“Letter to You” Review

By: Isaiah Ogren

A global pandemic is surging and Election Day lasted a week. You are forgiven for missing Bruce Springsteen’s new record Letter to You. 

In 2020, artists are brands. They need and want to diversify in order to make as much money from listeners as possible. Kanye has shoes, Taylor has sweaters. Ask not what your idols can do for you, but what you can do for your idols. Even worse, so many pandemic releases have been just plain depressing. Pop some Prozac, another bored artist is releasing some more punched up demos. 

Into this wretched hellscape of nihilism and cloying self promotion strides a septuagenarian white guy from New Jersey. 

On “Ghosts”, Bruce counts the band, guitar, saxophone and glockenspiel building to a joyous crescendo, and bellows, “I’m alive, I can feel the blood shiver in my bones/I'm alive and I'm out here on my own/I'm alive and I'm coming home.” It’s not the last roar of an old lion. Rather, it's an exhortation from an old and perhaps reluctant commander, rallying us one more time to take another hill, to beat back despair one more time, to prove once again, if not once and for all, that someone is indeed alive out there. This letter isn’t a nostalgic missive, it's a set of marching orders. And Springsteen is still the Boss.

Through the power of music, camaraderie, and even prayer, Bruce offers us once again another reason to believe. We should heed him.