It’s a typical busy holiday season. It’s cold outside. Christmas lights, decorations and wreaths everywhere. Walking into a busy restaurant I look around trying to find a table. My eyes land on the nice older couple above.
They are in their late 70s or early 80s, both wearing fun holiday themed hats. They sit, quietly. She scrolling on her phone. Him just sitting and enjoying the moment, lost in thought. Maybe he’s thinking of what he had for lunch. Maybe he’s thinking about Christmases past and missing someone. Maybe he’s just lost in thought, a mediation of where he’s at in life and where he’s been.
I’m wearing a green Boston Scally cap I bought last year for the holidays. I find a table to sit at and order my lunch. The couple finish their quiet moment and gather their things before leaving the restaurant.
As they pass, the man makes eye contact with me, nods his head and tips his hat to me, one Christmas hat to another. “I like your hat,” he says simply but in a deep authoritarian voice that reminds me of Morgan Freeman narrating The March of the Penguins. I reply with a grin, “I like your style.”
He asks if he can sit down for a moment as he pulls out a chair. Being the mild midwesterner I am, what else but to smile and nod, of course you can. Be my guest.
His name is George and her name is Helen. George and Helen. They are both 80 years old. They are here in Chicago visiting his kids for the holiday. George and Helen have been through some things as he pours forth with their life story. They met in high school, fell in love and married right after high school. He got a job at a local plant and they bought a small 2 room bedroom cottage with a loan from his parents.
They settled in but before they could have kids , he got drafted into the marines during Vietnam. He served in the motor pool overseas with his unit. He never saw live duty and returned home after his initial assignment was up. Helen waited patiently for him staying just with her family and friends as best she could. But she waited.
George returned home to see his wife and partner. But he wasn’t the same. His service had done some things to him. Helen tried to help and make him comfortable and relaxed. George couldn’t relax. It pained him but he got restless and told Helen he had to leave so he could keep moving and keep the things he had seen off his mind. Therapy wasn’t a thing back then.
George and Helen both moved on, met other people and had lives and children of their own. But they both kept the other in the back of their minds. And then one day after each of their partners had died, Helen picked up the phone and called her original love, the love of her life to see how he was doing. “I’m ok but it sure is lonely here. I miss you.”
Ten years later here they are wearing Christmas hats and looking quiet, happy and peaceful.
George says he has to go and stands up pushing the chair in like a gentleman would. He tips his hat to me one more time as do I.
We both wish the other a merry Christmas. I don’t think George needs the well wishes. I think he found what he was looking for all this time.
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
“Had to find some higher ground Had some fear to get around You can’t say what you don’t know Later on won’t work no more
Last time through, I hid my tracks So well I could not get back Yeah, my way was hard to find Can’t sell your soul for peace of mind
Square one, my slate is clear Rest your head on me, my dear It took a world of trouble, it took a world of tears It took a long time to get back here”
Square One, Highway Companion Tom Petty
By Ryan Hilligoss, January 9, 2024
After living 49 years and spending half of that building an adult life and all that entails, I am fully back to square one. It’s not a great feeling to live with everyday and try to sleep at night.
Both my mother and father are gone and my middle brother passed eight years ago. What was a family of five is down to two. When you are a kid, for most, you have grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. Then one by one the layers start to peel back and now I am the parent and there’s no more layers between here and the end of the road. All that is left is the time to make of it what I will on my own. I stand at a crossroads searching each direction for a sign or a tantalizing view. A whole universe made up of family, friends, ties, geographical locations has evaporated into the ether.
My father has been gone for roughly two months, and since then I’ve come to a realization of how much of my world was taken up by his. Robert Hilligoss was a one of a kind, a human force of nature. When he walked into the room, he had a presence that filled the room. His big personality was the center of attention. The rest of us were just ancillary, character actors filling roles in the back ground. For most of my life I was bit player, watching a professional work his magic, tall tales, jokes and good times.
I was married for nearly 20 years and helped raise two beautiful, great children, a nineteen year old son and seventeen year old daughter. Now I’m divorced and have been single for several years. My son will be leaving for college in the fall and my daughter will be graduating from high school in May.
This is a long winded way of saying the life I built up until now is gone. I will always be the father of my children and take care of them as long and in every way I can, being for them in every way possible. But there are parts of my life that are empty and hollow to say the least. I’m back at square one, my slate is clear. It’s time to rebuild and make the second half of life something full of sunshine, care and love. I hope to see you up the road while I figure it all out, hopefully with some help this time. Someone to help carry the weight.
My father passed away at 2:30am on Monday November 13, 2023. I got the call at 3:00am, lying in that halfway place between dreamland and wakefulness. I had been tossing and turning for an hour when I heard my phone vibrating in silent mode. Maybe it’s a car warranty sale person, maybe it’s one of the kids with an emergency?? No, “Your dad is gone.” Four simple words. Four words that change your life forever. A whole universe gone with a few words in the middle of the night. For the next twelve days, I would suspend disbelief to keep him with me. Magical thinking.
Instantly, my mind and body went back to 2017 when my father called to say, “Your mom won’t wake up.” What did that mean, was she gone? was she in a coma? will I be able to see her again? On that day, 300 miles away and without definite information, I jumped in my car and headed south as fast as I could tearing down Interstate 55 towards St. Louis. So when I got the call last month, my mind and body immediately thought “I have to get there as quick as I can to see him.”
I had an hour of anguish and sorrow like I’ve never experienced before. Then my mind realized: he’s gone, you don’t have to rush there right this instant. I made phone calls to family and friends to deliver the news and to seek comfort amid my shock and disbelief. I talked with my two children about plans – who has school, who has work, can you go, when should we go? – I stayed at home for several more hours getting my affairs in order, packing a bag and finally setting out for the four-hour drive back to my childhood home.
But in hindsight, maybe I was stalling, thinking if I just stayed there and didn’t travel back home, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t real. Maybe it was some elaborate ruse or maybe I was actually still asleep.
I arrived in my hometown Monday afternoon along with my son Graham. With my brother Kevin and his wife unfortunately stuck a thousand miles away as part of a long-ago planned trip, my first stop was to see my dad’s lady friend, his “dance partner”. I rang the doorbell, she came to the door, we looked at each other through the glass knowing exactly what the other was feeling: that spirit that lit up any room he walked into was gone. We hugged and held each other.
This was the same process that followed each time I saw a family member or friend in the next few days. The look, the catch in the throat, the tears spilling down our cheeks, the holding onto each other as if we were holding onto him. As if we held on close enough we would force him to stay here on this earthly plane.
What followed for the next 12 days was what our father taught us from a very early age: work. My dad grew up on a farm, his parents were tenement farmers in east central Illinois. He had a hard life as a child and young man, working hard on the farm, cutting broom corn on hot summer days, delivering newspapers via a bicycle, flipping hamburgers at the original Burger King in Mattoon, Il, etc.
Four generations: Father’s Day 2010, Humboldt, Il cemetery
In 1977 when I was a child, our parents bought a Browns Chicken franchise in Alton, Il. Being the hard workers they were, they opened a second franchise in a nearby town in 1980. It was a family operation with both parents and all three of us sons working at the restaurants. I earned my first paycheck in 1982 at the age of 8 and earned $165 dollars that year, all of them spent at the donut shop next door…..”165 vanilla long johns please, sir.”
(If I only I had invested half of the money I earned frying chicken and mushrooms, wiping tables and moping floors, I could be retired right now.)
Our father taught us all the value and meaning of hard work. He taught us it gives us meaning, it gives us strength and sustenance, it puts our minds at ease and our bodies in motion at the same time. He taught us to have pride in our work, done with our own two hands. He taught us life isn’t easy, but you need to do what you can to make a difference in any way we can. He taught us work is an honest man’s pillow.
But fried chicken is a far cry from the work at hand of tending and caring for the dead. Funeral arrangements, looking after the house, taking care of the cars, financial matters, visiting and speaking with friends and family, each of us trying to take care of each other as we each processed the loss of a father, a friend, a coworker, a coach, a teacher, a dance partner.
I quickly fell into a pattern of doing what Bob would have been doing or what we would have been doing together on my many visits. Coffee in the mornings with my uncle, stopping by the auto dealership he drove cars for to speak with the Jason, Mark and Will who viewed dad as a surrogate father, dropping in to see Donna Kay/Donna 2/his dance partner/his lady friend, seeing Jackson, the young man who lives next door to my dad, and his favorite – going to the Alton VFW and Grafton Winery to enjoy live music.
On day six, we held the visitation and funeral. People came through the visitation line from 10:00am until 1:15pm when the funeral director advised we needed to start the service. He said he had never seen so many people come through a service line in all the years he had been handling funerals. I was crippled with grief and cried from places I didn’t know I had. Each time I thought I had let it all out, I would see someone I’ve known for years and it would all rush out again.
My heart was and remains broken. Losing my father was a double loss for me. He was my father, my last parent, but more importantly he was one of my best friends. Nobody tells you that when your parents die you feel like you’ve become an orphan, no matter how old you are.
The following six days were a continuation of the same: coffee and meals with relatives and friends, taking care of the house, making Bob’s rounds. I found myself driving his car, wearing his jacket, as if I was standing in his place, trying my best to live as two people: myself while also processing a profound loss and life changing event, and him, walking in his shoes which are too big to fill.
On day twelve, it was time to make the long journey back to my own home, to try to re renter a life that would never be the same. As I pulled from the driveway on that day, I backed into the cul de sac, shifted into drive but kept my foot on the brake as I paused and took a long look at the house I had grown up in and spent half my life with my family in.
The house stood as it always has, lights on in the front hallway and the living room but this time nobody is home. The five of us now cast into the wind like so many seeds blowing in space and time. As I eased slowly down the street, a heavy feeling came over me: that’s the end of my whole life as I have known it up until now. My life is my own now to write out and live as best I can until I myself am no longer here on earth.
And then an even heavier feeling came over me. After having spent the last twelve days acting as my dad in some ways and taking care of him, by leaving the house I felt I was abandoning him in some way, even though I know that’s not reasonable or sensible. That’s the feeling I still carry as I write these words.
Here is the nasty truth about a sudden traumatic life event: not only are we in disbelief over what occurred, who we lost, we also delude ourselves into thinking we have learned some valuable lessons. When my brother Sean passed in 2015, I took away two things: 1. make amends with those you love because you never know when it is time and you don’t want to hold onto regret if something happens, and more tactically 2. get your will and estate plans ready so those left behind don’t have to struggle with the estate logistics.
The mistake many of us make after a loss like this is forgetting so quickly what in that moment is so clear – that life is finite and there is only so much time left. We quickly see how we want to spend the rest of our lives and commit to making changes: maybe it’s chasing long-dormant dreams, making that phone call to a long lost friend or family member, making that change in address, finding that special someone.
And then time passes and that clarity of purpose vanishes with each passing day. The focus fades and life as usual marches on until it’s too late for us as well.
As a way of reminding myself, I say this here for me and for those reading: don’t wait. Do it now. Regret is too heavy a burden to carry. Don’t let the moment pass. As Kinky Friedman once wrote, find what you love in life and ride it down until it kills you. Saddle up and ride my friends.
My family and I laid my father Robert Hilligoss to rest this past weekend. I wanted to share excerpts from the eulogy I delivered in his name for those who were unable to say their goodbyes in person.
—————
I saw a quote recently that really resonated with me, from the show Ted Lasso:
“I want you to be grateful that you’re going through this sad moment with all these other folks. Because I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad and that’s being alone and being sad. Ain’t nobody in this room alone.”
And that is us. None of us in this room are alone. We are all here through the magic and the power and the glory that was Robert, Bob, Bobby Lee Hilligoss. He has brought all of us in this room together through the gift that was his life, his charm, his charisma, his laugh, his stories, his jokes, his dancing. Nobody here is alone. We all share the grief and the sense of loss of this man who Kevin and I were proud to call our father.
I played that song because I’ve learned this from my mom and brother dying. Any regrets you have about my dad, interactions, disagreements, things you wish you had done, let them go. He would want you to go on with life and be happy. It’s okay to look back from a historical point of view so you know where you came from, but don’t hold onto the past. It’s ok let it go….that’s his last gift to you. It’s OK, go and live and love and have a good time and most importantly, dance if you feel like dancing.
My dad was the hardest working person I ever knew. This is one of the reasons he couldn’t sit still for too long. Starting at a very young age he helped his dad on their farm and from there he never stopped. Some of the jobs he held throughout his life included:
Cutting broom corn in the fields around Humboldt, IL
Being a server at Burger King in Mattoon, where he invented the distinct calling of order numbers still in existence there, number 9!!!!!
