Before Donald Trump‘s return to the White House there was no lack of celebrities lining up to speak out against him. But since he was voted back into power that hubbub has stilled to a hush. All those fire-spitting advocates for freedom and justice, where are they now? Rock’n’roll’s reputation for dissent is much diminished. The music of rebellion has been stilled to a whimper.
Bruce Springsteen is an exception, as he confirmed when he kicked off his Land of Hope & Dreams tour, in Manchester on May 14, with a tirade against the Trump administration, condemning it as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous”.
That speech and the music that followed immediately afterwards, spilling out in a roiling, righteous onslaught, have now been released as a six-track EP that packs a heftier punch than its 30-minute run time might suggest.
Springsteen elevates four songs and two speeches with his theatrical, almost preacher-like turn of phrase, a rhetorical style no less authentically American than the Maga groundswell that propelled Trump to the Oval Office.
Look inside: Shane Ross and Ruth Buchanan selling Enniskerry home for €3.5m
The best beauty minis to buy for travel this summer
Who were the big winners at the Irish Restaurant Awards? Best restaurant, chef and more revealed
Dara Ó Briain: ‘I’m a man, I can’t manage family at the best of times ... now I’ve willingly taken on a 600% increase in family members’
Coming before the arrival of a blockbusting set of “lost” Springsteen records this summer, it’s a relatively minor addition to the canon, but it feels far weightier than a throwaway live EP has any right to (and so scrapes in to be treated, for the purposes of this review slot, as an album).
It captures an artist who, at 75, is both vulnerable and steadfast, fading and burning bright. His denunciation of Trump – it is too considered to be described as a diatribe – is by way of introducing Land of Hope and Dreams, a song he wrote in the late 1990s but did not lay down in definitive studio form until 2012.
It appeared on that year’s Wrecking Ball album – his call to arms in the wake of the great recession. Wrecking Ball was embraced in Europe but largely rejected in the US, where its plea for solidarity against faceless corporate overreach went largely unheeded. (Cynics will point out that Springsteen isn’t above charging corporate ticket prices.)
The singer was strident in the original. Now he sounds distraught. As recorded in Manchester, Land of Hope and Dreams replaces the optimism that burns through the 2012 version with dread and sadness, his love letter to the United States’ perpetual powers of reinvention becoming a eulogy.
He follows it with Long Walk Home, a folksy piece he originally wrote to articulate his dislike of George W Bush and his astonishment that friends and neighbours could have voted for Bush as president. This feeling is magnified a dozen times over as he reorientates the lyrics to Trump’s presidency and the 50 per cent of American voters who concluded he was fit to be commander-in-chief (“This is a prayer for my country”).
Springsteen delivers the lyrics from the perspective of a man returning to where he grew up and finding his old pals have changed for the worse. The community he remembered has been replaced by rancour and hatred. “In that particular song a guy comes back to his town and recognises nothing and is recognised by nothing,” he explained to the New York Times in 2007. “The singer in Long Walk Home, that’s his experience. His world has changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers.”
Long Walk Home deals in abstracts: the hollowed-out town is a metaphor for the US. But Springsteen adopts a more plain-speaking tone as he introduces My City of Ruins, from his 2002 album The Rising.
“There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now,” he tells the crowd. “In America they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent.”
If universal in its scope, My City of Ruins has its roots in the personal. Springsteen wrote it as an elegy for his hometown of Asbury Park, in New Jersey – though it was later embraced as a post-9/11 prayer for “our fallen brothers and sisters”, as Springsteen announced on a telethon after those 2001 attacks. Live, it is lifted up by a beautifully understated piano and by Springsteen’s raw vocals as he reflects on the devastation of a place he once held dear.
“Are you ready to join together?” he asks the crowd, like a preacher; their assent has the quality of a secular hallelujah.
A passionate EP finishes in an upbeat register with a cover of Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom, a song about a coming revolution that will lift the downtrodden out of the shadows.
Springsteen sings it as if he truly believes dawn is on the horizon. Amid all the darkness in the world, the United States’ great blue-collar bard has not yet given up believing that things can be turned around. His message is to hold on and stay true to what we believe in. Things will get better – sooner, perhaps, than we might dare to hope.
