My life’s the same story, again and again

I’m on the outside looking in.

—“OUTSIDE LOOKING IN”

 

People really invest themselves in you
and you invest yourself in them.

—SPRINGSTEEN, INTERVIEW, 2004

 

1

 

LONESOMENESS TO COMMUNITY

 

 

The narrative Bruce Springsteen has created during his career contains a tension between lonesomeness and community. This tension never subsides. The loner aspect of Springsteen’s personality and worldview has always been apparent. But there’s also an impulse toward community both in the journey from youth into artistic maturity, and in characters’ stories across the decades. Springsteen’s work articulates the American lonesome while equally qualifying him as an American pragmatist. “It’s always public and personal simultaneously for me,” he says.1 Driven ultimately by social engagement, he’s mined his experience of solitude to create an oeuvre of significance to his era. To use Wendell Berry’s description of Springsteen’s fellow New Jersey writer William Carlos Williams, his career amounts to decades of practicing “citizenship,” by which Berry means “the unceasing labor of keeping responsibly conscious” of his time and place. He’s accomplished, as Berry writes of Williams, “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of the word—a thousand times more precise and loving and preserving than any patriotism ever contemplated by officials of the government or leaders of parties.”2 His instincts have kept him on this broad path from early in his career.

Related to these two ideas, and to facilitate investigation of Springsteen’s significance as an American writer and musician, this chapter sets up two definitions and a narrative. The definitions are of American lonesomeness and of the passionate pragmatism at the heart of Springsteen’s work, and the narrative is of his journey from a deep-rooted sense of alienation to a community-oriented perspective. All creative output is uneven, and the art is not the artist. In choosing “to trust the art and be suspicious of the artist,” Springsteen echoes D. H. Lawrence. The human being is likely to be as much of a “stumbling clown” as everyone else (TAD 314).3 There’s our image of the artist, the artist’s self-image, and there’s the messy life lived.4 Barack Obama is supposed to have joked to Michelle
Obama that he opted to become president because he couldn’t be Bruce Springsteen. “Sometimes,” Springsteen once said, “I wish I was Bruce myself” (TAD 318). Like all of us, the artist himself is flawed and has floundered at times in shaping his mature vision, but few who read the interviews, ponder the songs, or attend concerts are likely to question his professional integrity. Through his work, we get the best he can offer, and the broad sweep of that is built on opposing impulses that construct a narrative from youth to maturity.

As Walker Percy evidently indicated to Robert Coles, in seeing Springsteen as “a writer, as well as a composer,” he “knows how to improvise through music, through poetry, through his public talking: he’s able to connect with, communicate with, us hearing him. You feel what he’s saying is his very own, deeply felt letter being sent to you—and there he is: putting it on the line the way writers do.”5 Springsteen’s lyrics and interviews illustrate his concern with literary as well as compositional craft in creating song storylines as well as a loose narrative within and between albums. The result has been an evolving parallel universe that sustains both artist and audience. In a 2010 interview, he reflected on an early decision to do this. Already successful as a performer, he grew aware that when it came to recording more was needed. There would always be plenty of other bands and others who “play guitar well” or “front well.” To stand out he concentrated on “the imagining of a world,” the creation of a personal “fingerprint” that would affect the lives of members of that audience. “All the filmmakers we love, all the writers we love, all the songwriters we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination and in your heart and on your soul” (SOS 350–51). “Inspired” by the work of others, he wanted “to inspire” (TAD 262).

Yet for all this, Springsteen’s writing contains a strong sense of the lonesome. Kevin Lewis argues that “lonesome” is a notably American word and that “the American lonesome” is a state of mind peculiar to the national culture. Lonesomeness has connotations of loneliness but also of solitude conducive to reflection. “In part the word has created the experience,” he writes, “and the experience has come to be reflected in the word.” “Where the meaning of ‘lonely’ is uniformly negative,” the “meanings of ‘lonesome’” can “layer a positive upon the negative.”6 Lonesomeness involves a sense of “taking confident possession of oneself on a crest of savored, transcended melancholy.”7 It’s obvious from what he talks and sings about that Springsteen has used music to fill a void and believes he can connect with his audience by having the void facilitate the connection. “I know how deadly important my job is to me,” he told Bob Costas in 1995. “What if I didn’t have that job? Or what if I couldn’t do that job after I did it for 20 years or 25 years?” (TAD 186). “If you don’t have that underlying emotional connection,” he told Chet Flippo in 1984, “then you don’t have anything” (TAD 144). In the same interview he talks of his own experience of solitude. Explaining Nebraska, he reflects on characters suffering “a spiritual crisis” that renders them “isolated” from society, job, family, even friends, “to the point where nothing makes sense.” “That loneness,” he says, is “the beginning of the end” (TAD 145).

One explanation for a preoccupation with this feeling is personal. Springsteen is describing symptoms of depression, a tendency to which he’s been open about in recent years and explicit about in the autobiography.8 Such feelings of isolation produce many metaphors, from William Cowper’s eighteenth-century description of being “buried above ground” through Sylvia Plath’s bell-jar image to William Styron’s portrayal, in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), of depression as “a storm of murk.” Springsteen’s mixture of metaphors surpasses any of these in its nightmarish depiction of the illness. Depression brings with it “torrents of self-loathing.” It has him “face up against the wall” he’s been “inching toward for a long time.” It spews “like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf” of his “carefully planned and controlled existence,” a “black sludge” that threatens “to smother” him (BTR 308–9). It’s “a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track” (BTR 484). Horrifying as these images are, the severity of his condition unless controlled by antidepressants is not unexpected. His lyrics are full of references to deathly isolation, from two mentions of suicide in “Born to Run” to the pilgrimage to the dry riverbed in “The River” to a dream of dying in “Valentine’s Day,” to imagining being buried in “We Are Alive.” For Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, “Stolen Car” captures “the essence of depression.” It’s easy to think of the characters in Nebraska in terms of Styron’s observation that, subject to a madness “chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain,” the person’s “aggrieved, stricken, and muddied thought processes,” while usually “turned agonizingly inward,” can induce “violent thoughts regarding others.”9 This may help explain the “Nebraska” protagonist’s response that he did what he did because “there’s just a meanness in this world.” Similarly, when in “State Trooper” the driver pleads that no trooper stop him an implication is that to do so might lead to murder, suicide or both.

