Letter to You
Bruce Springsteen

Once upon a time, 55 years ago, there was a band called the Castiles. All but one of them is gone now. He was a “crazy” kid who’d recently graduated from St Rose of Lima high school in Freehold, New Jersey. The nuns there despaired of him. His personal saviours were another Joisy kid called Frank Sinatra and four long-haired lads from Liverpool. He’d concussed himself in a bike fall (this was long before Bob Dylan’s largely mythical “motorcycle accident”), which meant he missed Vietnam and fulfilled the promise he made to all the girls that one day he’d be a star.

There’s a stage in life when it all starts to come back again, and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is an elegiac masterpiece. It was inspired by the death of his Castiles former bandmate, George Theiss, in 2018, at whose bedside Bruce had kept vigil during the final illness. Some of the songs on the new album date back almost to the beginning. “If I Was The Priest” was among the tunes he’d played at an audition for legendary A&R man John Hammond. I have “Janey Needs A Shooter” on a 1980 Warren Zevon album called Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (though it’s given as “Jeannie”) – a sign that Springsteen, like Prince, has often passed on some of his best songs to others.