Concrete pourer
Iron welder
Railroad fireman
JC Penney salesman during the summers when he taught at Divernon and Rochester
Coach
Teacher
Restaurant owner, Brown’s Chicken and The Shoe Factory
Charlie Parkers Restaurant, featured on Diners, Drive Ins
Quick N EZ stores in Springfield, cashier and The Iceman
Driver – Smart Choice Auto Sales, where he drove cars and generally made a nuisance of himself much to the delight of the gang who gave it right back to him.
Apart from all of the various jobs and careers he amassed over his productive and hardworking lifetime, my dad also was also known for breaking out with what can now only be referred to as “Common Bob-isms” which will color our memories of him forever. Some of them include:
“All hands forward aft. Stand to and man the firestep. Grab the brooms and mops and swab the decks…..It’s quitting time” I believe this is from a poem or movie but not sure. He would announce it often in class or around the house trying to be funny.
Mashed potato…bump bump bump bump……Anyone who spent any time around dad heard him exclaim this at random moments. Once when he visited us in Cortland, he decided he wanted to make real mashed potatoes for lunch. I had no potato masher so we decied to go to the store. I suggested Target but being the cheap wad he was he insisted we go to Dollar General. I dropped dad and Graham off at the front door to save him walking and went to park. Rory and I walked into the store and all I heard, from across the back corner of the room, 100 feet away was dad saying loudly, “Mashed potato, bump bump bump.”
His requirement that his coffee come in half cup increments, and only in a Styrofoam cup
My horrifying experience as a 10yo child of of having to pull off his boots, his socks and lotion his feet after work on a very frequent and unfortunate basis. Still traumatized from that one.
Hey grab my ankle and pull. After having fallen off a ladder and obliterating his ankle in 1995, he had no ankle on his right leg, doctors having fused the bones together, he would seek relief by asking me, Will at Smartchoice and any other fool willing to do it to grab his right foot and lean back proving some needed relief to the joint.
His memory was impeccable, almost eerie at times on exact dates, years, locations, who said what, how much he spent on jeans in 1957 etc. Uncle BS….
“Dad, where were you on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th, 1941?” (mind you, he was born on January 3 1942)
“I was in my mothers stomach. Mom had gone into contractions and thought she was giving birth. The doctor told her to go back home, false alarm. Mom and dad stopped at a diner on the way home and had cheeseburgers. It was 35 degrees that day with a slight breeze from North to South….”
Everyone in this room is likely to have their own Bob stories. Here are two more that define him:
He once took his dogs to the groomers, dropped them off and then went to the nearest bank to take a 3-hour nap in their lobby while he waited for the dogs to be done because he didn’t want to drive back and forth 30 minutes and spend money on gas. “Sir, can we help you with something?” “No, I am just waiting.”
2. This past summer during my birthday weekend, Dad and I took a road trip to Atlanta to visit friends. Dad stayed with Danny Proffit ,while I stayed with one of my friends who lives there and another friend who flew in to meet us. Dad invited himself to join our plans (against our will but he would not take no for answer) and before we knew it, we were spending the day at the pool with Bob.
After a few hours, he asks me to take a video of him jumping off the diving board. This man is 81 years old. He tells me he wants to do this so that someday his grandkids will see that they had a grandpa who jumped off diving boards.
Jump 1 – the color drains from my friends’ faces. Jump 2 – they send panicked looks to me that clearly say “DO SOMETHING, MAKE IT STOP”. One of them asks nearby pool patrons if anyone has a medical background just in case. She marches over to the pool manager and quietly explains that we need her to make something up and get him off this diving board “What should I say?” “I don’t care.”
So, as he’s approaching the board for his third dive, the pool manager walks up and says “Sir, is this your last dive?”
“Why?”
“People are concerned”
“WHO? Who is concerned!?!?!?!?!”
Bob lived a full life. It comforted me to come across this short list the other day. The Five Regrets of the Dying are the anecdotal accounts of palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware and summarize the most common regrets she heard expressed by those nearing death, which included:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
Living true to myself: My father never lacked for having courage and living the life he wanted for himself and those around him. He was never one to wait around waiting for others to make decisions. He always had plans for trips, conversations, people to see, calls to make, etc. He lived life to the fullest everyday, and he did it his way.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard: As indicated above, Bob was the hardest working man I ever met and never was one to sit around. Always on the move.
I wish I had expressed my feelings more: This is the only one of the 5 I think pertained to him and he wished he had expressed his love and affection more. He was not much of a hugger to us in the family, and if so it was the classic mid western side hug. He didn’t say he loved us very much but he didn’t need to. We knew by his actions and the smile on his face.
I wish I had stayed in contact with my friends more: Categorically does not apply to Robert Hilligoss. Many of his closest friends were people he knew most of his life including classmates from Mattoon High School class of 1960, Eastern Illinois University class of 1964 and kids he taught and/or coached in school 50+ years ago. He was constantly in contact with his friends and family on the phone, on Facebook, in person, class reunions etc.
I wish I had been happier: False. He got to live a second life from the age of 74-81 after having stents put in his arteries in 2016. Not everyone gets a second chance at life, but he did and he lived it to the max, filling those days, weekends, and years with laughter, good times with family and friends, and lots and lots of dancing.
He was a fairly simple man, relatively speaking. But he was a complicated man. He loved unconditionally but had a lot of conditions. He wanted everyone to think like he thought and do as he wanted but he often times wanted to do his own thing.
He would say things that often times stung and hurt, but they were his terms of endearment. “Ryan, you’re fat and need to lose weight.” That was his way of saying he loved me and wanted me to be healthy.
In 2015, our brother sean died. The very first person through the visitation line was one of Sean’s clients at the probation department. She said Sean stayed on her butt with visits, work checkups, etc and if wasn’t for him, she would not be alive today.
We don’t know the full impact we have on the lives of others. We can either be a force of positive change in the lives of those around us, or we can be a force of negativity. Be careful with how you treat others.
Dad impacted the lives of countless students, athletes, employees, co workers and friends and family.
I’d like to share a note I got this week from Justin McQuality that illustrates this exact point:
”….Very sorry to hear of the loss of your father. He was a hugely important person in my life. He helped straighten me out in middle school and high school when I needed it. Literally drove me from school for more than a year of my life to help out me and my parents while they were going through a divorce. Just seemed like he always knew the right thing to say to make me believe in myself, and believe in my abilities.
I honestly don’t know if I would have made it where I am today without his support and I certainly wouldn’t be a coach without his support. Thank you to his family for sharing him with us all these years. As a coach, I know how all too well how difficult than can be sometimes. I will always remember him and his influence will live on through the years through the athletes I now coach because of him.”
One of the many friends I’ve made through my community of fellow Bruce Springsteen fans, Sarah Bee, shared this moving and fitting sentiment about Bob:
“Forces of nature don’t die. Parts wear out, bodies get retired, floating forever in echoes of laughter bouncing off wooden gym floors and metal rafters, like the hard earned felt banners decades of kids coached brought home. Every buzzer reminds us that as each moment ends, the next begins.”
Whitman Leaves of Grass, Songs of Myself verse 52
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles
You will hardly know what I am or what I mean but I shall bring good health you nonetheless
And filter and fiber your blood
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged
Missing me one place, search another
I stop somewhere waiting for you
I found this post Dad wrote on FB on July 19, 2020:
“I was having a short discussion of the meaning of life. They said there is none, they may be right, but there is purpose. We are here to help each other along the way, I don’t believe that we are swimming against the tides in a sea of despair. We are to give aid and comfort to our families. And to help friends and strangers as well. It is a purpose to find joy in our lives. It is not my objective to find misery in my existence. If our lives are in a personal cesspool who is responsible. Life is not complicated, it is simple. Enjoy it.”
“I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.” Invictus by William Ernes Henly
In our family, whether by blood, friendship or simple proximity, we grab you in and make you a part of it whether you want to or like it at all. We might not always get along and we have our moments of disagreement, but in the end, we have each other’s backs all day and all night. We love you, whether you want to be loved or not.
In some cultures, they believe you die three times: when you take your last breath, when your remains are handled, and when your name is spoken for the last time. May the name of Robert Lee Hilligoss live on for a long, long time through his stories, memories of his dancing, and through the smiles he put on our faces.
After John Lennon passed away, Paul McCartney went to the island of Monserrat to get away and record some music he was working on. He called his old friend Carl Perkins to come down and play guitar on a song. Carl spent a few days and the night before he was set to leave, a warm feeling came over him and he wrote a song called My Old Friend. He played the song for Paul, Paul abruptly stood up crying and ran from the room. Carl was perplexed at what had happened. Linda McCartney gave carl a hug and told Carl that the last words John said to Paul were, won’t you think of me every now and then my old friend. Sometimes there are forces in the universe we can’t see but can feel the push and pull of as we go about our daily lives.
For the last few years, every time we did anything, dad would say, “This could be the last time: we get a cup of coffee, this could be the last time I go dancing, this could be the last time I go to the family reunion. You never know when it will be your last time. Be good to each other, be good to yourselves. Enjoy every sandwich. Buy the good wine. Buy the concert tickets. Take that trip you’ve had on your list. Dance if you feel like it. And every once in a while, think about our old friend.
Earth received an honored guest, Robert Lee Hilligoss is laid to rest.
“Happiness is a journey, not a destination. for a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. but there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. at last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. this perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. happiness is the way. so treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one.”- Souza
By Ryan Hilligoss, November 4, 2023
The young family moved into their newly purchased home in June of 2006. A husband, wife, 2-year old boy and 2-month old baby girl. The house was built in 2002 but still seemed brand new on that day, at least in his mind. A small front yard, two-car garage, large fenced-in back yard for the two-year old and the soon-to come dogs to run around. Three bedrooms, a family room, a living room and large open kitchen with cozy dining area.
Furniture in the nearby rental van would shortly fill the rooms and art would be hung on the walls. The couch still inside the van would soon support the 2 month-old as she grew into a walker, holding on to the edges as she learned her way.
The house changed with the years. New patio pavers were added in the back, new concrete steps were replaced on the front and new landscaping stones curved around the flower bed. In the blink of an eye, the kids were 10 and 8. Endless whiffle ball home runs over the back fence for the boy and countless bubbles blown through a plastic straw for the girl, who laughed wildly as she spun around, popping bubbles with her small hands.
As the kids got older still, the husband and wife grew apart. The death of two parents, medical issues, long-distance support requiring frequent, long drives home to help care for a third parent all placed undue stress on everyone involved. This is how life runs good people who are simply trying their best to get through each day through a meat grinder, mashing the blood and bone down to fundamental atoms of existence, until they’re unrecognizable as their former selves.
Soon divorce became inevitable. The wife didn’t want the house. To keep a semblance of consistency for the kids in the only house they knew, the husband stayed behind. New paint on the walls, new carpet to replace the dog-stained old one, new kitchen table to start new memories over family meals.
Time moved on. The kids now shared two homes, and as they got older and began to develop interests and friendships, they spent less and less time at the house. It grew heavy with memories, and to the husband, it seemed as though ghosts filled the hallways and backyard. But he stayed, out of habit, out of what he knew and what seemed familiar, right or wrong, mostly wrong.
And now the house is home to father and son while mother and daughter live a short few miles away by car, but a galaxy away in other respects. The husband – he still thinks of himself as ‘the husband’ – remains alone out of self preservation, not wanting to take a chance, his heart locked up tight behind a friendly smile, glasses and an ever-present baseball hat.
Passing the time comes easily when working two jobs. What little downtime exists he spends listening to music, watching movies and reading books. There are so many books. The house groans with an ever-increasing number of possessions, but the man remains alone.
On reflection, it’s true that he came by it honestly in life, his mom forever collecting antiques, clothes and household goods until every room in his childhood home was bursting, slowly becoming a veritable museum of curiosities. But at this age, that’s no excuse for continuing to make poor decisions.
Wasted money and time trying to fill a void that possessions can’t fill
The weight of disappointment, regret and lost time is heavy, but as he has grown to learn from a bitter divorce, as well as the deaths of his mother, brother and former in-laws, life is too short even on its longest days. It’s too short to spend it wasting those remaining days holding on to the past, afraid of the future.
Filling rooms in an empty house with material goods doesn’t heal your soul. The man is finally learning life is much more than buying yet another book, more coffee mugs, one more souvenir t-shirt. He slowly..and then all at once, comes to an important realization. It’s time to declutter the house of unneeded possessions. Time, too, to declutter his heart and mind of a past that can never be undone.