Indeed, Nebraska, as Dave Marsh and Springsteen himself have suggested, for all its political concerns, is laceratingly personal. Marsh refers to Springsteen’s “private demons,” while Springsteen told Mikal Gilmore that he’d always considered it his “most personal record” because it captured the “tone” of his childhood.10 With regard to solitude, two pertinent songs are “My Father’s House” and “Highway Patrolman.” In both, the speaker’s focus on a loved one highlights his isolation. There can hardly be a more forlorn song about father-son alienation than “My Father’s House,” not least in the son’s inability to penetrate the father’s angry pride. The house stands “shiny and bright,” “so cold and alone,” and the song ends with no suggestion that either the father’s or the son’s sins will be atoned. Something of that same yearning for an elusive closeness is apparent in “Highway Patrolman,” the story of Joe Roberts, the good brother (as he sees himself) and Frankie, a Vietnam veteran and petty criminal. After a car chase to the Canadian border, Joe pulls over and watches Frankie’s “taillights disappear.” As with the “lunar landscape” of a New Jersey morning on “Open All Night,” this is a depiction of personal and cosmic loneliness akin to Joyce Carol Oates’s image, in her 1996 novel of a father’s banishment of a daughter, We Were the Mulvaneys. As the father drives away, Marianne watches his taillights shrink and fade. “Smaller and smaller,” they resemble “rapidly receding suns.” Whatever your personal relationship with a family member, especially where circumstances keep you apart, to view the matter in terms of a human lifespan set against the eternity and immensity of the Cosmos concentrates the mind.11

Springsteen refers not only to isolation but also to feelings in youth of being an outsider and of having to work things out for himself. “An outcast weirdo misfit sissy boy,” even aged seven, he received “the bullying all aspiring rock stars must undergo,” that “playground loneliness that is essential fuel for the coming fire” (BTR 15). He experienced a basic rite of passage for those who are troubled by their place in society and by their sense that others expect them to conform. Nor is it self-deprecation. In an unpublished reminiscence, Joe de Pugh, the model for the pitcher in “Glory Days,” describes how he and his teammates nicknamed Springsteen “Saddie,” because the cool and the outcasts were known as the Bad and the Sad, and Springsteen sat on the bench and “hardly ever played.”12 Hard as it is to assert your identity, and harder still when you’re labeled a loser, one way to achieve this is to escape the world you’re brought up in and find a new one. This needn’t mean physical travel, though since, in Saul Bellow’s words, “travel is mental travel,” it often does. But equally, one can stay put yet, the brain being wider than the sky, burrow deep within oneself. “Had I not been lonely none of my work would have happened,” said British painter L. S. Lowry. Art provides both the opportunity to express isolation and to escape it.13 If Bellow found it through travel, Dickinson through poetry—her letter to the world that never wrote to her—and Lowry through painting, Springsteen found it through music.

But expression of isolation and escape from it are often inextricable. A band in itself can be a community formed by misfits. “Musicians are funny,” Springsteen notes. “When you’re home, you’re never a real connected part of your own community, so you create one of your own” (TAD 198). Destined for an itinerant existence, they exemplify the lonesome. Those with a lonesome mentality turn it into a source of inspiration. Of being in the studio Springsteen said in 1981 that he wished he was “somewhere strange, playing,” because this made him “feel most alert and alive” (TAD 125). Moreover, it’s striking to note him saying four times in a few sentences, in 1975, that he likes to keep to himself, and add that his father “was always like that” (TAD 62). “From my youth,” he admits, “I had a tendency to be isolated psychologically” (SOS 173). Not knowing “how to join in,” he stood back and “watched the way things interrelated” (SOS 270). This sense of apartness drew him to what, in his Austin address, he calls the “outsider art” of rock and roll (SOS 388). But rather than stay within that narrow world he’s defined this experience in broader terms. Feeling like an outsider is often a common factor “with people who then go on and take their own thoughts and formulate them in some fashion,” he suggests. “It’s usually a result of a variety of dysfunctions that you’ve managed to channel into something positive and creative rather than destructive” (SOS 270).

Dwelling in solitude as a place of reflection is particularly a characteristic of youth, and to move from a sense of isolation to a sense of community is usually about maturing. But it’s rarely straightforward. The young test out who they might become. Like Julien and his mountain grotto in The Red and the Black, the young can be insanely ambitious yet happiest developing dreams alone. Subsequently most find their place. As their lives change, so do their perceptions. Lonesomeness may remain with maturity, merely changing shade and shape. The lonesome young may well become the lonesome old, or the older singer or listener may simply recall that lonesome youth. After all, how do we understand the young unless we put ourselves back into the mode that was once our core being? We might revise our response to a given song, or we might disassociate ourselves from it. The meaning of a song might change if it’s crafted to contain possibilities. Equally, we might keep singing or listening as a form of independent or communal nostalgia. This wouldn’t be pernicious, but we should see it for what it is. Shared lonesomeness creates a sense of the communal. Willa Cather ends her novel My Ántonia (1918) with the words, “whatever we have missed, we possessed together, the precious, the incommunicable past.”14 Like many a compelling phrase, this cracks on examination. We all possess the past. We may even possess aspects of that past together, and be unable to communicate it to others, yet the past we possess is never shared in detail. Our own past is a lonesome thing. Even if together, we’re solitary sailors on a flotilla of yachts dotted on an ocean. Perhaps, then, the past is incommunicable even to those who in theory share it, and not just to those who weren’t there. The character in “The River” speaks of how he and Mary would dive in the reservoir before the dreams of youth dissolved, and how they still return to the dry riverbed, he pretending amnesia and she indifference. “You shall not go down to the same river twice,” counsels Heraclitus. Borges explains the “dialectical dexterity” of this statement “because the ease with which we accept the first meaning (‘the river is different’) clandestinely imposes upon us the second (‘I am different’) and grants us the illusion of having invented it.”15

