“You can trace the characters on The Rising back to The River or even further. They’re the same people. They’re just living in what America is now.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“In the surrounding communities there were quite a few people affected. You knew this woman and her husband, someone else’s son, someone else’s brother.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN on 9/11
The world changed on 9/11. At least that’s what the international media told us so it must be true, right? Wrong. What changed on 9/11 was that those who would not be enslaved by America’s omnipresent brand of capitalism, by its cultural homogenisation of the planet, struck back. What changed was that indiscriminate killing on a scale unprecedented outside military engagement between nations came to America. What changed was that an American President under suspicion for stealing the election the previous December, exploited the suffering of thousands of grieving families to seize the moral high ground and wage a phoney war on a fundamentalist Islamist terrorist group that probably doesn’t even exist.
For what is the ‘War on Terror’ but a war invented for America’s strategic benefit, to facilitate a foothold in the oil rich Middle East? The American lives sacrificed to that aim (and it’s arguable these include the poor souls that perished in the Twin Towers) are of little consequence to the power junkies on Capitol Hill or Wall Street, though they matter marginally more than those Iraqi and Afghan lives claimed as collateral damage. No, the world didn’t change on 9/11. America’s attitude to the world, particularly the Muslim world, is what changed. Along with America itself.
Everybody can remember where they were and what they were doing when news of the attacks on the World Trade Centre broke. Bruce Springsteen was at home.
“Thought it was an accident, but it was a really clear day. I tried to figure that out and went to the television just before the second plane hit. I was just, like everybody, watching the television, a lot of us together. Nobody wanted to be alone, waiting to see what was going to happen.”
What did happen was mass murder, a slaughter to which each of us watching wide-eyed and incredulous on our TV screens, was witness. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing, we didn’t want to believe it. We wanted not to look but we couldn’t turn away.
And then there was the aftermath, the agony of the relatives as they waited for news of the missing, all the while knowing, feeling it in their gut, that their loved ones were never coming back. The funerals, the interment of empty caskets, the terrible grief of the widowed, the children, the men in uniform, granite faces stained by tears for their brothers.
“Because we’re so close to the city, there were a lot of people lost and there were a lot of town meetings and vigils, and we did our best to take the children out to those things,” Springsteen told Robert Crampton in The Times ten months later.
And he did more than that. He read the obituaries and called the bereaved, offered sympathy, shared their grief and their memories. Stacey Farrelly, whose husband Joe was among the firemen who went to his death while trying to evacuate the towers, was one of them.
“At the beginning of October I was at home alone and heavily medicated,” she recalled. “I picked up the phone and a voice said, ‘May I speak to Stacey? This is Bruce Springsteen.’ After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little smaller. I got through Joe’s memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call.”
Suzanne Berger, whose husband Jim was an insurance broker, was another Springsteen called. “He said, ‘I want to respect your privacy, but I just want you to know that I was very touched and I want to know more about your husband.’ He wanted to hear Jim’s story, so I told him.”
While Springsteen the man reached out to complete strangers in their unbearable anguish, Springsteen the writer’s response to 9/11 was The Rising, a bunch of songs composed between September 2001 and May 2002 augmented by previously unrecorded material such as ‘Nothing Man’ and ‘Further On (Up The Road)’. America needed consoling, and the greatest form of consolation is to give hope. Who better to deliver that hope than Springsteen and the E Street Band, reunited on a long player for the first time since 1984’s Born In The USA?
The songs came almost of their own volition, with Springsteen “acting virtually as a receiver of messages flashing in from his own subconscious or from out of the disturbances in the collective ether,” according to Adam Sweeting in Uncut magazine a year after 9/11. In the same piece, Springsteen told Sweeting, “I think the second or third week in September I’d written ‘Into The Fire’ for a telethon they had here in the States after 9/11, and I was gonna sing it on the telethon, but instead I sang a song I already had called ‘My City Of Ruins’.
“Then I wrote ‘You’re Missing’, then after that I woke up one night and I had this song, ‘The Fuse’, and so all of a sudden you have these elements of the story you’re compelled to tell at a certain moment. That you’re kind of asked to tell. Then you look at it and listen to it and it begins to say, there’s just a wide variety of emotional elements to make it thoughtful and complete, and the songs kind of present themselves as such and in that fashion.