It’s time to start anew, make better decisions, find the sunshine in life and let it shine on his face. Open his heart to the beauty of possibility. A house is not a home if there is no one to share it with, no one to care for. A house is not a home if there is no laughter and smiles and dreams to be made. A house is not a home without life and love.
Maybe it’s time to let the house go for a new family to make their own memories. It’s time for this man to build a home once again. May you all find the sunshine, find the soul shine, find the one who can help you heal the scars and help you learn to love again. It’s time to let the old ways die, to learn from the past and look to the future and to the possibilities that lie ahead.
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Like many working Americans, I have not set foot in my workplace since March of 2020. As Covid became a pandemic, I left work one day for the long drive home, in the cool spring air, not realizing just how long of a journey it would be. This past week, along with a lot of other working Americans who have recently been called back into a formal work setting, I returned not knowing what to expect.
The same granite edifice was there, the same marble tile on the lobby floor, lots of glass. The concrete stairs I have walked a thousand times seemed even more dreary than before. Down a long carpeted hallway into a side entrance I went, opening the door with a swipe of the ever necessary security card. I stepped through the threshold into the same setup as when I left. Same cubicles, same chairs, same desks, same gray carpet, same view of the nearby highways out the north windows.
It struck me as though I’d walked through a time warp back to spring 2020, but yet it was not the same, it never will or could be the same. A great sadness descended on me as it struck me how much I – we, all as Americans and global citizens – have lost in the last few years. A sapling of loss bloomed inside my heart, its roots having been growing for some time, and sprung to life with the sunshine streaming through the floor to ceiling windows a few feet from me.
The idea of loss, of losing someone, has been ever present in my mind for the last few weeks. My mother Madonna Sue Barr Hilligoss passed away August 11, 2017. Six years later I think I am just now fully coming to terms with the fact my mom, the one I knew as a kid and young man, not the one suffering health issues in her last years, is truly gone. My mom is gone. She’s not coming back. That gives me pause and stops me cold in my tracks at moments.
My middle brother Sean passed away two years earlier, on September 22, 2015 at the age of 42. I pause to remember him, offering a tribute and remembrance. Maybe as a way to keep him alive in my memory but also to let others know that such a person existed, to bear witness to him being a very real person who lived and loved – and was loved – but who is no longer present on earth.
Further from my personal experience, the anniversary of the last Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert just passed, on September 25. The band last played together in 2017 at the Hollywood Bowl. The last show of the tour, a grueling 40 stop tour that had him playing on a broken hip. Unknown to anyone outside of the organization, he had been diagnosed shortly before the tour started. Being a true musician and utmost professional, not wanting to disappoint the fans, and knowing the band and crew counted on the shows to make a living, Tom toughed it out with the help of opioids which was the eventual cause of his death.
The last song Tom Petty played was American Girl, one he had sung thousands of times, but for some of those fans it was the first and last time they would hear it live. As Tom walked off stage that night, the crowd held the ringing of the last notes in their ears. And Tom had the roar of the crowd in his ears, putting a big smile on his bearded face.
During the pandemic, we collectively lost an extraordinary amount not only in the lives lost, but the loss of basic human decency at times, seeing truly ugly human behavior of the likes unknown to me until now. We saw friends and family ripped apart over differences in politics and differences of opinion on how things were handled during that time. Apparently a deep sense of general anger and atavistic rage bubbled under the surface waiting for the right moment to erupt, splitting our very core. In my 49 years, I have never been as despondent or down about our nation in general, not because of the politics, but just the pure meanness and glee some people have taken poking the bear to get some satisfaction they desperately lack elsewhere.
The sense of loss has been with me for a long time. Most of us live our lives along a general progression: being part of a family, a circle of friends, work acquaintances, etc and then as we get older, one by one, you start peeling back those layers, losing critical mass with each piece that we lose along the way. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, friends and loved ones.
Sometimes, the loss isn’t death in the physical sense of a human being, but a relationship you struggled to build over years, only to see it crumble and vanish just like the child’s sandcastle at the shore, ebbing away in the evening tide as the sunlight dances a few more times across the water. It leaves you shaken and wobbly, teetering from side to side with the wind, waiting for the next blow to come at any moment. Without a firm reinforcement of new friends and loved ones, it leaves one in a precarious environment. Can you rebuild and try again or are you left in a state of arrested development as a human being, simply biding your time as one day slides into the next.
The grief comes and goes, sometimes at obvious times such as the anniversary of a passing, or at the oddest times: When you are listening to a song or an artist sing out their soul and a lyric or emotion hits you, knocking you sideways. During a conversation, one topic leads to another and soon, you are standing in the same spot as when you got the phone call that day, telling you the world you knew was over.
The term loss has always bothered me, seeming disingenuous at best. Loss has many meanings obviously. A team can lose a game. You can lose your senses for brief moments of time, hopefully returning soon enough. You can lose your favorite mug while stumbling through the kitchen, dropping the cup to the floor, shattering in a thousand pieces as the coffee quickly spreads across the tile floor.
But to lose someone? Where did they go, will they come back, and will they be the same as before? No, when you lose someone, they’re gone: irreplaceable. I know it’s supposed to soften the blow and take the edge of the word death, but sometimes I wish people would just say, “I’m sorry your mom died”, because then we know she’s not hiding around the corner waiting to surprise me one day. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. If we said that, we’d at least be real for a moment.
When I walked into my office this week, the sadness descended on me and I was reminded of a co-worker I had known for 20 years. He and I weren’t close friends, hanging out on weekends and spending time on the holidays, but we saw each other and talked almost everyday for years. Two years ago after having beaten pancreatic cancer, he went to sleep one day and didn’t wake up.
Unknown to most of us, he had also developed prostate cancer, and because of his terrible experience with chemo on the prior cancer, he had chosen to not seek treatment. Not having been in the same building had made time move slowly, yet quickly, but walking through that door, looking at his old desk space, I knew he was gone, not lost.
In 2015, Lou Reed was posthumously inducted into the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with the Velvet Underground and his solo work. His partner and love of his life, Laurie Anderson accepted the award on his behalf. During her speech, she said people die three deaths: once when your heart stops beating, secondly when your remains are handled and lastly when your name is spoken for the last time as the years pass and those that knew you slip away and you’re nothing but a memory or a headstone at a cemetery. Laurie implored the crowd to say his name and the audience responded with a loud and resounding, “Looooooouuuuuuuu.”
Most of us are not lucky or talented enough to be enshrined in a museum, honored for our gift and artistry and contributions to the greater world. Most of us live out lives of quiet dignity and grace, building a life and maybe planting a small garden where your favorite plants grow, some have children they raise and leave behind hoping you did your best as a parent, some have life partners and spouses they build an entire universe with, some filled with light and magic, some not so much, but at least you made the effort to the best of your abilities.
At the end of the day, all of us carry the ghosts of our loved ones with us, we carry the burdens we built of our own volition, we carry the scars of the past, we carry our own demons. None of us knows the battles being fought by those around us or those that pass us on the street. As Robin Williams said, “Be kind. Always.” We’ve all suffered losses, but with a little sunlight, some time and love, maybe we can find our way back home again.
Peace and love. Thanks for reading if you’ve gotten this far.
In the last several years, the holidays have been a struggle for me. I am not alone. My brother Sean passed away at the age of forty four in 2015 from diabetic ketoacidosis after having lived with juvenile diabetes since the age of three. My mother Donna Barr Hilligoss passed in 2017 after struggling with Parkinson’s and other complications. During that time, I also went through a divorce and the ensuing reduction in time with my two kids. As the rolled around the first few years, I put on a good face and kept it as cheery as possible for the kids sake and in my own self defense. This included going big on outdoor Christmas lights and decorations, fully decorated tree, trips to light shows in the Chicago area and other fun activities. Each passing year has gotten progressively harder. And then this year: I ran out of Christmas spirit. No tree, minimal decorations inside and outside the house, and no light shows. With each year, the Christmas glow dimmed a little more the further I got from the spirits of those I love and echoes of what used to be.
And then, as if from a Hallmark movie script, I was graced with three Christmas miracles.
Hilligoss Family Christmas 2016
The Ghost of Christmas Past
For several years, two of my close work friends and I have enjoyed a nice steak dinner out together around the holidays at Wildfire Grill. Having a big dinner out is not a frequent event and since Covid, I don’t see coworkers in person at all. This year we met about a week prior to Christmas on a cold Chicago evening. We were seated, having a good time catching up and having a few drinks. Behind us sat three nice older black ladies who seemed to be enjoying our “spirited” conversation. With my back turned to them, I could hear them getting up to leave the restaurant. And then I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders as one of them leaned close to my ear and sang a few bars of Silent Night. Once she was done singing, she rubbed my back a little and jokingly asked, “You like that don’t you?” Yes, Yes I did. Thank you kindly nice lady. It was as if my mom’s spirit was visiting me, telling me everything is OK and she’s here watching over all of us.
Faith Restored
The last few years have left all of us battered and bruised to varying degrees due to Covid, political events and an overwhelming sense of loss. I’ve never been more pessimistic about the country, many of our fellow citizens and humanity in general. I’ve seen levels of ugliness, mean spiritedness and outright hate I’ve never witnessed in my lifetime. Countless times, I’ve seen people seem to take joy in getting a rise out of others and going out of their way to insult others for the sake of feeling better about themselves. Like many others, I’ve withdrawn into a narrow pattern of habits, people I am willing to be around and spend time with, and routines. I’ve stopped watching the news at all on any platforms, only keeping up to date with the Chicago Tribune newspaper I still receive at home. (Yes, you read that right. I still get a physical newspaper delivered to me at home. I know I know, but you’ll have to rip the newspaper from my cold, dead, newsprint stained hands.) It’s changed the way I look at, regard and interact with people in public and privately.
During this same time, I’ve not been in a good financial position for many reasons. To dig myself out of a self made whole, I’ve worked youth sport games as an official, mostly baseball but some softball, volleyball and basketball. I love baseball. I played it as a kid, coached my son, and watch it all the time as an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan. So I enjoy being out there and watching the kids compete, everything from 8U travel to in house and club ball to varsity high school and everything in between. I would do it even if I didn’t need the money but I wouldn’t do it nearly as much. I spend many grueling days handling anywhere from 4-6 games in a day, often in good weather but sometimes in the cold, heat and rain. A day handling anything over4 games is a stretch for me physically and mentally. But I work hard, have gotten good at it and am paid for my time. Because at this point that’s what it is, I am trading my time for more income.
This season, I started handling basketball games at a local private school, 6th grade boys and girls, $40 at a time paid in check. I fell into a habit of putting the checks along with my loose cash in a plain white envelope I keep with my monthly bills. In the week between Christmas and New Years, I went to find the envelope only to find it missing. Frantically I searched everywhere around the house, among all my papers, even going through the trash can and recycling bin thinking I had misplaced it or mistakenly thrown it away. It was nowhere to be found and I had a sickening feeling in my stomach after realizing I had inadvertently put in it with a batch of bills that needed to be mailed out for payment. I ran out to the mailbox in my house slippers with the hope it was still in there or that my post lady had seen it and left it behind since there was no address or stamp on the outside. I grabbed the cold lid, opened it only to see an empty, dark space. In desperation I called the local post office and was told they would keep an eye out but what might happen is when it got to the main sorting office, eventually someone would look inside to see what was in there and maybe see the name and mailing address of the check issuer and mail the envelope back. Being the cynic I am, I thought, “Bullshit. With $120 in cash and another $120 in checks inside, maybe I’ll get the checks back eventually but I’ll never see that cash.” I had just traded 6 ours of my life for $240 dollars by officiating only to casually throw it away.
Two weeks later, I walk into the gymnasium to handle another game. The nice lady who writes me a check each game and hands it to me before the games starts walks up with a check in her hand as I sit on the sideline getting my court shoes on and whistle hung around my neck. I smile and say thank you as usual and she says, “Thanks for coming and doing the game.” She paused, reached into her purse and tells me something funny happened today. She received a blank envelope today along with the rest of the school’s mail. There in her hand is my envelope. I open it and there sits $120 in cash and $120 in checks just like it was weeks prior. I give her a hug and tell her she has no idea how happy she has made me. After all this time of only seeing the dark side of people, my faith in humanity was restored a few degrees.