Springsteen’s career encourages a sense of this dichotomy, apparent to many people at any time in life, between being an individual and being part of the crowd. This is true not just in terms of the individual creating and performing the song before escaping to the next town but also of the individual attending the concert and contemplating it in solitude. Perhaps it’s not just Springsteen but all of us who are by nature loners yet seek community. We’re strange animals and the work embodies our contradictions. The river becomes a metaphor for togetherness, then solitude even in company, and finally for the flow of time,
where elsewhere (as on Live in New York City) it becomes the river of hope and the river of life. Springsteen stands on the bank between solidity and fluidity—“the edge of the stage,” as Stevan Weine puts it, “worked so intensively for forty years,” “a concentrated point on the edge connecting and dividing the individual and the world”—reminding us that we can accommodate the lonesome by sharing.16 When he performs “Born to Run,” the lights go up on the audience. The singer and Wendy are the nominal “we” while the band and crowd form another collective. Yet this most melancholy of songs mingles major chords with minor, and the lyrics are full of yearning. As Springsteen put it of his music and the band’s performances in those early days, it was “desperate fun” (TAD 200). But the “loneness” he refers to can give way to lonesomeness. On one hand, country music, among Springsteen’s multitude of influences, might be, in Cecelia Tichi’s words, “a grieving music for a lonesomeness bred in the American bone,” and at times tending toward “mawkish self pity,” on the other hand, to turn a negative into a positive is an American ideal. For both Tichi and Lewis, the lonesome is rooted in the immigrant experience. Tichi describes this in terms of the “gut-level loneliness” of being separated from one’s family, friends, and culture. For Lewis, “this feeling state” grows out of the historical contexts whereby “religious inclinations have had to find expression or release where they will” in the face of frontier experience, “post-Enlightenment scepticism,” and an erosion of “the authority of traditional doctrine-based religions.” He thus writes of the American “cultural imperative to reinvent religion.” The lonesome, he argues, relates to the “yearning for belief in a transcendent reality, a yearning not capable of being fulfilled more than a tantalizing, fleeting moment, but at least for that.”17 Springsteen nails it in a title: “Gotta Get That Feeling.” American culture does this best in what he calls “the dream world of popular music” (TAD 412).

As noted with “My Father’s House,” and other Nebraska songs, Springsteen doesn’t always provide the possibility for a positive interpretation, but the idea of something positive coming out of a negative can exist in ostensibly bleak material. In “State Trooper,” for instance, the desperate voice hopes that “somebody out there” will hear him. A “last prayer” doesn’t bode well, but it’s a phone-in show and the radio suggests other listeners. A song can save a life. “State Trooper” is a companion to “Stolen Car” on The River, in which the isolated individual feels it’s better to be caught, and thus become something, if only a convict, than to travel so far into “this darkness” that he’ll “disappear.” Discussing “Stolen Car,” Springsteen reveals the extent to which he blends the personal with the cultural. “If you don’t connect yourself to your family and to the world,” he says, “you feel like you’re disappearing. I felt like that for a very, very long time. Growing up, I felt invisible.” “To be caught” on the radar as a felon is the most muted positive imaginable. But it’s a version of a far more prevalent force, both in American culture and in Springsteen’s work: a life-affirming, ultimately communal impulse. “The heart of almost all my music,” he explains, is “the struggle to make some impact and to create meaning for yourself and for the people you come in touch with” (TAD 254). Beginning with that “outsider art,” Springsteen has, as he told Percy’s nephew, always been “looking inward and reaching out to others” (TAD 231). His career has thus evolved through passionate engagement, first with his art form and later with wider areas of interest. From the experience of being on the outside looking in—and mentally on the inside looking out—to discovering meaning through music, to finding that his private experience had value through communal expression, he found his path.

 

The idea that “lonesomeness,” in the midst of a “loneness” that threatens pure negation and annihilation, has within it a core positive, a some-thing felt by and between all his listeners, is the “hungry heart” that pulses through Springsteen’s work. It’s where his version of the American lonesome merges with his passionate pragmatism. I use this particular “-ism” advisedly. In 1972 Springsteen described his abortive attempt to study at college. “I got there and tried to take psychology,” he said, “and I kept opening a book and seeing myself in all these different -isms. I thought, I can’t get into that.”18 We should honor our young selves. They will always be a part of us. In maturity we may still feel that records taught us more than we learned in school. But not all “-isms” are alike. The young Springsteen was reacting to categorization. All young rebels resemble that most lonesome of youths, Huckleberry Finn. Like Huck, many too are at heart conservative. They’re responding to a world that has gone awry from their instinctive morality. They don’t want to adhere to hollow conventions, accept falsities, be confined, or swallow a belief system served up for them by circumstance or accident of birth. Nor do they want to face the brutality of fathers unable to come to terms with failure. The last thing they want is a curriculum leading to that euphemism for conformity, “sivilization,” which too often contains acceptance of inequality, greed, and racism. The nineteenth-century rebel seeks escape on a raft. The twentieth-century rebel finds “the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car.” He wants to be free, to fake his own death, debunk to Jackson’s Island (or escape the Jackson Cage), and “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.”19

But pragmatism is paradoxically all about escaping “-isms” of the incarcerating kind. It celebrates the fluid energy of the river rather than the solid conventionality of the bank. It’s never been about bowing to authority. It’s akin to the very rebelliousness that rejects most “-isms.” One might almost call it a constructive anarchism. A multipurpose philosophical tool, it is reshaped by pragmatists for the task at hand. To be a pragmatist is to have a secular sense that what we believe will affect how we act, and hence that idealism is pragmatic. This amalgam of positive perspectives began, in American terms, with the ideas of Emerson and then Whitman; Charles Sanders Peirce coined “pragmatism” as a term; William James articulated it as a way of thinking; diverse American thinkers and writers from Dewey and Rorty to Wallace Stevens and James Baldwin developed it. Since then it has continued to resonate into the twenty-first century.20 Brother of novelist Henry James, William James has something in common with Springsteen in his outsider status. In the words of Louis Menand, “he was not a product of a particular school or academic tradition, or even a practitioner of a particular scholarly discipline,” so he “could honestly feel that he was responsible for his beliefs to no one but himself. This not only lent passion to his convictions,” it also enabled him to ignore convictions if they began “to operate as prejudices.” He started out rebelling against his father, whose beliefs in “the unchanging reality of an unseen world, indifference to temporal moral distinctions, and anti-individualism” were anathema to him. He thus designed pragmatism to undermine such conceptions of “a closed and predetermined universe.” Hating notions of “an undifferentiated oneness,” he “thought the universe should be renamed the ‘pluriverse.’”21 Springsteen has been an eclectic reader for decades, and influenced as much by this as by music. Robert Santelli said to him in 2013 that, when he worked with him on Songs in the 1990s, he was amazed at the books in his study on “American history, politics, art, and music.” In response, Springsteen admitted to being “quite a student” (TAD 426). He’ll therefore have imbued many ideas from American philosophy and be familiar with some of these figures. Certainly his work shares many of their preoccupations and tendencies.

