![]() ![]() “It is a call to resolve in us what simply will not go away.” Springsteen has made a career, and built a global fan base, out of going back and back, to Freehold and Asbury Park, and digging, digging, digging to understand the people he grew up around and who made him, for good and ill, the man he became. “Memory is many things,” the Benedictine nun Joan Chittister has written. He goes further back, to his childhood, and reminisces about the trains that used to rumble through town the pennies he’d put on the tracks and when he first became familiar with death as a boy, going to the funerals of his extended clan, walking up semi-terrified and kneeling before the casket and then walking back home with a sense of trembling accomplishment. On the album, Springsteen goes back in time to those mid-’60s years when he, Theiss, and the Castiles would play in the union halls, hullabaloo clubs, and bowling alleys around Freehold, New Jersey. It feels wonderful every time it happens, and I’ve learned to live with the anxiety of it not happening over long periods of time.” Creativity is an act of magic rising up from your subconscious. “The actual mechanics of songwriting is only understandable up to a certain point,” Springsteen told me, “and it’s frustrating because it’s at that point that it begins to matter. The experience created an emotional vortex and the music poured out of him. After his passing, Springsteen realized that he is the sole remaining survivor from that band-the “Last Man Standing,” as he puts it in one of the songs on the new album. Two years ago, Springsteen found himself at the bedside of a member of that band, George Theiss, as he died of cancer. From 1965 to 1968, when rock was in its moment of explosive growth and creativity, Springsteen was in a band called the Castiles. The album, and the film that recorded the making of the album (I recommend watching the film first), was occasioned by a death. The record is a little bit of an antidote to that.” The album generates the feeling you get when you meet a certain sort of older person-one who knows the story of her life, who sees herself whole, and who now approaches the world with an earned emotional security and gratitude. “Dread is an emotion that all of us have become very familiar with. “When I listen to it, there’s more joy than dread,” Springsteen told me. It’s the happiest Springsteen album maybe in decades. Now he’s not only telling the story of his life, but asking, in the face of death, about life’s meaning, and savoring life in the current moment. It’s a step forward from his Broadway show that debuted three years ago and his memoir, released four years ago. Far from being sad or lachrymose, it’s both youthful-loud and hard-charging-and serene and wise. Letter to You is rich in lessons for those who want to know what successful aging looks like. His new album and film, Letter to You, are performances about growing older and death, topics that would have seemed unlikely for rock when it was born as a rebellion for anyone over 30. Springsteen is the world champion of aging well-physically, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. These qualities are not lacking in old age but in fact grow as time passes.”ĭavid Brooks: Bruce Springsteen’s playlist for the Trump era Nearly two millennia ago, the Roman statesman Cicero offered a more robust vision of what elders should do and be: “It’s not by strength or speed or swiftness of body that great deeds are done,” he wrote, “but by wisdom, character and sober judgment. President Donald Trump is a prime example of an unsuccessful older person-one who still lusts for external validation, who doesn’t know who he is, who knows no peace. As the nation becomes a gerontocracy, it’s worth pondering: What do people gain when they age, and what do they lose? What does successful aging look like? “Active aging” is now a decades-long phase of life. ![]() Bruce Springsteen released an album today at 71. Bob Dylan produced a remarkable album this year at 79. Even our rock stars are getting up there. The presidential candidates are 77 and 74. The speaker of the House is 80 and going strong. Whether because of better diet or health care or something else, a 73-year-old in 2020 looks like a 53-year-old in 1935. He left the presidency, broken, and beaten, at 60, the same age as, say, Colin Firth is now. It was a shock to learn that he was only 55 at the time, roughly the same age as Chris Rock is now. He looked like a classic old guy-wrinkled, mature, in the late season of life. Johnson in the first year of his presidency. He is the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. About the author: David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a columnist for The New York Times. ![]()
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