Silent Night
One common and unexpected consequence of Covid has been the impact on teenagers. between virtual learning, being cutoff from friends and their normal social circle and seeing bad news come crashing down on a minute by minute, hourly, never ending basis through social media. Dark thoughts and times have crept into their minds. The phenomena impacted my son Graham who had always been a good student and well balanced, grounded human being. As the months passed, it’s effects had a visual impact through weight loss and other indicators. At a certain point in time, he decided he wanted to just stay at his mom’s house instead of splitting the time half and half as we had done for a long time. It was hard for me because I had gone to seeing him everyday and being buddies to only seeing him half the time after our divorce and then not all for a while.
Within the last year or so, our relationship has slowly gotten back on track. He’s a freshman at our local community college, takes his studies seriously and has a solid plan for his studies and career path. He has a beautiful, smart and caring girlfriend who has helped him along the way, finding a path to a sunnier place. Most days, the three of us work out at the same gym around the same time. They do they’re thing and I do mine but our paths intermingle throughout.
It’s a few weeks after Christmas. I’ve just gotten done working out and ordered Jimmy John’s sandwiches for all of us. While they continue to work out, I decide to go get the sandwiches, bring them theirs and then head home. I exit the gym door into a cold, dark northern Illinois evening. There is some snow and ice on the ground and salt pellets everywhere scrunching under my feet as I trudge my way a short distance away. The nearby church has a carillon that plays music on the hour, every hour. As I round the corner to return to the gym with dinner, I stop cold in my tracks. It’s 6:00 and the music has started on the church bells. It’s a familiar melody, but I can’t quite place it. It seems out of place for the date. Then it dawns on me as if I’m having an out of mind experience: it’s Silent Night being played mid January. Despite the chill in the air, I am filled with an unexpected warmth from within. My son is 200 yards away in a warm, safe gym, smiling, talking with his lady friend and doing what brings him a little peace each day.
I let out a breath which I see dissipate like a ghost in the the glow of nearby streetlights. I gather myself, and start walking again into the night, feet firmly on the ground, holding onto the thought that Christmas isn’t any one day of the year. It’s a gift which comes to us that fills us with kindness, grace and love whenever, wherever we stumble across life’s beautiful moments. All is calm, all is bright. Cheers my friends.
(Ryan will also be hosting on E Street Radio Sirius/XM Channel 20 a special on Springsteen and Mellencamp. Airing times as follows: Friday 1/21 8:00am EST
Saturday 1/22 6:00pm EST, Sunday 1/23 3:00pm EST, Tuesday 1/25 4:00pm EST, Wednesday 1/26 12:00pm EST)
After more than 50 years in their recording careers, the two long time contemporaries Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp are finally joining forces. Mellencamps’s 25th studio album Strictly A One-Eyed Jack will be released January 21. The album features collaborations with his new big brother Bruce Springsteen on three of the album’s twelve tracks. For a guy who proclaims he has done things his own way all his life and paid an awfully high price, Mellencamp has the career, stories, and scars to prove it. While the careers of Mellencamp and Springsteen have run parallel over the last 50 years, they occasionally crossed paths but never made a connection until recently. They are now quickly making up for lost time including regular phone calls, visiting each other’s homes and more importantly, collaborating on stage and in studio.
“Bruce is my big brother now”
In September of 2021, Mellencamp called into Sirius/XM E Street Radio weekly call in show E Street Nation and talked with hosts Jim Rotolo and Dave Marsh about working with Springsteen, his long career and being lost somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.
Jim Rotolo: So how did Bruce get involved?
John: “I don’t recall how it really happened. I would consider Bruce now to be one of my better friends in the music business. Bruce and I talk quite a bit. He and I relate to each other because we’ve had similar experiences of growing up in a small town, starting out as being band leaders. We played together a few years ago. They asked me to play at Sting’s Rainforest thing and I said no. I didn’t want to go to NY and I said no. And then Bruce called me up and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come and sing with me?’ And I thought well if Bruce is calling then I should go do it. For guys like me, Bruce put down a big footprint, and he said, here now fill it. You know I’m just a couple years younger than him, but he inspired us to work a little bit harder than we normally would. Because we all know that musicians are lazy bums.
“I told Bruce this. Back in the 80s I was playing down in Lagunas Beach and Bruce came on stage and played with me way back then. (Editor’s note: According to Brucebase.wiki. On May 26, 1988, Mellencamp performed at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in Irvine, Ca which is near Laguna Beach. Springsteen joined Mellencamp on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone.) I’ve played with a lot of people and I always thought the one thing I had going for me was on stage, that I had a certain charisma on stage and that is how we got over, because I wasn’t afraid to make a fool of myself. So Bruce came on stage, and he was the only guy, I can remember this, he’s the only guy I sang with, and I’ve played with a lot of people, that I could feel his presence next to mine. I always felt like whoever I was singing with that I was overshadowing them because of my presence. But when Springsteen came on stage it was like, Jesus Christ, this guy has got some energy. But we didn’t talk or connect.
“So 30 years later when we played at the rainforest thing, Bruce and I connected. We just started talking and next thing you know we are talking all the time. And now he’s like my big brother now. I talk to him about everything and anything. It’s very fortunate that people our age can make a connection with someone else who has similar background and we have more to talk about than just meeting a fan or someone you grew up with. You know, when you grow up with somebody you have a long time to talk to them. I think both Bruce and I both feel like we don’t have that long a time to talk. Let’s try to get to know each other the best we can as quickly as possible. I think Bruce said it in his play, we only have so many empty pages left. And you want to fill those pages with people that you love and people that you care about. You don’t have time to play any fucking games, no games.”
Small Town/My Hometown
John Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Indiana, a small town south of Indianapolis, very similar in size, community and background to Freehold, NJ. Mellencamp was born with spina bifida. Doctors told his parents Richard and Marilyn that he might not live very long, but a new operation procedure was tested and proved to save his life. He seems to have lived his whole life with a chip on his shoulder, feeling a need to prove to the world that his living had meaning and consequence. In both of their hometowns, Mellencamp and Springsteen and their families were looked down upon by those around them for being down the social/economic ladder. Both had serious issues and growing pains with their fathers. Douglas Springsteen famously had a barber come in and cut young Bruce’s hair while he was laid up in bed after a motorcycle accident. After one particularly nasty argument, Richard Mellencamp cut Mellencamp’s long and unruly hair. The next day Mellencamp walked around the neighborhood with a handwritten placard around his neck that said, “I am the product of my father.”
Springsteen and Mellencamp both fought hard during their early years to get out of the hometowns they thought were holding them back only to return later and be welcomed as local heroes. For years, Mellencamp has lived in Bloomington, In, 50 miles from Seymour and has his recording studio Belmont Mall close by. Springsteen lives a short car ride away from Freehold. In a recent interview, Mellencamp said, “The reason I stayed in Indiana was because all of my friends were here,” Mellencamp says. “When I was younger, people said, ‘You’ve got to move to New York. You’ve got to be seen.’ Even at 22, I said, ‘I’m not doing that. I’m not going to go to some club. This isn’t about being seen with a certain bunch of people. It’s about learning to write songs and how to make a decent record.”
Springsteen and Mellencamp started playing music at a young age, working their way into and through a series of bands, some of them integrated which didn’t always go down well with the locals. Mellencamp’s first band Crepe Soul was him as lead vocalist and front man backed by six black instrumentlaists. They played dance halls and bars, playing cover songs to earn money to spend on records and listening to the same artists and songs ranging from Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, James Brown, Motown, Stax and Elvis among many others. Mellencamp and Springsteen both struggled in school due in part to Mellencamp’s diagnosed dyslexia and Springsteen just not feeling like he fit into school’s basic structure. Both attended community college, Vincennes and Oceanside respectively, for a short time before deciding to pursue their musical dreams and passion.
Some Manager’s Mister
In 1975-1976,Mellencamp walked the streets of New York City and had tried every recording company and management company he could find in a phone book. In 1976, Mellencamp’s first management contract was signed quickly in an office with Tony Defries’ MainMan management company without reading it himself or having anyone else look it over. MainMan handled management for David Bowie and Lou Reed, both of whom were huge influences on Mellencamp. “I would have signed the bottom of a shoe at the time.” Bruce famously signed his first contract on the hood of a car without reading it or seeking legal advice. Both gave their managers control over their publishing. In spring of 1977, Springsteen emerged from his legal battle with Mike Appel. While, in November 1977, Mellencamp signed a deal with Englishman Billy Gaff, president of Riva Records and manager of Rod Stewart. John signed a deal for $35,000 for the publishing rights to his songs. Gaff was then Mellencamp’s manager, agent, record company president and publisher.
According to Paul Rees’ recently released biography Mellencamp, John said, “Back when I signed my record deal, the jobs were already taken. Springsteen had already been on the covers of Time and Newsweek, both in the same week. There was already Dylan, and Tom Petty, Neil Young, Neil Diamond and Billy Joel. The singer-songwriter slots were pretty well taken up. Then there were a lot of guys trying to do the same thing I was, right around the same time. Really good songwriters like Steve Forbert, John Prine. Nobody wrote better songs than John Prine. I was still learning to write songs. Having my name changed to Johnny Cougar was just another hurdle. Pretty much I was going to have to create my own world.”
While Springsteen had already released three albums by then, Mellencamp’s first record was released October 1, 1976 entitled Chestnut Street Incident. It can’t be a coincidence that John picked the title from the main street in his hometown of Seymour without it also being a nod to Greetings From Asbury Park and Incident on 57th Street. In 1977, Mellencamp recorded Kid Inside which wouldn’t be released until 1983 and included these lyrics, “It’s hard to justify my position/When everything I’m sayin’ can be said better by Mr. Springsteen.”
While Springsteen was type cast as one of the “New Dylans” and John Hammond wanted his first record to be one that showcased his singer-songwriter abilities, Springsteen demanded to use a band and record a rock and roll album. For Mellencamp, the studio wanted to use Jimmy Iovine as the producer for American Fool. Iovine was hot off working with Springsteen, Tom Petty and Patti Smith, but John dug in his heels and said no until the studio relented, letting him pick his own producer. That would be only the first of many battles Mellencamp would fight with his various record labels during his career.
Having grown up in Illinois, next door to Mellencamp’s home state of Indiana, Mellencamp’s music is to us in the Midwest what Springsteen’s music is to the east coast: an integral part of our lives sung in a voice and style we can relate to and understand. Mellencamp sometimes bristles at being described as being from the “heartland” because as he says, Indiana is politically a solid red state. But his sound and style are organically from where he comes and the sounds he heard growing up by often using accordion, mandolin, dobro, and fiddle, but the core of both of their sounds is the same, rhythm section, piano, and keyboards.
Mellencamp and Springsteen, Rainforest Benefit, NYC December 2019
Pink Houses In The USA
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and both Springsteen and Mellencamp witnessed and reported in on the economic and political fallout. Pink Houses and Born In The USA, arguably one of their signature songs, both written and recorded around the same time, and completely misunderstood by a lot of listeners who took them as jingoistic, flag waving anthems when actually they were both studies of the darker sides of America.
On Born In The USA, Springsteen’s rage against the treatment of Vietnam Vets comes through in the lyrics: “Come back home to the refinery/Hiring man says, ‘Son if it was up to me’/Went down to see my VA man/He said, ‘Son, don’t you understand’. Just like Woody Guthrie who said, “You can only write what you see,” to explain how he came up with This Land is Your Land, one day Mellencamp was driving through Indiana when he spied an old house alongside the interstate, painted pink with a black man standing on the front porch. He went home and wrote Pink Houses in a flurry. The lyrics undercut the hooks and anthemic recording of the song with: “There’s a black man with a black cat/Living in a black neighborhood/ You know he thinks he’s got it so good.” In the second verse, autobiographical, he writes, “There’s a young man in a T shirt, listening to a rockn’ and rolln’ station/He’s got his greasy hair, greasy smile/Cause they told me when I was younger/Said boy you’re gonna be president/But just like everything else those old crazy dreams/Kinda came and went.” In just a few lines, Mellencamp lays out the lives of common Americans “paying for the thrills with bills and pills that kill” and shows the American Dream has passed by the majority of the people working hard, trying their best to make a good, meaningful life.
In 2009, Mellencamp was asked to perform at Springsteen’s Kennedy Center Honor along with Sting, Eddie Vedder, Melissa Ethridge and Ben Harper. Along with his lead guitarist Andy York and the house band, Mellencamp appeared first and performed Born In The USA. The arrangement and performance were brilliant in encapsulating both versions that Springsteen has performed, starting with an acoustic version of the first verse and then breaking into a house burning rock version for the rest of the song, ending again with an acapella outro. The rage, depression, humiliation, honesty and devastation of the character was on full display.