The idea of the lonely journey—the American lonesome—is integral to Spring­steen as an American pragmatist: in Stewart Friedman’s terms, “a teacher” who has
come to this by way of “his own experience.” This sense of an individualistic world­view self-made out of available materials is one of pragmatism’s most appealing aspects. Pragmatists don’t function as a group. They merely share traits. Idiosyncratic thinkers, they rely on intuition as well as evidence, and borrow ideas to suit a purpose. Typical of James was his belief that “a risk-assuming decisiveness—betting on an alternative even before all the evidence was in—was the supreme mark of character” set against his view “that certainty was moral death.”22 “Pragmatists,” writes Rorty, “realize this way of thinking about knowledge and truth makes certainty unlikely. But they think that the quest for certainty—even as a long-term goal—is an attempt to escape the world.”23 Springsteen’s homespun, contingent worldview therefore exudes both the American lonesome and a particularly passionate form of pragmatism.

Lonesomeness and pragmatism combine in expressing the value of charting your own path using whatever’s at hand. Emerson was a family friend during William James’s childhood. His ideas, epitomized by his celebrated essay “Self-Reliance,” clearly influence James’s formulation of pragmatism. “Emerson’s method,” writes Menand, “was to skim works of literature and philosophy, of all types and from all cultures, with an eye to ideas and phrases he could appropriate for his own use.” His conviction was “that organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously.” You should “believe your own thought,” writes Emerson. “What is true for you in your private heart is true for all.”24 That we work from the inside out, that intuition is preferable to dogma, and that consistency might amount to falsity, are all central tenets of his writing. There’s no point in arguing pragmatism into false coherence, of trying, in Rorty’s words, “to find a way of making everything hang together.” Instead, the point is to use the concept as a magnet for attracting other sources to create a narrative that may in turn stimulate the ideas of others, growing from their own experience and interests.25

In critical terms, what matters for pragmatists and neo-pragmatists is invariably what an artist’s work does rather than any lowered or elevated status an establishment assigns it. This view tends to see the importance of an artist, in Giles Gunn’s words, “in relation to the questions they continue to keep alive and insistent.” For Gunn, this is why opening up the canon “to more and different authors” is so important. It is to alter “the way culture represents its own resources to itself. Until new texts and new authors are brought into functional relations with established ones,” he argues, “culture doesn’t really change.” Pragmatists thus celebrate the “world of difference between thinking of canons as treasuries to be protected and hoarded and as savings to be invested, portfolios to be managed and risked.”26 In Rorty’s pragmatist utopia, “there will be no dominant form” of culture. “High culture will no longer be thought of as the place where the aim of the society as a whole is debated and decided, and where it is a matter of social concern which sort of intellectual is ruling the roost. Nor will there be much concern about the gap that yawns between popular culture, the culture of people who have never felt the need for redemption, and the high culture of the intellectuals—the people who are always trying to be something more or different than they presently are.” We’ll have dropped notions of “a standard against which the products of the human imagination can be measured other than their social utility,” and will judge such use by taking “fully to heart the maxim that it is the journey that matters.”27

While philosophical pragmatists have no bosses, they tend to hold similar values. To borrow definitions set out by John Stuhr, these include a rejection of “distinctions made in thought” such as supposed oppositions between intellect and emotion or oneself and other people; a fallibilist, pluralist belief that “varieties of experience” are valid, and a sense of radical empiricism, James’s term for the conviction that “experience is an active, ongoing affair.” They also tend to think in experimental, melioristic terms, and proceed with “a method of enquiry” that assumes “human action can improve the human condition.”28 When I think of supposed oppositions, such as intellect/emotion, I recall Springsteen’s comment that music is primarily an “emotional language” but intimation that emotion and intellect are entwined. I also think of Springsteen’s class awareness, and the once-common assumption that rock music must be a lesser art, and so recall Dewey’s view, in Menand’s words, that such oppositions reflect “class bias.” When I think of fallibilism, I reflect upon Springsteen’s willingness to revise beliefs (or, to use his vernacular, from “Long Time Comin’” on Devils & Dust, not to “fuck it up this time”). When I think of pluralism, I note the common ground he finds with diverse others. Radical empiricism is evident in his comments—echoing Emerson’s to let “the inmost” become “the outmost” and to “trust thyself”—that ultimately you must “trust yourself” and “the world will catch up” (TAD 213). He’s experimental in his willingness to try different formats. Danny Federici described him as “the kind of guy who just says, ‘Oh—that was yesterday.’”29 More to the point, he revises, reworks, and recasts ideas. The spare rhythm of “Open All Night” from Nebraska transforms in his 2006 Dublin show with the Sessions Band into a 1940s-style big-band extravaganza. When I think of meliorism, I reflect that, for all the dark material, he’s never been “much of a cynic” (SOS 152). When, finally, I contemplate community and the social, I’m aware of how even the most downbeat of songs, such as “This Depression” on Wrecking Ball, imply the possibility of help-at-hand. “Baby, I’ve been down but never this down,” is the shocking opening to a song that never transcends the emotion. Yet the singer is confident of emotional support. Even in songs such as “State Trooper,” “My
Father’s House” or “Dead Man Walkin’” a community element exists in that Springsteen gives voice to people often denied it in American culture, and the speakers assume listeners.30

