(Photo: AP)
I grew up on Bruce Springsteen. Some of my earliest memories are of hanging over the front seat of our old station wagon on road trips across the American West as cassette tapes of the Boss played on loop, because he was one of the few musical genres everyone in my family agreed on.
His music seemed a fitting backdrop to those summer road trips, the highway unfolding beneath an endless sky full of possibility, as Springsteen sang about broken dreams and the struggles of small towns and not surrendering.
In high school and college, I drifted away from classic rock in favor of pop and alternative rock. Springsteen drifted, too, writing pop-oriented albums in the late '80s and early '90s that didn’t sway critics.
I returned to Springsteen’s music after 9/11. No music better captured the emotions of the nation than the 2002 album “The Rising” — grief and anger, loss and resiliency. I rediscovered his old albums like “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Born to Run,” which never seem to lose their power or poignancy.
Monday night’s concert at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul will mark the sixth time I’ve seen Springsteen perform live. His concerts are legendary, three-plus-hour roller coasters of energy and emotion. He’s the only musician I’ve seen who will chide the audience to be quiet during an intimate solo number because he wants to make sure you’re listening. Or take a request from an audience member for a song that the band hasn’t played in decades and pull it off without a hitch. Or cover Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Creedence Clearwater Revival and somehow capture the essence of the song better than the original.
Every time I’ve heard him live has been a different experience depending on his mood and the mood of the country, from despair and hope after 9/11 to anger over the war in Iraq.
Amid the chaos of current events, Springsteen finds the human voice — the survivor who struggles with emptiness and loss, the Vietnam veteran forgotten by his country, the immigrant hoping to make a better life.
What draws me back to Springsteen’s music again and again is the depth of the songs, the emotional punch of the lyrics. How, written years or decades earlier, the message of a song like “American Skin (41 Shots),” “Born in the U.S.A.” or “Land of Hope and Dreams” can feel just as urgent and important today.
I’ll keep returning to Springsteen’s music — for the songs that never get old, and that voice amid the human struggle.
Kirsti Marohn is the government and tax watchdog reporter for the St. Cloud Times. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook or contact her by phone at 320-255-8746.