In Mellencamp, he says of the two songs, “A record had to sound a certain way to get on the radio at that time. It had to have hook lines. To get the general public to listen to a song, you had to cover it up, pretty much wrap it in a turd. Of course Pink Houses was really not rah rah America, but if you weren’t listening too closely, one might think it was.
It was the same thing as Springsteen did with Born In The USA. I played Born In The USA the night Bruce got the Kennedy Center Honor in 2009. I did it on acoustic guitar. It’s a beautiful fucking song. Get down to what Bruce is saying and it’s fucking fantastic. It’s art. It’s literature. I mean it’s up there with fucking Steinbeck.”
Tunnel of Love/Big Daddy
Born In The USA, Springsteen’s biggest selling album of his career released in 1984 followed by a massive tour which propelled him into the music stratosphere. Mellencamp released Scarecrow, second biggest selling album of his career in 1985 and Lonesome Jubilee in 1987, followed by the biggest tours of his career. Both of their albums and tours launched them into superstardom only to both peak and run into a brick wall emotionally, mentally, physically, etc after running themselves ragged. Both followed up their careers with introspective albums and change of direction with Tunnel of Love for Springsteen in 1987 and Big Daddy for Mellencamp in 1989. Springsteen explored adult themes of marriage and building an adult identity. Mellencamp, who became a father before he graduated from high school, was on his second marriage and becoming father to more children, struggled with the same topics and wounds as Springsteen with songs like Void In My Heart, Big Daddy of Them All and Mansions In Heaven.
In Pop Singer, Mellencamp vented some anger while burning some bridges and public image with these lyrics, “Never wanted to be no pop singer/ never wanted to write no pop songs/Never had no weird hair to get my songs over/ Never wanted to hang out after the show/Never wanted to have a manager over for dinner/Never wanted to hang out after the show”. In 1995, Springsteen released The Ghost of Tom Joad which contained his kiss-off song to fans and critics who didn’t appreciate his best efforts at making music without the E Street Band, My Best Was Never Good Enough which contained these lyrics: “Stupid is as stupid does and all the rest of that shit/Come on pretty baby, call my bluff/but for you my best was never good enough.”
In 1994 at the age of 42, Mellencamp suffered a major heart attack due to genetics, high cholesterol, constant coffee intake and years of smoking. When told by doctors to stop with some of his addictions, he replied, “A heart attack isn’t a good enough reason to quit.” Experiencing a life changing event made Mellencamp take account of his life and career which set him on a path that would ultimately lead him years later to where he wanted to be from day one: making music and records he wanted to make without worrying about studio executives’ directives or pleasing anyone else.
Crossroads
On first glance, the relationship between the two artists seems distant, but there have been numerous times when the two have rubbed shoulders in various ways.
A Very Special Christmas album. Mellencamp with his cover of I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Clause and Springsteen’s cover of Merry Christmas Baby
RR HOF members, Springsteen 1999, Mellencamp 2008
Both have incredible recorded covers of Bob Dylan with Springsteen’s Chimes of Freedom featured on the EP off the same name released in 1988 and Mellencamp’s version of Farewell Angelina released on Rough Harvest in 1999.
Both won the John Steinbeck award, Springsteen in inaugural 1996 event and Mellencamp in 2012. The award is given to artists who capture “Steinbeck’s empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes”.
Both won Woody Guthrie award, John in 2018 and Bruce in 2021.
Both performed at Pete Seeger 90th Birthday celebration held at MSG, NYC
We Are One Inaugural 2009, Bruce played The Rising and with Pete Seeger on This Land Is Your Land. Mellencamp performed Pink Houses along with his guitarist Any York. After the event, Mellencamp left town quickly. According to sources, Springsteen saw York backstage and said, “That was great. Tell John Pink Houses still stands up after all these years.”
2015 Musicares salute to Bob Dylan. Mellencamp performed Highway 61 while Springsteen performed Knocking On Heaven’s Door along with Tom Morello
1988, both played on Folkways: A Vision Shared- A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Mellencamp with Do Re Mi and Springsteen with I Ain’t Got No Home and Vigilante Man
Crystal Talefrino, sang backup and percussion with John starting on Scarecrow Tour through the recording of Big Daddy in 1989. She worked with Bruce on Human Touch/Lucky Town Tour.
John Hammond saw Bruce as a singer songwriter like Dylan and John was seen as the next Neil Diamond which was laughable. A kid from the farm fields of Indiana was being compared to a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who was an established Brill Building writer. None of the comparisons were fair to any of the artists involved and typifies the uphill battles both artists fought with their labels and managers to be the artists they envisioned for themselves.
TCM work. In 2019, Springsteen teamed with Ben Mankiewicz to talk about and introduce two of his favorite movies, The Searchers and A Face In The Crowd. Earlier this year, Mellencamp teamed with TCM to reflect on the role of American small towns in cinema. In September, he served as a guest programmer and picked the following movies: Tortilla Flat, The Misfits, On The Waterfront, The Fugitive Kind, East of Eden and Cool Hand Luke. Paul Newman’s character epitomizes the way John has lived his entire life: a rebel who does things his own way and has paid an awful high price. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcwpW-VBEY
Both look for other artistic outlets while also continuing to make music. Mellencamp has been painting for decades now, spending countless hours in his art studio. Springsteen has collaborated with Thom Zimny to make some incredible documentaries for Darkness, The River and Born To Run as well as Western Stars and written a stunning autobiography.
As band leaders and front men, both learned from masters. Mellencamp learned his stage craft from watching Ray Davies lead the Kinks while touring with them in his early career. Springsteen has said he watched Sam Moore work at a club in Fort Dix, NJ to learn how to work a crowd with call and response and charisma, how to build up the tension in the crowd and then bring it back down and built it up again over and over.
Both had similar recoding styles in their early stages of their careers with often having fragments of melodies and lyrics, running them by the band members and then making up the parts and finishing touches along the way with contributions from each of the band members.
Both avoided drugs and alcohol as a way to stay in control of themselves, those around them and the pursuit of their art.
Both were earlier in their careers demanding perfectionists in the studio, of themselves and of the band members
Wasted Days/Simply A One-Eyed Jack
During the interview with E Street Radio, Dave Marsh asked Mellencamp about the upcoming album and its structure.
“They’re all original songs. The record was started before the pandemic. We were about halfway done with it. So that year gave me an opportunity to walk away from the project and not think about it and come back and say, this is what we need to do. At this point in time, I try to find one line of honesty to get me started in the song and no matter how bleak or how happy the song is or turns out…I let the song write itself. I don’t try to control the songs anymore. When I was a kid, I tried to control it. I can’t say that, I want to say this. I don’t do that anymore and I haven’t done it for years. The songs are just sent to me. I sometimes have a hard time writing them down and recording them on my cassette player quick enough. I don’t sit down and say, Oh I want to write about this, that doesn’t happen anymore. The songs are just sent to me. I’m just a conduit. I have to listen to the songs and think, what is this song about. Because there’s no pretense. That’s just the way it worked out for me.
When asked what it was like to collaborate with Springsteen and Zimny, Mellencamp said, “This is going to sound awful but, I was always in charge. But with Bruce, I have respect for Bruce. There’s a couple guys I had admiration for that was Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. That is pretty much it, the rest I pretty much didn’t give a shit about. I didn’t care a lot about bands that were popular. I never wanted to be part of anything. I never wanted to be part of the punk movement. I just wanted to be me. I took me a while to find my feet. What was different about working with Bruce was I was working on my backfoot. I’m not a good collaborator. It was always ‘this is my band; we do things my way’, and Bruce is the same way. But with Bruce I was on my backfoot and if he had a suggestion I listened. Generally, people would make a suggestion and I would go, ‘OK I’ll take that into consideration but with Bruce it was like ‘oh that might work’. It’s different when you’re working with someone you respect as opposed to someone who maybe works for the record company who suggests, maybe work with this one person on a duet for maybe air play reasons or some stupid shit like that.”
When asked about working with Thom Zimny for the video for Wasted Days, “Again, I was working on my backfoot. To be perfectly honest, if I never make another video in life, I don’t care. Nobody wants to see a fucking old man dancing around anyway. It was Bruce’s idea to make the video. He said ‘I have this great guy’ and he showed me some of the work Thom had done and I said ‘yeah, I don’t care’. And I just went along with whatever these guys wanted to do. Because ultimately and finally fellas, at my age, there’s no reward for being right. I thought when I was a kid I had to be right all the time. I don’t have to be right. Because in a few years, people aren’t going to care if I was right or wrong, they are just going to say ‘Well, Mellencamp didn’t live forever but it sure seemed like it.”
Further On Down The Road
Rotolo: So you were recently in New Jersey?
“I didn’t know where I was at. I’m not sure Bruce really neither but, we found our way to a restaurant. It was pretty funny. I had to sit back and just smile at Bruce because people came up to him and said things that I kind of just went…wow. Poor guy. We walked about 4 blocks. In NJ, everybody knows Bruce and it was funny. As a matter of fact, I was talking to Bruce about doing something together and he said, ‘Well is it going to be like you coming to NJ?’ and I said, no quite honestly it will be quite the opposite. You’ll be lucky to see a car.”
I am hesitant to even raise the issue here but I feel like it would is a disservice for anyone to compare the two artists and John has been stuck with label “poor man’s Springsteen” by some over the years. The comparison is unfair between the two because neither was competing with the other. Just like contemporaries Bob Seger and Tom Petty, they might have all been watching each other from the corner of their eyes, but it was to just get a lay of the land, not out of a competitive drive. Mellencamp and Springsteen have created art that speaks to them based on very similar influences and tastes. Both of them have characters that speak in plain language they speak in their very day lives and that’s why we can relate to the songs and characters.
In an interview from 1.20.18, Howard Stern asked John to speak to that concept:
Howard: “Who was the big competition? The Eagles, Springsteen?”
Mellencamp: “It was always incorrect. We’re two different artists. Because he’s a better songwriter than me. You know, I give. I think Bruce Springsteen could have been the greatest pop song writer of our generation if he had wanted to be. But he didn’t want to be. Everyone talks about his lyrical content…his melodies sometimes are jaw dropping. It’s like how can a guy make such beautiful melodies out of three chords, and he would do it.”
Recent interview with Anthony Decurtis, ““Listen, I’ll just flat-out say it: I love Bruce,” Mellencamp says. “I love him like a brother. I feel very fortunate to have found a colleague and a good friend in him. This should have happened years ago.” In addition to performing on Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, The Boss ventured even further into Mellencamp’s world when he stayed at his house in Bloomington. “Bruce and I have done two paintings together,” John declares with evident pleasure. “We have a painting that we worked on for two days straight. He painted one side and I painted the other. Bruce had never painted at all and he was really good, really into it. I was surprised at how hard he tried. He was like, ‘How do you do this, John? How do I make this work?’ We’re trying to figure out how to sell it and give the money to charity. But I was proud of him. He went after it.”
L to R, Thom Zimny, John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen. Colts Neck, NJ
50 years Burning Down That Road
Both artists are now working into their 6th decade. John has made 24 albums, with his 25th slated to come out in early 2022. Springsteen has made 20 studio albums. Since 2000, Mellencamp has released 8 albums and Springsteen 9 along with box sets and other works. Both have done some of the best work of their careers since in the last twenty years. Mellencamp’s 2008 release Life, Death, Love and Freedom and2010 No Better Than This stand out to this listener and fan. Springsteen’s Magic, Wrecking Ball and Letter To You rank as some of the best work of his career. Both have made drastic changes to some of their classics. During the Seeger Sessions tour, Springsteen worked up different arrangements and instrumentation for classics such as Blinded By The Light and Atlantic City. In Mellencamp’s case, he has restructured his shows, often played in theaters to include a three-part play: an acoustic set with the band, an acoustic set with just him and his guitar, and a full electric band set. He has restructured some of his classics including Small Town and even Jack and Diane. I’ve attended at least one show wherein he didn’t play Jack and Diane at all and fans were left scratching their heads and pissed off.
Both artists have long stood for their principles on and off stage. While Bruce withstood the ire of NY police by performing 41 Shots, Mellencamp began taking a knee at the end of Easy Target in 2019 during the Colin Kaepernick controversy. Both took heat from conservative fans during GW presidency by writing, recording and performing songs like Magic, Last To Die in and Living In The Future and Mellencamp’s Rodeo Clown and To Washington which is a repurposed song from Woody Guthrie. Both have stood for their principles for decades in recordings, on stage and in their personal lives with how they chose to spend their time volunteering for various causes. Bruce for Vietnam Vets, food banks and John for small American farmers, BLM and racism with Cuttin’ Heads which features Chuck D.