In sum, art, from a pragmatist perspective, is seen to have a social use. “Our beliefs are really rules for actions,” writes James. American poets often echo this. “The necessity, the usefulness of poetry!” exclaims Wendell Berry. “The people I love best,” writes Marge Piercy in “To Be of Use,” “jump into work head first.”31 “I wanted to be good at doing something that was useful to other people, and to myself,” said Springsteen in 1984 (TAD 134). “One of the main motivations for me was to try to be useful,” he repeated in 1995. “I was trying to find a fundamental purpose for my own existence” (TAD 172). By 2012, opening the Wrecking Ball tour in Atlanta, he was describing himself as “the custodian” of “people’s feelings and memories” and the band as “a purpose-based organization.” In other words, pragmatism is all about moral purpose, testing beliefs and ideals in terms of their practical, beneficial effect.32 As for what might be meant by “use,” in Rorty’s words, “pragmatists—both classical and ‘neo-’—do not believe that there is a way things really are.” Rather, “they want to replace the appearance-reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful.”33 This doesn’t mean they have answers to questions about what the descriptions might be useful for, or by what criterion a definition might be judged to be better. Pragmatists have no abstract agenda defined in advance. They deal with specific situations. Thus they tend to adhere to what Rorty calls “polytheism,” which amounts to an abandonment of the idea of locating an unchallengeable script “which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell them all the same thing.”34 Usefulness, therefore, always depends upon the concrete situation.

It’s no coincidence that, as an American, Springsteen has a worldview that echoes the tendencies of pragmatism since the latter articulates, in Stuhr’s words, “attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life embedded in the culture from which and in which it arose.” Springsteen’s adherence to the pragmatist principles of revisionism, fallibility, energy, movement, pluralism, meliorism, and usefulness feeds his prolificacy. Equally apparent is the neo-pragmatist emphasis on language as the shaper of worldview. Few other singer-songwriters have ever produced not just album after album but also version after version of song after song and then whole back catalogues that contain such a stream of material, including versions of well-known songs, songs that didn’t make it onto albums, and hybrid songs drawing on ideas and rhythms from other artists that then become Springsteen’s own. However different the mature artist is from the young artist, his work has always tended to reflect the ideals and actualities of his country—or at least, as he puts it, “that big country” he feels his audiences, American, European, or other­wise, carry “in their hearts” (TAD 211). “The country of one’s dreams,” writes Rorty, “must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands.” “With these hands,” runs the refrain from “My City of Ruins.” Such language, common to Rorty and Springsteen, about “what a nation has been and should try to be” is not about “accurate representation,” in Rorty’s words. Rather, it’s an attempt “to forge a moral identity.”35

If Springsteen’s work has long revealed a pragmatist worldview, Born to Run is a culmination of it. Very much a reader- rather than self-serving autobiography, its impulse is to be useful—whether to fans wishing to understand “the Boss,” young musicians wishing to make the most of their craft and avoid pitfalls, workaholic parents who need reminding of priorities, people coping with depression who can gain from knowing they are not alone, or any of us in our roles as sons, daughters, siblings, or spouses. “The writer has made one promise,” he writes near the end, “to show the reader his mind. In these pages I’ve tried to do that” (BTR 501). It’s obvious from the confessional element of the book that this is not designed to impress but to help readers to “strengthen” and “make sense of” their own lives (BTR 505). The book is shot through with the belief that we can use our imagination to shape our senses of ourselves. In the “Badlands” phrase, “Talk about a dream / Try to make it real.” The first thing to do is to find a language. Out of the language comes the idea. Out of the idea comes the reality. Out of experimentation we find that future. A hypothesis is not merely something to prove but to provide new possibilities. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will,” writes James.36 The word or phrase, denoting an idea, can lead to the belief and then the action. “Faith,” he writes, “creates its own verification.”37 Decades after James, Springsteen asserts: “Mister, I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man / And I believe in a promised land.” Attitudes have concrete results. This is what James, to use one of his essay titles, called “The Will to Believe.” Such idealism tends to bypass the fact that beliefs can be destructive as well as constructive, depending both upon what one might mean by “a promised land,” or what one might put faith in. But, writes Rorty, “any philosophical view is a tool which can be used by many different hands,” and in its melioristic form this one shapes
Springsteen’s career.38

These beliefs explain Springsteen’s willingness to change sound and image across the decades. They explain his willingness to embrace multiple styles and influences, from the joyous blend of rock and jazz—part Duke Ellington, part Elvis, part Van Morrison—that provided live entertainment on the Jersey Shore in the early 1970s, through the operatic romance of the Born to Run era, the moodier period of Darkness, The River, and Nebraska, and the more socially and politically engaged, Guthrie-inspired music of The Ghost of Tom Joad to the eclectic mix of Wrecking Ball and High Hopes. As many have noted, Springsteen is, in June Skinner Sawyers’s words, an unabashed “synthesist.” “There has never been an artist so aware of the rock ’n’ roll heritage,” writes Greil Marcus. As Ann Douglas points out, he “learned his trade through” what she calls “saturation—he calls it ‘assimilation’ as opposed to study—in the cheapest media outlets of rock, the AM radio station and the single.” More than that, it was, for me, startling to discover that the origins of “Backstreets,” and the extended versions at late-1970s concerts, owed so much to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and that even the late wails on “Born to Run” strongly echo those of “Madame George.” But such echoes are everywhere in his music. If Van Morrison refers to a “Mansion on the Hill” on “Cedar Avenue,” there’s also, to borrow from Geoffrey Himes’s more extensive selection, Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill,” Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway,” Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe” and Woody Guthrie’s “Tom Joad.” American pragmatists accept, in Rorty’s words, “the contingency of starting points,” and that our identity is part of a continuum. To do so “is to accept our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow human beings as our only source of guidance.” Without a solid base of the kind that dogma claims, we live our lives in a river of language-created realities. What therefore ultimately matters “is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right,” let alone a deluded sense of creating new ideas, or tunes, unconnected with what has come before.39

Springsteen expresses these sentiments in numerous utterances in conversation and from every pore during performance. He speaks often of his dialogue with his audience and sense of continuity with the music of the past. That he’s people-oriented, “isolationist” tendency aside (TAD 157), is self-evident. But he’s spelled out on many occasions what he tries to achieve. He put it best to Mark Hagen in 1999. Everyone carries idiosyncratic, personal memories “for no explicable reason,” he says. These memories live with you throughout your life and “are an essential part of who you are.” “For some reasons on that particular day you had some moment of pure experience that revealed to you what it meant to be alive. How important it is, what you can do with your life.” “The writer’s job” is therefore to collect and create such moments from personal experience, to imagine them into cohesion and to present this to others “who then experience their own inner vitality,” and “their own questions about their own life, and their moral life” (TAD 255–56). In other words, artists first of all try to make sense of their own lives, but if they do it well then that has a similar effect on the lives of others. His vision is of the artist as teacher, teaching first himself and then allowing us access to what he’s learned. As he said in 1995, he’s always been “interested in becoming part of people’s lives, and having some usefulness—that would be the best word.” “To try to be useful” (as well, of course, as dreaming of “the Cadillac or the girls”) would, after all, fulfill that need to find “a fundamental purpose” (TAD 172).