“It’s not necessarily linear and it’s not necessarily directly literal – in fact, hopefully it’s not really literal. That was something I was trying not to do. I wanted to feel emotionally in that context but not directly literal, though on some songs I was gonna be a little more literal than on others. Those songs kind of anchored the theme of the record, so when you get to the other ones you start to look into it and check the verses and realise it’s a piece of the whole thing. That was pretty much how it developed, very instinctively. It wasn’t over thought-out.”
Lyrically, The Rising is at the other end of the spectrum from Springsteen’s previous album, The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Where the latter, like Nebraska, displays a novelist’s eye for detail in depicting scene and characterisation, the former owes more to the populist approach of a visual artist intent on making an immediate impact. In this instance the image is vivified by the colour of sound, a sound generated by Springsteen and the E Street Band and finessed by Brendan O’Brien, a new production recruit renowned for his collaborations with Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. It is the sound of The Rising more than the words that inspires the hope referred to earlier – that curious ability music has to manipulate the emotions, to raise us up. Call it the Lazarus effect, if you will. Unlike Nebraska or The Ghost Of Tom Joad, these songs had to be made bigger by the band.
Springsteen again: “On Nebraska, immediately the band played those songs they overruled the lyrics. It didn’t work. Those two forms didn’t fit. The band comes in and generally makes noise, and the lyrics wanted silence. They make arrangement, and the lyrics wanted less arrangement. The lyrics wanted to be at the centre and there was a minimal amount of music. The music was very necessary but it wanted to be minimal, and so with The Rising I was trying to make an exciting record with the E Street Band which I hadn’t done in a long time, so that form was kind of driving me.”
In settling on a form dominated by anthemic choruses and irresistible hooks, Springsteen intuitively gave America what it needed at that particular moment. His was an outfit built “for difficult times”. When people wanted a dialogue, “a conversation of events, internal and external, we developed a language that suited those moments, a language I hoped would entertain, inspire, comfort and reveal.”
‘Lonesome Day’ sets the tone for much of what follows on The Rising. There are flash pictures of hell brewing, dark sun, storm, a house ablaze, a viper in the grass, revenge…but in the end a promise that this will all come to pass, that we will find the courage to navigate our way through the lonesome day.
Courage is manifest too in ‘Into The Fire’ – the courage of the firefighters who ascended the stairs of the Twin Towers on an impossible rescue mission, an ascension into the fire, into the sky, “somewhere higher”, into heaven. The refrain is gospel, Springsteen praying for the same fortitude and faith and hope and love that these brave men carried with them to their deaths.
‘Waitin’ On A Sunny Day’ could jar but doesn’t. It’s an innocuous pop song, yes, but never underestimate the invigorating properties of the innocuous pop song. Springsteen told VH1’s Storytellers that this is the kind of song he writes to hear it sung back at him by a live audience. Yet on The Rising it serves a purpose too, reminding us that hard times come to everyone but that blues are temporary and that sunny day is never far away. You’ve just got to keep faith. Later on the album, ‘Mary’s Place’ is similar in its design and intention.
‘Nothing Man’ is about a small-town hero who doesn’t feel like a hero at all but is assailed by remorse for having survived whatever incident earned him his status. It’s difficult not to associate the sentiments expressed in the song with the post-9/11 guilt felt by those members of the emergency services who lived while their comrades died, yet the song was actually written in 1994.
On ‘Countin’ On A Miracle’, the protagonist is “still waiting on, insisting on life”. Along with ‘Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin)’ and ‘Further On (Up The Road)’, this is Springsteen and the E Street Band doing what they do best, “tearin’ down the house”.
As you listen to ‘Empty Sky’, you can’t help but see the space where the Twin Towers used to stand. There is fleeting anger here, a suggestion of Biblical payback, “an eye for an eye”. This may have been the manifesto of George W Bush’s administration, but such bloodlust has no place on The Rising, which is about healing not hating. And part of that healing process involved the introduction of voices other than American voices, situations other than American situations.
“I wanted Eastern voices, the presence of Allah. I wanted to find a place where worlds collide and meet,” said Springsteen.