Springsteen and Mellencamp have worked hard pursuing their musical vision for well over 50 years. They both believe that hard work, a strong work ethic and honing their craft is a lifelong job, like the families and communities they come from. They honor their parents, friends and family by getting up each day and going to work, shackled and drawn. Mellencamp says it best in this quote from Mellencamp, “If you see some guy who’s happy all the time, there’s something fucking wrong with him. He’s on drugs or drunk. Happiness is a very small commodity and the idea that we live to be happy is just fucked up. It’s wrong. We live to work. And we should toil like galley salves and try to find happiness in our work. That’s what life is about. People who think, “Oh I can’t wait to get down to the pub, have a drink and I’ll be happy.’ No! That’s not happiness. It’s being drunk. Happiness is a fulfillment that’s internal. It fulfills the mind, the body and the soul. And it doesn’t come at the bottom of a bottle or the end of a fucking needle.”
Mellencamp and Springsteen are hard core troubadours, observing the world around them, catching snippets of conversation of passersby, watching the news, turning their observations in to character studies, anthems and ballads that speak to the universal truths of the human condition. They see those around them striving for a place to fit into, a community, a family, love and kindness. They are both adult artists who realize that train is coming down the tracks, bearing down on them and there are only so many years and days left. As Springsteen has said, “That light coming down the tracks helps focus the mind.” They both have been making some of the best music of their careers in the last twenty years, improving their craft as they move along while grappling with aging and everything that comes with it like to loss of friends and family. They are honest about themselves, their strengths, and weaknesses. They give us a blueprint on how to age with grace, humility, and honesty. They show us how to walk tall.
“One of the most heartrending aspects of these deaths is that the virus has stolen from us our rituals, our funerals, our wakes, our house meetings with family after the burial. Our ability to stand by our loved ones, to touch them, to kiss them as they pass, to look into their eyes and let them physically know we love them. This is the cruelty of this disease. To say our last goodbyes to our loved ones by phone and then return home alone to an empty house. It is a heart breaking and lonely death for those afflicted and for those left behind to pick up the pieces.” Bruce Springsteen June 17, From My Home To Yours, E Street Radio, Sirius XM.
By Ryan Hilligoss December 20. 2020
In the fifty-year-plus career of American musician and artist Bruce Springsteen, he has had an uncanny knack for writing, singing and producing timely, meaningful music and albums that speak directly to our times, the unvarnished truths of our lives and the country. Springsteen’s ever watchful eyes, ears and mind see the realities of American life, find what’s meaningful to our nation and it’s citizens, identifies what’s most important and boils off the white noise and chatter of media, talking heads and loud hailers. His lyrics, music and albums speak in a voice that emanates from a raw, honest and visceral place of the American spirit.
In 1975, he released his seminal work Born To Run, which captured one long, hot night of summer and, in essence, reflected America’s lost innocence resulting from the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency. The River captured the end of youth, and marked the beginning of the dark, tired days of adulthood, shining a light on blue collar lives worn out from the oil embargo, stagflation and lost jobs during the Carter administration. In 2002, Springsteen released The Rising which spoke to our nations fears, heartaches, devastation, and emotional, psychological fallout from the attacks of 9/11. It paid tribute to the lives of those lost and those that remain behind, but ultimately reflected the best of our nation: the hopes for what we could do as a nation, a people that came together during dark times to help each other recover and try to begin again.
Springsteen’s Letter To You was inspired by events of 2018 and recorded in November of 2019, well before the world learned the importance of the words Corona Virus 19, nasal swabs and quarantine. However, the album turns out to be the defining work of art reflecting our lives and reality in 2020. The lyrics and songs reflect the loss of loved ones, the loss of connection with those around us, the loss of innocence, the loss of time, separation, isolation, loneliness, age, death and the ghosts that we carry in our daily lives. Before we slipped into a perpetual Ground Hog’s Day, living every day mostly the same over and over, Springsteen had his finger on some of the defining characteristics of our time: the fracturing of our communities due to technology, social media platforms, multitudes of streaming devices for music, movies and other art forms, and the raging tribalism of national politics. But through it all, despite the darkness on the edge of town, Springsteen’s work leaves us with a sense of hope, a dream of better days. The promise of sunlight up around the river bend. A land of hope and dreams beyond the road’s horizon.
The album was released in October of 2020 along with a documentary film of the same title directed by long-time collaborator Thom Zimny. The pair of projects are intertwined, helping Springsteen broaden the visual and emotional impact of his vision and message. The album and movie have been out for two months now, so I am delayed in writing this, but the music and images are so dense, layered and meaningful on so many levels, I am still trying to unpack it all and may never reach the end, isn’t that one of the truths of all great art? Also, as a long time serious fan of his work, professionalism and high quality of his craft, anytime I write about a project, I feel I owe it to him as part of our agreement to give the best I have within my abilities, just as he does for us.
Danny Clinch photo
As Springsteen has said in interviews many times over, he hadn’t written any songs for the E Street Band since 2012’s Wrecking Ball which shone a spotlight on the wreckage, carnage and destruction the 2008 financial meltdown left on the American people and country. But two events merged into a channel helping Springsteen write the songs that form one of the best albums of his career. First, during his historic run of Springsteen on Broadway which played at the Walter Kerr Theater in NYC for 236 shows spread over 15 months between October 2017 through December 2018, an unnamed fan from Italy handed Springsteen a handmade acoustic guitar as he exited the theater and got into his car. Springsteen thanked the fan, took the guitar home with him where it sat in a corner of his house untouched for months. Secondly, in 2018, Springsteen’s friend and former bandmate George Theiss from their 1960’s band The Castiles passed away from cancer. Springsteen realized on his drive home from the hospital that he was the last man still alive from that band: he was the last man standing. In the weeks that followed, Springsteen picked up that fan’s gift to him, the guitar sitting in a corner which called to him like a musical divining rod, and the songs came to him quickly like messages from the great beyond.
George Theiss far left and Bruce Springsteen behind the mic and The Castiles 1966
In the last five years, Springsteen has spent a lot of time and artistic reflection on his life and career. He wrote his autobiography Born To Run, unbelievably while touring almost non-stop from 2009-2015, somehow finding the energy and time after exhausting himself for nearly 3-4 hours on stage. He wrote and performed Springsteen On Broadway which told his life story through his songs. He wrote, composed, arranged and recorded the album Western Stars along with the accompanying film which included live performances of the album songs backed by a terrific band and orchestra and also contained spoken narrative passages. And now Letter To You album and film. I’ve read several critiques of the latest project and a lot of writers have said these projects were Springsteen’s effort at a summation or ending. I see these efforts as a way for Springsteen to try to understand to the best of his abilities his life, his journey, his friends and family, his music and his fans. In knowing, where he came from and where he’s been, he has a guide to where he is headed in his artistic vision. Springsteen has had one of the most productive and prolific parts of his career in the last twenty years, comparable only to degrees with those of Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan in longevity, high quality and willingness to take chances. Signs indicate his sights are set on many more various projects, musical styles and records to be made. As he has described before, there is only so much time in every person’s life and there’s a train barreling down the tracks that focuses one’s attention.
The album was recorded at Springsteen’s home studio with the full band in just five days, well recorded in four and played back on day 5. This is unheard of in Springsteen’s career, some albums, specifically in his earlier career, taking as long as 18 to 24 months to record, arrange, mix and produce. After spending decades together, the band demonstrates a fine- tuned short hand that allowed them to quickly listen to Springsteen sing the lyrics and rough chord progressions for each individual song, discuss, arrange, play and record each track. The band is in fine form, possibly some of their best recordings of their careers. Especially the drumming from Max Weinberg who, as you can see in the movie, sat directly in front of Springsteen’s isolation booth making sure his eyes remained focused on Springsteen’s every move just as he does on stage, searching for the smallest cues in Springsteen’s movements and facial expressions. Garry Tallent’s smooth, subtle bass lines provide the foundation for the rest of the E Street Band sound. He’s not flashy or showy, that’s not his style, but it’s there all the time if you listen hard enough.
Steven Van Zandt provides excellent guitar solos on If I Was The Priest and Song For Orphans. Nils Lofgren provides excellent acoustic guitar accompaniment on Last Man Standing that propels the song forward while keeping it anchored at the same time. Charlie Giordano’s organ is subtle and finely textured as usual and stands out on I’ll See You In My Dreams. Roy Bittan’s piano as always makes an indelible presence in every song; there would be no E Street sound without Roy’s piano. Jake Clemons provides excellent, soaring sax solos on Last Man Standing and Ghosts. And Patti Scialfa, a fine artist and song writer in her own right, provides accompanying vocals on several tracks.
The album begins with One Minute You’re Here, a hypnotic simple acoustic guitar line repeating itself over and over, ethereal keyboards hover in the background as Springsteen sings, “Big black train comin’ down the track/Blow your whistle long and low, one minute you’re here/Next Minute you’re gone.” The guitar playing and vocal phrasing and tone remind me of The Hitter from his 2005 release Devils and Dust. He’s obviously thinking about that train of mortality barreling down the tracks toward him and anyone else in it’s path and I hear echoes of Junior Parker’s Mystery Train made famous by Elvis Presley, one of Springsteen’s musical heroes, with that long black train, 16 coaches long taking his baby and gone. The song sets the stage for what is to follow with it’s focus on those who have come and gone, their spirits that remain with us as we move through life, friendship, comradery, love, loss and hope. The album and songs were inspired by the passing of one bandmate, but he also carries the ghosts of others like E Street Band members Clarence Clemons and Danny Fedirici, his friend and guardian Terry McGovern, his father and grandparents and many others.
Clarence Clemons and Danny Fedirici from Letter To You movie
In Letter To You, the second tack on the album, Springsteen summarizes the song, the album and his whole career in two lines, “Got down on my knees grabbed my pen and bowed my head, tried to summon all that my heart finds true/And put it in my letter to you.” As he said in the Broadway show, his whole creative career has been a long, noisy prayer, his magic trick. The letter he writes is a letter for us the fans, his bandmates, other musicians, his family and friends and to himself, his way of organizing and clarifying his thoughts. It’s a letter decades in the writing. Part of the ever evolving conversation he’s been having with his fans since he first picked up a guitar and put pen to paper.
As Springsteen says in the movie’s introduction, “I’m in the middle of a 45-year conversation with these men and women I’m surrounded by and with some of you. Now with some of you I suppose we’ve only recently started speaking. But either way, I’ve tried to make that conversation essential, fun and entertaining. I started playing the guitar because I was looking to speak to and correspond with you. I guess that worked out better than my wildest dreams. All I know is after all this time, I still feel that burning need to communicate. It’s there when I wake every morning, walks along side of me throughout the day, and is there when I go to sleep each night. Over the past 50 years, it’s never once ceased, owing to what I really don’t know. Is it loneliness, hunger, ego, ambition, desire, a need to be felt and heard, recognized, all of the above? All I know is that it’s one of the most consistent impulses in my life. As reliable as the rhythmic beating of my own heart, is my need to talk to you.”
Up Around The River Bend
Listening to the album is one thing but to see the documentary is a whole other animal that takes the music and meaning to an entirely higher level. Director Thom Zimny has worked with and collaborated with Springsteen for more than 20 years now and has directed and produced, among many other projects, Wings For Wheels, the movie that accompanied the 30th anniversary released of Born To Run, The Promise which was part of the box set released for Darkness On The Edge of Town and The River documentary that was part of the box set for that release. Before Springsteen recorded the music for Letter To You, he called Zimny and asked him to come down and film the band as they recorded with only one instruction: stay out of the way. The movie captures the band in all of their glory and demonstrates the work that went into the recording process from the musicians to producer Ron Aniello, the sound engineers, techs and Jon Landau, Springsteen’s long time manager, co producer and friend.
It’s beautifully constructed, shot in black and white and strikes to the heart of the album’s message whose essence is captured in a scene where after a long day’s work in the studio, the band gathers around to raise a toast and Springsteen says, “We’re taking this all the way boys, until we’re all in a box”. It’s only rock and roll, but it’s as important as life and death. The choice of black and film is genius in a few respects. On the previous documentaries, Zimny had access to black and white video footage shot by Barry Rebo in the studio while the band recorded Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge of Town and The River. Here, Zimny chooses black and white possibly to put the album and band in a historical perspective, adding a softening touch to footage which clearly shows the years the band has put in together, close ups of their hands, eyes and faces for all the world to see.