 

While it’s true that lonesomeness and community are oscillating poles in Springsteen’s music, one can also see his early career as a journey from one to the other. Starting with feelings of alienation, he discovers that he can turn these feelings into an art that celebrates community and proves beneficial to others. The process has two stages. One is to recognize this as a way forward. The other is to make it real. As is the case with most young people, he begins without a fully realized sense of what he’s doing or why. In time, he begins to express a message of community on stage. But he admits that, for all his talk “about community,” his personal immersion in the process is another step (TAD 161). This in itself is an example of the pragmatist belief that putting a goal into words can lead to an emotional, intellectual, and professional reality. Achieving this eventually transforms Springsteen from being a mere writer and performer to a position where he becomes an articulate spokesperson for his society.40 Perhaps he always felt, as he told Will Percy, that what he “was doing was rooted in a community—either real or imagined” and that his “connection to that community” is what made his work matter (TAD 212), but it wasn’t until he had a stable personal life that he “was driven to write more outwardly—about social issues” (TAD 223). The pivotal album is The Ghost of Tom Joad, but the process begins much earlier, both through his own desire to make his life and work more significant, and through Jon Landau and others encouraging him to open himself up to wider cultural influences. Continuing from the 1980s into the twenty-first century, it’s deepened into a consistent attitude toward the role of the songwriter in the community, both in his actions and in songs from “Streets of Philadelphia” to “Wrecking Ball.” Although “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was inspired by John Ford’s 1940 movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, and as late as 2014 Springsteen was embarrassed not to have read East of Eden, his alignment with Steinbeck’s active concern about migrants illustrates a tendency that’s become more obvious in artistic maturity, to assert what David Masciotra describes as a “progressive political vision.”41

Springsteen’s art had long functioned as social commentary, but by the late 1990s he was consistently aware of this. Only from Darkness, notably in “Factory,” did he begin to refer to the workplace itself, but in “Youngstown,” on Tom Joad, he documents a specific ironworks founded in northeast Ohio in 1803 by James and Dan Heaton. He notes its role as a maker of Union cannonballs in the nineteenth century and tanks and bombs in the twentieth, and he situates one blast-furnace worker’s story within a cultural, geographical, and historical context. By the end, he’s taken us from the Monongahela Valley of West Virginia and Pennsylvania and the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota to Kentucky’s Appalachian coalmines and from the Civil War through World War II to Korea and Vietnam. At the same time, he’s given voice to the American worker as deliberately as that quintessential cultural witness, Studs Terkel.42 The same can be said for later songs like “Jack of All Trades” and “Wrecking Ball.” That the impulse toward specificity had been growing is apparent from the excised “Glory Days” couplet that has a boy observing how his father no longer works “at the Metuchan Ford plant assembly line” but “just sits on a stool down at the Legion Hall.”43

Tom Joad marks Springsteen’s maturation beyond mere awareness of his immediate environment into a sense of his story as part of American history and culture. Early in his career, his travel motif is predominantly about individual dreams of escape. The heroes of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” “Born to Run,” and “Thunder Road” see their hometown as restrictive. They’ll find personal success elsewhere. From this, Springsteen moves, via the sense of entrapment, family ties, and reluctant separations evident in such Darkness and River songs as “Factory” and “Independence Day,” to something quite different. His theme in Tom Joad is forced migration and communal responsibility. Characters try to connect with each other. In “Galveston Bay” a Vietnam veteran spares a Vietnamese immigrant who’s killed two Texan Klan members in self-defense. As Jim Cullen puts it, the song’s resolution offers “the ultimate definition of brotherhood: love that transcends boundaries.”44 Similarly, “Sinaloa Cowboys” and “The Line” raise questions—again far from the early work—about the interrelationships between friendship, responsibility, family, and community.

Curiously, Steinbeck critic Warren French’s analysis of the change in the character of Tom Joad describes the kind of change evident in Springsteen’s perspective as this new emphasis emerges. The change, writes French of Joad, is from an “individual concerned only with the survival of his touchy clan into a visionary” who becomes “an inspiring influence to his unity.”45 Springsteen, like Joad, moves from self-as-rebel-hero to being that “inspiring influence.” Again, like Joad, he absented himself from his original community when, as “a southern Californian in the early nineties,” he echoed his parents’ migration to the West Coast.46 But his return spoke to his attachment to place as a marker of identity. That “a fella ain’t no good alone” is as relevant to Springsteen’s career as to Steinbeck’s novel.47 Individuals mature when they see themselves as part of a larger context. The change between Springsteen’s youthful and mature visions is put in relief on his 1989 video anthology. Introducing a 1987 live version of “Born to Run,” he advises his audience, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.” “This is the beginning,” writes Steinbeck, “—from ‘I’ to ‘we.’”48 American myths of individualism strike at the heart of notions of community, and this is evident in both The Grapes of Wrath and The Ghost of Tom Joad. Those Springsteen listeners who prefer romantic rebellion to an emphasis on community, may, as Christopher Sandford suggests, “feel that he never quite recovered from watching The Grapes of Wrath on TV,” but, as he introduced a 1988 acoustic version of “Born to Run” in the same anthology, he realized that, having “put all those people in all those cars,” he would “have to figure out some place for them to go.” “Individual freedom,” he came to acknowledge, “when it’s not connected to some sort of community or friends or the world outside ends up feeling pretty meaningless.” For what does it mean to “win”? What does it mean to “succeed”? To quote Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, “success has no smell or taste, and when you get used to it, it doesn’t exist.”49 Real as they may be, feelings or manifestations of personal achievement are more temporary than family and community.

