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Welcome to part two of my therapy session as I work through why I was so let down by Bruce Springsteen’s Philadelphia show on Thursday, 3/16! You can gander at part one here.

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. The Bruce performance two weeks ago that left me so deflated represents the sad culmination of a late career trajectory that I fear will be his last act.

Here’s the nub: for decades, Springsteen has talked about his musicianship as a “conversation with my fans”—and for the great majority of his life as an artist, that’s been vitally true. If empathy is Bruce’s superpower, for the longest time fans felt as if his music gave voice to their own hopes and fears, successes and sorrows. As we continued to face new struggles, there were new songs to meet us and help us navigate into the future.

Things began to change in 2016. Rumor had it that Springsteen had a new record in the can and ready to release, but instead he put out an expanded edition of 1980’s seminal The River, complete with discs full of outtakes and live performances from the era. I was happy enough to receive the box set yet perplexed that it seemed that it was released instead of a new album. Why not both? Soon after, the Springsteen camp announced a new tour called “The River Tour,” and it would heavily feature that 35 year old album. Over 2016, Bruce and the E Street Band were in fine form, but those performances had a retrospective quality that had never before been a primary aspect of the Springsteen live experience.

That same year, Springsteen released Born to Run, his bestselling and well received autobiography. I actually surprised myself when I chose not to read the memoir, but my feeling was that because I had spent so many years constructing my own story of Bruce’s life and work, I didn’t need to hear the Boss’s own take on the same. Nevertheless, even if I didn’t begrudge Springsteen the right to pen Born to Run, it was another step in the retrospective direction.

Then came 2017 and 2018’s Springsteen on Broadway, a solo show that featured Bruce looking back upon his life—while utilizing much of the prose from Born to Run—with songs interspersed. The show opened to ecstatic reviews, and even though tickets were impossibly difficult to procure, I didn’t make any attempt to catch it. I didn’t need to hear Bruce talk about Bruce.

It’s somewhat ironic to observe that although it was in Born to Run and Springsteen on Broadway when Bruce kicked into overdrive in his constant discussions about his “conversation with my fans” that my interest in Springsteen as a living concern in the present began to wane. The more Bruce began to talk about his conversation with his fans, the less he was actually conversing with them. With us. I’m sure that Springsteen would claim otherwise, but these last few years haven’t been about conversation (with fans) but curation (of legacy). Which is not compelling to me at all.

(Letters to You is a blog on a church website, and as such I suppose I should include here some connection with the things of Jesus. Here you go. If I’m worried that Bruce is slowing down artistically as his life draws to a close, I happily have no fear that such a state would ever befall our triune God. The scriptures reveal to us that our one-in-three Lord existed before time in a “dance” within himself of reciprocal and personal delight. As God welcomes us through Christ, we’re able to partake in God’s very life of dynamic, relational joy. This is an energy and vitality will never abate or atrophy.)

Now, about 3/18’s show at the Wells Fargo Center. As a soon to turn 74 year old, Bruce Springsteen is a freak of nature as far as the stamina, intensity, physicality, and power with which he’s able to front a rock and roll band. Even based on the lofty bar that he’s set as a younger man, I don’t think that even the most homer-ish of Bruce fans could have imagined that he’d still be able to rock out at such a stratospheric level. I would never have guessed, too, that if I were to be disappointed by a 2023 Springsteen show, it would be because it was Bruce’s spirit, not his flesh, was weak.

Springsteen has released two wonderful records, 2018’s Western Stars and 2021’s Letter to You, since he last toured. 2016’s River tour notwithstanding, a new Springsteen tour typically features a setlist that spotlights his new material and then thoughtfully draws from his back catalogue in order to construct a fresh narrative thread and artistic statement. In particular, Letter to You finds Springsteen confronting his own mortality, and it seems that he at least attempted to construct a set around those themes. Midway through the Philly show, however, Bruce completely dropped any and all new songs, and the last hour and a half consisted of the same warhorses—admittedly well executed—that he’s been playing for decades. There was no conversation, only curation.

I would trust Bruce Springsteen as a 73 year old artist to put together a spectacular rock performance that invites his audience to consider its own oncoming demise. Sadly, we’ve received a show that doesn’t invite us to reckon with our own mortality; we’re merely present to witness Bruce contemplating his own.

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