The choice of black and white also plays into the weather at the time of the recording as snow falls outside of the recording studio, blanketing the area in beautiful white landscape similar to some of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings. This provides for an earthy, realistic and gritty contrast to the black trees in the nearby woods and plowed, barren fields. Zimny uses drones to capture footage of the surrounding area’s rural setting giving a ghostly, ethereal feel to the movie and working hand in hand with the music and themes. Black and white is binary, it’s one thing or the other, but the scenery adds a gray texture to it and the drone hovers just as the ghosts Springsteen sings of, Clarence, Danny, Terry, his father, George, hover overhead, watching, listening and guiding with their spirits. The opening shot shows snow covered fields and trees near a winding, frozen creek that mirrors the lyrics of my favorite song from the album, I’lll See You In My Dreams: “I’ll see you in my dreams, When all our summers have come to an end/ I’ll see you in my dreams, we’ll meet and live and laugh again/ I’ll see you in my dreams, Up around the riverbend/For death is not the end”.
39 1/2 Institute Street, Freehold, NJ
When one considers the role and place of a special tree in Springsteen’s autobiography and one-man Broadway show, the trees in Letter To You take on even more significance. In the book, Springsteen writes lovingly about a giant copper beech tree that stood in the front yard of his boyhood home under which he played as child, counting and feeling the trees roots, and climbing to the top to feel the breeze on his face. “The tree sprouts, it’s branches thicken, mature, bloom. It is scarred by lightning, shaken by thunder, sickness, human events and God’s hand. Drawn black, it grows itself back toward lights, rising higher toward heaven while thrusting itself deeper, more firmly, into the earth. It’s history and memory retained, it’s presence felt.”
After describing his entire life, the joys, heartaches, triumphs and longevity, he returns at the end of the book to the tree. “On a November evening during the writing of this book, I drove once again back to my hometown, back to my neighborhood. The streets were quiet. My corner church was silent and unchanged. Tonight there were no weddings, no funerals. I rolled slowly another 50 yards up my block to find my great towering copper beech tree gone, cut to the street. My heart went blank….then settled. I looked again. It was gone but still there. The very air and space above it was filled with the form, soul and lifting presence of my old friend, it’s leaves and branches now outlined and shot through by evening stars and sky. A square of musty earth, carved into the parking lot blacktop at pavement’s edge, was all that remained. It still held small snakes of root slightly submerged by dust and dirt, and there the arc of my tree, my life lay plainly visible. My great tree’s life by county dictum or blade could not be ended or erased. Its history, it’s magic, was too old and too strong. Like my father, my grandmother, my aunt Virginia, my two grandfathers, my father in law Joe, my Aunt Dora and Eda, Ray and Walter Chicon, Bart Haynes, Terry, Danny, Clarence and Tony, my own family gone from these houses now filled with strangers- we remain. We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited. My clan, my blood, my place, my people.”
In the movie, the images of the trees take on a life of their own, becoming silent characters in the movie like the snow itself. The trees stand in as the chorus from Greek Tragedy. They stand in place of the spirits of Springsteen’s family, friends, bandmates, love, music, inspiration and God’s divining hand providing shade, cover, warmth and the breath of life.
Ghosts: I Shoulder Your Les Paul and Finger The Fretboard
Guitar used by Springsteen during Letter To You Recording, photo from Ron Aniello
The images and ideas of ghosts are ever present in the music and movie, some more obvious than others, but all adding up to prove his point: we carry the spirits of those we’ve known with us every step of the way. In a narrative leading into Ghosts, Springsteen says, “Where do we go when we die? Maybe we go nowhere or maybe everywhere. Maybe our soul resides in the ether, in the starless part of the sky and resonates outward like a stone dropped into a still lake whose circles are the lives of the people we’ve touched over the course of our lives. No one knows where or how far their soul may sound we travel. Or, maybe it’s all just bones, dirt, clay and turtles all the way down. I don’t know. But I’ve grieved at the thought of never seeing some of those that I’ve loved and lost again. But those passed never completely disappear. We see them on familiar streets, in empty clubs and late nights of long ago. They move in shadows, glimpsed only from the corner of our eyes. We see them in our dreams.”
As even casual fans of Springsteen’s work know, he is incredibly deliberate, meaningful and serious when it comes to the work that goes out under his name, leaving nothing to chance, fate or a roll of the dice. He is a perfectionist who wants his vision communicated clearly and directly with his audience. If you see or hear it, it’s on purpose and there for a reason. Letter To You is an Easter Egg hunt of clues, symbols, metaphors and images that are absorbed slowly and throughout the music forming a strong sense of the truth of which he speaks.
Consider the following:
One of the guitars he uses during the recording photo above was given to him prior to recording. It’s worn and aged, seemingly battle tested and scarred from thousands of hours of practice and live performances. It stands in for one he or one of his earlier bandmates could have used decades ago.
A brief clip of the band exiting the stage after their rave performance at the No Nukes concert in 1979 with Clarence Clemons picking Springsteen up like a football and carrying him off camera.
Danny Federici’s glockenspiel has a prominent place in the recording studio which Roy Bittan is asked to add a part on during the recording, bringing the instrument back to life with Fedirici’s spirit.
A saxophone travel case with Clarence Clemons name in tape appears briefly
A Backstreets Magazine appears briefly lying atop a studio coffee table. The back cover showing Springsteen and Clemons together during the Born To Run album cover shoot
During the filming and recording of the album, Jake Clemons plays a saxophone solo on Power of Prayer while Springsteen stands behind the mixing board with his arms waving in the air like a conductor. This mirrors the memory of Springsteen conducting Clarence Clemons’s earth shattering solo on Jungleland during the recording of Born To Run. Clemons said that he and Springsteen worked on that solo one note, one inflection, one bar at a time, “No Big Man, play it like this.”
A stock video image of a little boy climbing a tree in front of a house.
Springsteen stands in his isolation booth during the recording of the album. A tapestry or print hangs behind him on the wall which shows his boyhood home of 39 1/2 Institute Street, Freehold, NJ. His history and his ghosts peer over his shoulder. Or possibly, that is a cinematic magic trick Zimny pulled from his deck of cards in post production?
Footage taken from the recording of Darkness appears showing Springsteen and Van Zandt discussing the arrangement of a song and the the film cuts to them having almost the same conversation and same looks on their faces as they discuss the arrangement of a song on Letter To You 40 years later. Some things never change.
Steven Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen, Colt’s neck, NJ November 2019
Springsteen’s cousin Frank Bruno appears throughout the film, and there is a reason. When Springsteen got his first guitar, he was trying to learn at home on his own but he didn’t have the rudimentary facts down like how to tune a guitar and how to play basic chords. His cousin Frank came to their house one day and showed young Springsteen how to tune his guitar, how to hold his fingers on the fret board, to play basic chords and lent him a song book of basic American folk songs. As he stated in a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon, the first song Springsteen ever learned to play was Greensleeves which only had two chords. Then the first rock and roll song he learned to play was The Beatle’s cover of The Isley Brothers song, Twist and Shout, after he learned to add a third chord. Bruno is there in the film as a visceral, tangible connection between his past and present, between that distant moment in time decades ago and his storied career with the man who helped him take his first steps on a long and winding journey.
During a break in the recording, Springsteen is seen talking with Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren about guitars, the kind they used when he first got started and describes a Sears and Roebuck guitar which had a speaker built into the body of the guitar which sounded terrible. After the credits are done rolling, the last minutes of the film show Springsteen sitting in front of his studio along with his cousin Frank Bruno. They both hold guitars, Springsteen’s being a Sears and Roebuck with a speaker built into the stock. He then proceeds to play and sing Baby I , the song Springsteen and Theiss wrote together in the 1960s and which was the first song Springsteen ever recorded in a studio which was in Bricktown, NJ. As Springsteen hammers his way through the song, which sounds very similar to Them’s Gloria, Frank Bruno strums along on rhythm guitar. Just like in all of his other work, Springsteen starts at the beginning, goes on a long journey and then brings it all back home. The alpha and the omega.
I’ll See You In My Dreams
At first glance, the album may appear to be a grab bag of newly written songs and earlier outtakes. The album contains 12 songs including Janey Needs A Shooter, written in the early 1970s. Warren Zevon later borrowed at least the title and used it as the basis for his song Jeannie Needs A Shooter which has different lyrics and a story setting. Based on interviews, Springsteen has stated he recorded the song a few years ago to possibly release as a Record Store Day release but decided it was too good and needed to be used on a full project. Song For Orphans and If I Was The Priest were both written around the time he auditioned for John Hammond at Columbia Records. Both tracks were left off his first few albums and then they just sat dormant in the proverbial but legendary vault at Thrill Hill Studio collecting New Jersey dust. Springsteen says in the film as an introduction to Song For Orphans, “The songs from 1972 were and remain a mystery to me. They were just the way I wrote back then, a lot of words. As a matter of fact, Clive Davis, the man who signed me to Columbia Records with John Hammond called me briefly after we released Greetings and said someone had called him and told him if I wasn’t careful, I was going to use up the entire English language and he said that was Bob Dylan. And Bob was always my mentor and the brother I never had so I took the words quite seriously. But all I know is these songs hold a very warm place in my heart. The song Orphans is about someone overcoming their fears, their doubts, their time. It’s about fighting for a place of their own.”
If I Was The Priest and Orphans harken back to his original writing style which was abundant and colorful and character driven, full of metaphors, allegory and story lines. Some have likened his lyrics, singing and arrangements to Bob Dylan and there are some similarities, but I think the best comparison or influence is actually from The Band, especially in the current arrangement and sound with heavy guitar tethered to Giorando’s organ and Bittan’s piano lines. There is obviously a lot of cross over between Dylan and The Band since The Band worked with Dylan for several years both on the road and at Big Pink, but The Band had a very distinctive sound with Garth Hudson’s organ and early synthesizer keyboards, Levon Helm’s solid but funky drumming, Rick Danko’s bass and Robbie Robertson’s piercing guitar lines.
Springsteen has also stated in interviews that he originally wrote Rainmaker, which many listeners have incorrectly assumed is about Donald Trump, about George W Bush around the time of the Magic album. While the imagery of a snake oil salesman applies even more appropriately to the current occupant of the White House, the song was not written for this album. Regardless of when the songs were written and originally recorded, Letter To You is the first Springsteen album in a long time which contains a narrative arc from start to finish much like his albums Born To Run, Darkness and Nebraska. It begins with One Minute You’re Here speaking to the precariousness of life and our connections to each other, proceeds through the trials, tribulations and turmoil that we all experience in life to one degree or another and concludes with I’ll See You In My Dreams which is a summation of the overall, reaching hope of life beyond this mortal world, somewhere in the ether, possibly a half way point between heaven and earth. A hope that despite the years and miles travelled and the spirits lost, that we’ll see them again, if only in our dreams.
One of the most touching and poignant scenes in the film occurs as the band gathers around the mixing board and listens to the playback of Dreams. Landau its to Springsteen’s immediate left. As the lyrics and arrangement come floating through the speakers, Landau is visibly taken emotionally and sheds some tears. Perfectly captured on film for all to see and experience, Landau’s reaction acts as a summation of the emotions and thoughts he shares with many of us on the outside: what a long, strange, beautiful trip it’s been. Landau turns to Springsteen and says, “It has magnificence.”
Even the ghosts of Springsteen’s musical past have haunted him, and now a few of them find their way to a permanent home on his new album. He has said that he carries a library of recorded songs that didn’t make their way onto a project and periodically, he’ll check in with them listen and think of ways to find them a permanent home. I do not mean to pry into his private life or even remotely consider I know his private thoughts and don’t want to know, but there is one aspect that he has spoken of publicly which is his mother Adele, his life-long cheerleader and the woman who bought him his first real guitar as a Christmas present long ago.
In an interview in AARP OCT/Nov 2020, Springsteen is asked about his mother Adele who, he has acknowledged and spoken publicly, has suffered from Alzheimer’s for close to 10 years. “I’m very lucky that my mother remains in very, very good spirits. She can’t really speak, but when you see her, she still moves to rhythm or put music on, and she’s happy. She’s always got a smile. Always got a kiss or hug. She can’t name you now or anything, but she can recognize you and is excited when you come over. It’s been 10 years. And her progress was very slow, so I consider us quite lucky with the disease.” In his one man production, Springsteen On Broadway just as in his autobiography Born To Run, Springsteen speaks lovingly of his mother, always cheerful, hardworking, joyful, ready to dance and the life and spirit of their family. I was lucky enough to attend the show with my brother, and during the introduction to The Wish, Springsteen said, “My mother is 7 years into Alzheimer’s.” Our mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years prior to us attending the performance and we had watched her symptoms grow over time to include Alzheimer’s or some other sort of memory issue. His words made an instant, immediate connection with me, knocked me sideways and struck a raw nerve with me.