Springsteen’s changing statements between the early 1970s and late 1990s corroborate the evidence of the songs. In a 1974 interview with Michael Watts, appropriately entitled “Lone Star,” he admitted, “the main thing I’ve always worried about is me.” He “had to write about me all the time because in a way you’re trying to find out what that ‘me’ is.” This is a youthful question. “Is there anything more interesting,” asks a young character in Joyce Carol Oates’s You Must Remember This, “than who you finally turn out to be”?50 In maturity you’re more likely to be interested in what you do with who you’ve turned out to be. By 1992 Springsteen had moved to the next stage. His relocation to California would seem to have been part of that. He’d lived in New Jersey for a long time, he told David
Hepworth, and had written a great deal about his past. Having taken this as far as he could, he was now writing instead about “people trying to connect to each other, and that happens everywhere.” Connection, as he says of “With Every Wish” on Human Touch, means “dealing with a life with consequences.” “What does it mean to be a husband?” he asks. “What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a friend to somebody? When you finally get a good look at the world as it is, how do you not give in to cynicism, not give in to despair?” His answer is that you recognize “a world of love and a world of fear,” and that the two go hand in hand.51 Springsteen’s later albums have plenty to say about lonesomeness; you don’t outgrow your nature or leave your formative experience behind. But he rejects extended escapism in favor of confronting “the pain that living brings.” Out of the world of love and fear comes the world of responsibility. Beginning with his own early wrath he comes to see class anger in context. As enmeshed in the capitalist system as one can imagine, he’s part of the system he critiques. As Simon Frith put it, at the height of his popularity in the Born in the U.S.A. era, Springsteen came to represent the “pop commodity” that “stands for the principle that music should not be a commodity.”52 But the contradictions of his songs and story have largely to do with the contradictory American ideals of equality and individualism. His intelligence enabled him to negotiate that period
and establish a deeper role as a cultural commentator.

Beyond the similarities between Joad’s maturation in the novel and Springsteen’s through the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, Tom Joad is also notable for a new approach. It shows Springsteen reflecting on the roots of his profession. The translation of Steinbeck’s words and Ford’s images from movie into lyric sees him returning to storytelling as folk art. It pays homage to Guthrie and other folk singers of the 1930s and 1940s.53 Not least in its depiction of alienated labor in “Youngstown” and itinerant labor in “the New Timer,” it calls to mind Steinbeck’s campfire guitarist both in its ruminative rhythms and in subject matter, marking a return to music as intimacy. This is also why Tom Joad is markedly warmer and more companionable, for all its dark subject matter, than Nebraska, which it superficially resembles. The bleaker, harder songs of that earlier album reflect a destructive form of contemporary solitude. “Johnny 99” would hardly weld our imagined group of migrants, let alone lull their children to sleep. Nor is there any of the sense some might feel about Nebraska that the emphasis on the humanity of the criminals—albeit because the album critiques both the death penalty and incarceration without parole—leaves an uncomfortable silence about the multiple tragedies of the victims and their bereft loved ones. The characters in Tom Joad are for the most part decent individuals in dire straits.54

If this shift from lonesomeness to community pivots on Tom Joad, thereafter community is a watchword for every studio album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions included, except Working on a Dream, where the communal aspect has to do with the narrower if equally important matter of everyday involvement with family and friends. The Rising is one of Springsteen’s most important albums in this regard. In the wake of 9/11 there was a need among people, and a response from artists, musicians, and writers, to articulate their emotions. Jonathan Safran Foer responded with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Don DeLillo with Falling Man. There are examples in painting, in film, in poetry, and in music.55 Springsteen responded with skill and sensitivity. In the words of Cornel Bonca, in an exceptionally considered study of the title song in this context, “more than any other pop product produced since 9/11,” it “suggests than an artist can transcend pop’s typical puerility, commercialization, and superficiality to deliver an enduring piece of art.” Bonca hears “a man who has listened to the silence at the heart of the massacre, has honored it, and then proceeded to transform it into music.” In doing so, Springsteen provides not only “a vital, vibrant testament that popular culture can transcend its usual limitations,” but also shows that responses “needn’t be merely part of the noise, but truly be a help to those trying to get beyond it.”56

Springsteen also responded by consolidating the reuniting of the E Street Band for their first studio album since 1984. The album heralded his renewed sense of purpose as rooted in the communal even as lonesomeness is, for self-evident reasons, a central theme. For Geoffrey Himes and others, The Rising songs “are strangely vague and apolitical,” and most “could just as easily have been describing the aftermath of a hurricane or earthquake as a terrorist attack by right-wing religious fundamentalists.” But such observations, as Roxanne Harde argues, underestimate the meanings and manifestations of the “political.” “Several songs bring up and dismiss the thought of vengeance or discuss the costs inherent in taking revenge,” writes Harde.57 They thus take a political position, as does Springsteen in featuring Sufi Muslim musicians on “Worlds Apart.” The majority of listeners bring to the music images of 9/11, and Springsteen need only hint at those images for them to form. Such obliqueness enables him to blend acknowledgments of personal tragedy with a range of emotions we might feel. While several of the songs were written earlier, in the wake of 9/11 The Rising provides music as a catalyst for renewing strength. Cullen calls it “a profoundly religious document.” I prefer to think of Springsteen simply using religious language as an artistic device. Rorty describes religion and philosophy as “relatively primitive, yet glorious literary genres” in a world where those of a secular mind-set accept that there’s no “intrinsic reality to be discovered,” no “nonhuman authority” to which human beings owe respect, only useful ways of describing things and useful work to be done in bettering individual and collective lives. Hence the refrain, “with these hands.”58