The Eastern voices on ‘Worlds Apart’ (in which blood builds a bridge, peoples on opposite sides of tragedy are united) are those of Pakistani Qawwali singers Asif Ali Kahn and his group.
‘The Fuse’ is stuffed full of unsettling images of “life during wartime, scenes from home in the days immediately following the eleventh” – the lowered flag, the funeral cortege, the black dust…
‘You’re Missing’ was apparently inspired by Springsteen’s conversations with Suzanne Berger. It’s a heartbreaking litany of absence, everyday reminders of a life that was once shared by another and that now hangs in some kind of purgatorial suspense.
‘The Rising’ itself, Springsteen told Robert Santelli, is a bookend to ‘Into The Fire’, a sort of secular Stations of the Cross in which the steps of duty are “irretraceable, the hard realisation of all the life and love left behind”.
For Steve Wynn, founder member of Dream Syndicate, this was Springsteen’s vast songwriting experience coming into its own. “There’s a challenge – write an uplifting and positive song about the sad and doomed task of the firefighters in the World Trade Centre. And make it poetic. And fill it with hooks, something easy to sing with in both arenas and solitary rides on the freeway. And don’t slip into cheap and obvious sentimentality or grandstanding. The kind of songwriting challenge that could be pulled off only after many decades of songwriting.”
‘Paradise’ offers different impressions of the afterlife, including a Palestinian suicide bomber contemplating his last moments, and a Navy wife yearning for the husband lost at the Pentagon. The ‘I’ in the song bridges the gap between life and death in the final verse, glimpsing a loved one on the far shore, eyes “empty as paradise” – perhaps a reference to the futility of the 9/11 bombers’ self-sacrifice in seeking their place in the Islamic Paradise.
‘My City Of Ruins’ closes The Rising on an exhortation – “Come on, rise up!” Like the earlier ‘Nothing Man’, eerily prescient of 9/11 in its self-reproach for surviving when others did not, it was written beforehand. A whole year beforehand, as a lament for Springsteen’s old stomping ground, Asbury Park. Or at least it begins as a lament. But by the end it’s a plea to the Lord (Springsteen’s Catholic impulse kicking in again) to fill the American people with strength and faith and love – not dissimilar indeed to ‘Into The Fire’ – so that they may rise again from the ashes of that dreadful day in September.
The Rising resurrected Springsteen’s profile too after what could arguably be called his wilderness years. Not only was it a massive seller and a wow with the critics, but it restored his reputation as the unofficial All American voice, a man who understood what the nation was feeling and who knew exactly how to salve its wounds.
“Springsteen wades into the wreckage and pain of that horrendous event and emerges bearing 15 songs that genuflect with enormous grace before the sorrows that drift in its wake,” wrote Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone.
“The small miracle of his accomplishment is that at no point does he give vent to the anger felt by so many Americans: the hunger for revenge. The music is often fierce in its execution, but in essence it is a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them. Springsteen grandly salutes their innocence and their courage and holds out a hand to those who mourn them, who seek the comfort of an explanation for the inexplicable.”
The Rising, Loder enthused, was “a singular triumph. I can’t think of another album in which such an abundance of great songs might be said to seem the least of its achievements.”
For Alan Light, in The New Yorker, The Rising contained “none of the political engagement we might have expected to find on a Bruce Springsteen 9/11 album. In fact, this is ultimately an album about love.”
AO Scott, in his Slate magazine review, identified a link between the recurring nouns used by Springsteen (blood, fire, rain, sky, strength, hope, faith, love) and the repetition that psychologists say “is part of the work of grief”.
He explained, “Over the course of the 15 songs on The Rising, the reiteration of key words and phrases – now sung in agony, now in resignation, now in hope – has a cathartic effect. In the weeks and months after 9/11, people told and retold their stories almost compulsively and plunged again and again into their terror and confusion in a paradoxical effort to move beyond the experience and to keep it close. The Rising…has a similar effect. It neither assuages the horror with false hope nor allows it to slip into nihilistic despair.”
In Britain, Uncut’s Sarfraz Manzoor described it as “a brave and beautiful album of humanity, hurt and hope from the songwriter best qualified to speak to and for his country,” while Sylvie Simmons in Mojo hailed the album’s message of indomitability.