During the performance he sings:
“It ain’t no phone call on Sunday, flowers or a mother’s day card It ain’t no house on a hill with a garden and a nice little yard I got my hot rod down on Bond Street, I’m older but you’ll know me in a glance We’ll find us a little rock ‘n roll bar and baby we’ll go out and dance”
In the third line, he pauses after saying ‘you’ll know me’ and repeats ‘you’ll know me in a glance”. It’s a heartbreaking acknowledgement directed at Adele, that she may not be able to say his name anymore, but despite the disease and it’s limitations on her memory and function, she still knows him and recognizes him and loves him. I watched my own mother struggle with these same issues before she passed and I can’t help but feeling that in some way, Springsteen is feeling like an orphan himself in a metaphorical sense as his father Douglas passed years ago and now his mother can no longer speak his name. I’ve been there and it’s devastating.
One fact of Springsteen’s life that has always stuck with me is that at the age of 18, his father decided they were leaving Freehold, NJ, the only town he’d ever known and was moving the family to California to make a new start. Springsteen was left in tough position, either leave his home and a budding musical career and his passion and dreams, or lose his family in a physical sense. Springsteen chose to stay and at a very young age he was alone, an orphan in a way. Maybe, he’s looking for a way home for himself and for the ghosts of his past while walking further on up the road to a future somewhere up around the river bend.
We’ll Rise Together and Fire The Spark
In A House of A Thousand Guitars, Springsteen sings, “All good souls from near and far, brothers and sisters wherever you are/ We’ll rise together til we fire the spark that’ll light up the house of a thousand guitars.” Whether intentional or not, a listener could be reminded of Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark when he sings, “You can’t start a fire without a spark.” Springsteen has long held the belief in recording and especially on stage, that music is only truly communicated and understood and shared properly when the artist connects with the listeners and fans. That’s why he plays epic concerts that last nearly four hours, exhausting himself in the service of his craft, the music, his bandmates, his fans and all who came before. We rise and fall together. We all experience dark days, we lose loved ones, friends and family, we endure hardships, financial woes, psychological scars. But we also experience life’s pleasures, joys, tribulations, highlights, loves, passions, friendships and families together. His songs capture a snapshot of the crisis that has crippled our nation and taken so many from us in a short time, but it also reflects a universal truth: we get through these hard times together, as a family, as a community and as a nation together, with each other’s help, guidance and love. We get through the hard times and look forward to the next daybreak, somewhere over the horizon where we can stand together again at a concert singing our hearts out, where we can hug and kiss each other, a place where we can begin again.
Springsteen wrote a letter to us, the fans, the listeners, the critics, his family and friends and fellow musicians and we’re reading that letter along with all the others he’s written us for decades. What he has to say is vital, important, meaningful, hard rocking and beautiful. As always, he is ever present, a sentinel standing on the precipice, watching and listening, sending signals back to us, showing us the way forward to a better place.
Springsteen October 2020 at his Colt’s Neck, NJ home. Phote courtesy of Patti Scialfa
At the end of the film, a drone flies from the ground up into the air catching a beautiful, bucolic scene of black trees reaching high into the sky, towering over white, snow blanketed fields as fresh snow falls from the heavens. A road is cut through a stand of trees with fresh tire tracks dug into the rough road bed. Zimny presents an image of a road cut into the forest, a road cut by Springsteen through his own forest of vulnerability, tension, unknowns, precarious chances. A road he cut and paved on his own, with his two hands. A road that twists and turns with the hope of possibility. Springsteen continues a career filled with music, different genres, different styles, different band mates and he makes the road his own. He closes the movie with this last spoken passage which bears repeating, “Age. Age brings perspective. A defining clarity one gets at midnight on the tracks looking into the lights of an oncoming train. It dawns on you rather quickly. There’s only so much time left. Only so many star filled nights, snowfalls, brisk fall afternoons, rainy mid-summer days. So how you conduct yourself and do your work matters. How you treat your friends, your family, your lover. On good days, a blessing falls over you. It wraps its arms around you and you’re free and deeply in and of this world. That’s your reward: being here. That’s what gets you up the next morning: a new chance to receive that benediction….while you’re buttering your toast, getting dressed or driving home from work. You stumble into those moments when you can feel the hand of God gently rest upon your shoulder, and you realize how lucky you are. Lucky to be alive, lucky to be breathing in this world of beauty, horror and hope. Because this is what there is: a chance. A world where it’s lucky to love, lucky to be loved. So you go, until it fills you. Until the sweat, blood and hard tears make sense. You go until the light from the fading, distant stars fall at your feet. Go. And may god bless you.”
Any may god bless you Bruce Springsteen and all of your family and friends. Thank you kind sir. May we have another and another. Let’s dance.
What can I say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said a million times over already. It’s been a bleak, dark, hard year between Covid and all that’s been taken from us including friends, family, socializing, human interactions and our sanity. Despite the restrictions and need for safety protocols, one thing has remained consistent this year which is the creation of art and music, just in time when we needed it the most. Without artists and all who help create it, we would have been without much needed respite from the darkness lingering on the edge of town. Art, music, literature, film, and television are the things that allow us to shake off the dust of the day and rise a little higher and see the world in a different way. Art and the artists who make it provide us with much needed laughter, tears, joy, ideas to consider, and other people’s shoes to walk in for a brief time.
Given all the time I’ve had on my hands this year, it’s allowed me to take daily walks along my dusty country roads while listening to music and getting away from the torrent of gloom and doom barreling at us daily. While walking alone physically, I’ve had some of the best musicians in the world as good companions along the way. Here is a sampling of some of my favorite new music from this year. For anyone reading this, nothing I can say will enlighten or say anything you can’t learn by just listening so I’ll leave it at that. Many of you have probably heard of most of these, but maybe not and hopefully you can find something new to listen for a while on your journey. And if you know something I need to listen to which doesn’t appear here, let me know.
I Remember Everything, John Prine
John passed away earlier this year, taking a little bit of me with him when he left. He was one of the best songwriters of the last 50 years. His writing and lyrics could make you laugh and cry, sometimes in the same song, even sometimes in the same verse. He kept his eye on the daily lives of common people, the people he came from, and turned them into songs of Everyman. I Remember Everything was the last song he ever recorded and was released after he passed in April. The song became his first Billboard number one song and encapsulates everything great about his songs, his humor and pathos, his guitar and his voice.
Carsie Blanton, Fishin’ With You
Released very shortly after John passed, I ran across this excellent tribute from Carsie. She nailed it in the chords and arrangement and worked in plenty of Prine lyrics and song titles. Anytime things seem easy and simple, they are anything but. Carsie says what all of us non musicians wanted to say to John, and she did it in perfect fashion: thank you John Prine.
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, Reunions
One of the finest songwriters, guitarists and musicians working today continues a streak of incredible albums. The 400 unit is a great band which includes Amanda Shires, his wife and superb musician and songwriter in her own right, on fiddle and background vocals. “The river is my savior, because she used to be a cloud/ Now she’s happy just to lay there, when she used to be so proud”
Springsteen, Letter To You
The Boss Man recorded his 20th studio album along with the E Street Band in late 2019 in the hopes of launching a world wide tour in 2020. According to multiple interviews, Springsteen wrote most of the songs in a quick burst of inspiration after his one man show Springsteen On Broadway concluded in 2018. The album has twelve tracks, nine written recently and three coming from material he wrote in the early 70’s. The band gathered at his Colt’s Neck, NJ home studio and recorded all the songs in four days, resting and listening to play backs on the fifth day. It’s the first time the band recorded live together in the studio since the 80’s. In my opinion, the album ranks up in the top 5 of his career. In lieu of a tour, Springsteen decided to release a documentary film of the same name, directed and shot by longtime collaborator Thom Zimny, showing the band recording live in studio, working together on arrangements, commiserating and toasting each other at the end of every hard earned day. The album and film are exceptional and well worth your time. The film is currently only available on apple TV which often times offers a free 7 day trial. Below is a live performance of the song taken from Stand Up For Heroes fundraiser, sung with his wife and fellow musician Patti Scialfa at their horse barn.
The Mavericks En Espanol
All songs and lyrics sung in Spanish and I have no idea what Raul is saying but I know it’s beautiful and heartfelt. The Mavericks combine several genres including pop, country, salsa and western swing and make it their own with myriad beats like samba and ska. Lead singer Raul Malo has one of the finest voices in all of modern music, operatic like Roy Orbison and Elvis but all his own style and phrasing. A tip of the hat to the band for this gem.
The Chicks Gaslighter
The Chicks return with their fifth studio album and their first since 2006. Lead singer Natalie Maines and sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire channel the rage fueled by Maine’s recent divorce from her husband father of their children. If you think Taylor Swift can burn an ex, just listen to Gaslighter or Tights on My Boat. I remember clearly walking in the morning listening to the album when I got to the last track, it hit me hard having gone through a divorce myself in the last few years, and I had to sit down on a nearby bench to gather my thoughts. While my circumstances were different, the power of music and songwriters is, they sometimes can nail the essence and spirit of something that countless others have experienced but you feel like it was written just for you.
Taylor Swift Folklore
When she was younger, I listened to her hits but didn’t really pay attention thinking she was a passing fad but over the course of her career, she has proven herself time after time with each passing album. She is the real deal and is in it for the long haul as a musician, performer and song writer. I give her all the credit in the world for fighting for control of her catalogue and making hard decisions while fighting for her artistic freedom. She is one of the few current musicians I can see having a career filled with high quality material and the longevity like Springsteen and McCartney. It doesn’t matter the genre she writes and records in, she’s all in and at the top of her game.
Will Hoge Tiny Little Movies
Thanks to my friend Jeff Calaway for introducing me to this phenomenal singer and songwriter a few years ago with his album Never Give In which was followed by Anchors and My American Dream. His lyrics and arrangements remind me at times of James McMurtry and Springsteen in his storytelling abilities and the way his lyrics evoke cinematic images. If you’ve never listened to Will, do yourself a favor and check him out.
Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways
The ever changing chameleon, the self described poet laureate of rock and roll keeps the creative train rolling in a nearly 60 year career. He scored his first Billboard number one single with this 17 minute dirge regarding the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas. Anyone songwriter who can name check the Beatles, Wolf Man Jack, Etta James, The Kingston Trio, Jellyroll Morton, Macbeth and The Eagles and many others is the Shakespeare of rock and roll.
Chris Stapleton Starting Over
Stapleton keeps his string of high quality recordings going following up on Traveler and From Studio A Volumes I and II with Starting Over. Backed by his superb band including his wife Morgane on vocals and percussion, Stapleton lays his powerful voice into a wide range of genres including rock, country and blues. The title track is a perfect song, only slightly below Traveler in his catalogue in my opinion. Stapleton along with Isbell and Sturgill Simpson make up a trio of artists pushing country/rock forward.
Margo Price That’s How Rumors Get Started
Along with Brandi Carlisle, Amanda Shires and Kacey Musgraves, Margo, hailing from Aledo, Illinois, is part of an excellent collection of work being done in country/pop by strong female singers and song writers.
“I grew where I was planted But I never felt at home My head was filled with questions And my feet, they long to roam My arms reached out like branches But my heart just couldn’t stay I left the moment that I could, a prisoner of the highway”
Tom Petty Wild Flowers and All The Rest
When Tom Petty originally wrote and recorded his solo album Wildflowers in 1994, he intended it to be a double album with roughly twenty five songs but the label demanded he cut it down to one album which even then was a stretch at fifteen tracks. Right up until the time he passed, he and fellow Heartbreaker and long time partner Mike Campbell toyed with the idea of rereleasing it in his original formulation and touring behind the entire package of material. Since he passed, Campbell and Tom’s family have been sorting through his vault of material and they decided to release it as he envisioned along with home demo recordings, outtakes and live recordings. Simply put, it’s a beautiful tribute to a great artist and musician by those who loved and worked with him.
“So dream away my love, let your heart be free/And if ever someone tries to break your will, have a dream on me”
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and listening. I hope to see you up the road soon enough at a concert where we can stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart. Rock on my brothers and sisters.
unionavenue706 