Springsteen followed The Rising with Devils & Dust, which is as concerned with foreign policy and with the experiences of soldiers abroad as with America at home. “Devils & Dust” itself picks up from “Further On (Up the Road)” on The Rising. The voice of a soldier heading for war with grim concentration becomes the voice of a soldier in the midst of war, uncertain of what he’s being asked to do, and of the effect on him and his comrades if what “you do to survive / Kills the things you love.” The lyrics are both abstract and visceral, yet the “field of mud and bone” is indeterminate in setting or scenario. Other songs, notably “Reno” and “All I’m Thinkin’ About,” depict the search for companionship. But two standout songs on the theme of lonesomeness and community are about mothers and sons. “Jesus Was an Only Son” and “Black Cowboys” mirror each other. One depicts a son dying young and leaving a grieving mother, the other depicts a son leaving a dying mother. The first dramatizes the human story behind the Christian myth. We see Jesus as a child, walking with his mother on Calvary Hill, and Mary soothing him to sleep, then in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying “for the life he’d never live,” and finally comforting his mother by reminding her that “the soul of the universe willed a world and it appeared.” “Black Cowboys” is equally about mutual tenderness. Rainey Williams’s mother has protected him in the Bronx and fed his imagination with a book about “the black cowboys of the Oklahoma range,” and in turn he grows up to support her as she falls into addiction and perhaps prostitution. But, echoing The Grapes of Wrath, the song tells of his need to say farewell and move to distant lands. The smile Rainey has depended on has “dusted away.” Through her chest he hears “the ghost of her bones.” The final verse produces such a sense of lonesome reverie that I listened to it again and again to overcome being hypnotized by the clacking rhythm of the train tracks. As with Supertramp’s “Rudy” on that “train to nowhere,” we take the journey, drifting through Pennsylvania and Indiana, awakening “to muddy fields of green, corn and cotton.” The “red sun” slips “over the rutted hills of Oklahoma,” and the moon strips “the earth to its bone.” In terms of The Grapes of Wrath, the irony is that the boy is escaping to Oklahoma, the starting point of Steinbeck’s novel. Our dreams start out in our head. We invest a land with meaning. It’s not the land that’s turning to dust, but his mother. He’s heading for the place of his childhood dreams, the land of the black cowboys who are no longer there, and the final word reminds us of his mother on whose bones he’s laid his head. Like Tom Joad, he must leave the parent and find his own identity. Like 1920s folk singer Jimmie Rodgers who, in Greil Marcus’s words, “simply hopped on a train”—a “mystery train” no less—he’s “every boy who ever ran away from home.” More than this, he’s all of us, heading from our place of origin with high hopes.59

Throughout his career, Springsteen has shown suitable devotion to the matriarch, often having his mother, Adele, attend concerts. As with Elvis, his mother would seem to have been his first great fan. There’s a photograph of him at a New York show, aged sixty-two, serenading her aged ninety just as he did in Hyde Park a couple of years later, in 2013. The most personal and touching tribute to his mother is “The Wish” on Tracks, about her purchase (taking her cue from Grace Presley perhaps) of his first guitar. Along with “Jesus Was an Only Son,” “Black Cowboys” runs a close second in the mother-son depictions. Its emotional impact is reminiscent of that final movie scene between Ma and Tom. “We ain’t the kissing kind,” she says, yet embraces him. Tom recedes from the camera while his mother looms in the foreground, her hand momentarily reaching out. To hear the song is to have such images in mind. But “Black Cowboys” is about more than mother-son bonds. It’s about the creative imagination. Rainey is off to reenvision the world. I picture Steinbeck in his study, crafting this great American novel and, after scribbling away month after month, finally coming to those words of Tom Joad’s, “I’ll be there.” I see Woody Guthrie in that fleapit hotel, Hanover House, on the corner of Sixth and Forty-Third on 23 February 1940, penning his own “God Blessed America” in answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” and so composing verses that led to “This Land Is Your Land”—“the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling.” Steinbeck couldn’t have known that his sentiments would inspire Guthrie and Springsteen. But a few scrawled words and there you have it, a kind of immortality: proof, in a way that ghosts—not least those of Tom Joad and his family—do exist; proof that the American lonesome instigates an equally powerful pull toward community, both between people in their own time and with the voices of the past, recalled and rearranged in the present, enlarging the circle of American art.

The path established in the Tom Joad era and consolidated in The Rising and Devils & Dust continues through Magic, Wrecking Ball, and High Hopes to the present. While “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” speaks to unrequited attraction, “Radio Nowhere” is about connection through music. The singer seeks his “way home.” The sound he hears is “bouncing off a satellite” in “the last lone American night.” He spins “’round a dead dial” in search of “a world with some soul.” Sheer rhythmic noise will sometimes do, “a thousand guitars,” the “pounding drums.” “Making the Loud Noise” drowns out what Blaise Pascal calls “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.”60 The same is true of Wrecking Ball, the title track of which combines this requiem for a community with a squaring up to mortality. It sets the speaker in that community, even as the wrecking ball in question is also what Philip Roth calls “the truncheon of old age.”61 “Bring on your wrecking ball” thus becomes existential defiance as well as a musical shield. We’re all “burning down the clock.” Gone is the exuberance of youth, but gone, too, or at least tamed, is that sense of lonesomeness without remedy. In the long run, no Wrecking Ball song will be more poignant than the final one, “We Are Alive.” The band and its contemporary audience will disappear. But the dead reside in the living. “They” becomes “We.” “I’m basically a traditionalist, and I like the whole idea of a rock and roll lineage,” Springsteen said in 1995. “I always saw myself as the kid who stepped up out of the front row and onto the stage—who would carry the guitar for a while, and then pass on the rock and roll flame” (TAD 174). This sense of community acknowledges not only continuity between living beings but also with past eras. Musically exuberant, “We Are Alive” ends with a whistle, a whistle in the dark perhaps but a whistle nevertheless. Something remains. Others will inherit and use the music. Springsteen continues to take new directions, whether in the reinvigorating of American folk songs in We Shall Overcome or in High Hopes, with its mixture of material including the title song by Tim Scott McCon­nell; “Just Like Fire Would,” from an Australian punk band, the Saints; “Dream Baby Dream,” by Martin Rev and Alan Vega; and “The Wall,” acknowledged as stemming from an idea of Joe Grushecky’s and dedicated to Walter Cichon, missing in action in Vietnam in 1968. Together with new versions of older songs, “American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and newly composed material one of which, “Down in the Hole,” features his own then-middle-school children, Evan, Jess, and Sam, on backing vocals, this merging of the old and new, personal and public, could hardly be a better expression of the communal that has arisen over the decades out of the lonesome.