Bruce Springsteen's latest album will be released on April 26th. But the title track, "Devils and Dust" is already available. Like the compelling story in the newspaper that you find well after the hype of the front page, the characters in this new song are riveting yet invisible to the general public. The music is stripped down, at times hardscrabble and barren like the physical and emotional landscapes that these characters roam. As a painter, when I listen to Springsteen's hard fought melodies and stark vocals, I see images. And many times I see images painted by Edward Hopper.
Edward Hopper, Gas, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Hopper's figures share with Springsteen's characters a very American way of being. Not always pretty- but always present. Both Hopper's paintings and Springsteen's songs are lit by a sort of American light that exists not to create atmosphere, but to light objects. This same light is used in school portraits and family snapshots to fix smiles for posterity. But, as in the boxes of color photos found in attics and basements, the color in Hopper's paintings seems to turn amber as the works age. I was struck recently by the evident aging in Hopper’s "New York Movie" at the Museum of Modern Art. The paint was visibly pulling away from the edges of the painting. The clean, smooth look found in much contemporary painting and photography was not there. You could see the struggle in the painting's creation and feel its impending loss in the growing network of cracks and fissures. Springsteen's ballads on 1982's "Nebraska" foretold another process of decay even while new. The album was mastered from a damaged cassette tape of homemade demos that Bruce carried with him to band rehearsals. The crack and hiss in the album were there from the start and seemed to create the soundtrack for the eventual decay of Reagan's grand American Empire. Springsteen's next stripped down acoustic album, 1995's " The Ghost of Tom Joad", was steeped in Steinbeck’s novels "Grapes of Wrath" and "East of Eden". But Steinbeck's optimism had been left in Salinas. And Bruce left the romanticism out on New Jersey's Highway 9. The music in "The Ghost of Tom Joad" was as dry as Hopper's paint in his later works. And that was the point. These were American artworks based on tangible images and moments. And there was a sort of American heroism evident in getting these images and stories down.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
what a terrific and thoughtful piece Gregg - thanks so much and welcome!
2 - SFC SKI
Nice essay.
It might interest you to know that the Hopper painting is of a gas station in Truro MA. It is located on Cape Cod, and while it has changed, there was still a resemblence to the old.
Hopper's Cape Cod series is great at capturing a spirit of time and place.
3 - Lisa McKay
This was really nice piece, Gregg - the parallel between Springsteen and Hopper is an interesting one. Hopper is one of the painters who truly evokes not just mood for me, but memory somehow.
I very much look forward to your thoughts on the concert.
4 - Sticker
thank you, Gregg
5 - Rodney Welch
How many years did it take the Boss to finally throw that damn beret in the trash?
6 - Lisa McKay
It's a cap, Rodney, not a beret.
7 - Eric Olsen
I love Hopper's eerie, painterly specificity
8 - bhw
And I love Bruuuuuuuuuuuce!
9 - Lisa McKay
He did a VH1 Storytellers thing that was on Saturday night - it was excellent.
10 - gregg
Thanks for the comments. Glad that the post speaks to all of you. The mix of mood, memory and fact in both Springsteen and Hopper is so evocative and so haunting. Always inspiring to me.
11 - censored
great piece wow...
i just listened to the track and am going to buy it; the whole album. the very simple statements made by the boss let you read/feel between the lines. so few and far between are there any real lyrics that speak to and about the reality we exist in now. the imagery evoked is of a soldier sitting at "home" reviewing "what was it all for...?" he sitting there with a colt 45 revolver to the temple in one hand; the other around a whiskey bottle asking god to forgive him his transgressions wanting to join with his compatriot and end the waking pain, and waiting for God to stay his hand by letting the people realise what they are doing to the world around them. the killing of the things we love, the ideals we thought we as individuals and a nation/s stood for being twisted and destroyed in the name of god. the false proffits be damned!.