Hometown." There's a lot there for someone far from home to connect to.

But then, unable to resist, I took it up a notch. This started with just listening to it (I have his live albums in my iTunes library, too), but then I went and found a video--the better to share it with you. Here is Bruce doing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," which he says is just about the best song about America ever written. It's hard to disagree with that, especially the way Bruce does it.

I'll add just one more thing. I recently read an article about comedian Jon Stewart, who was asked (among other things) about what Springsteen meant to him. I'm not going to find the exact quote for you, but the gist of it was this: "When I listened to Springsteen growing up, I didn't feel like a loser. I felt like a character in an epic poem about losers. And so somehow there was hope that it would all turn out okay."

Yeah, I needed a little Springsteen today.