A Reason to Believe
Bruce Springsteen, heartbreak, redemption
27th June 2024
I saw Bruce yesterday, 8 years after the first time. On the train to London, I remembered the note I had written the day after the first time - who was my audience? I can’t remember. Maybe Tumblr? Probably Tumblr. Either way I wanted a record of everything that happened that day. I was glad about it yesterday, because I would have forgotten the couple that let me and my friend Emily go in front of them, the way in which I wanted to hug everyone, how open my heart was at age 22.
Seeing Bruce for the first time was just before one of the largest heartbreaks of my romantic life, when I knew little better than to give a lot of power to one guy, whose words of discouragement filtered through the months and years spent away from him. He didn’t care that I was going to see one of my favourite musicians, an artist whose work cut through the emotional fog of my adolescence and made me want to live again. And I didn’t know how to make him care. I didn’t know that it wasn’t my job to make him care, that him not caring was an equivocal fact that had nothing to do with me.
I didn’t know that it was enough that the people who did love me, did care. That Emily was there to take a photo of me expressing the wordless emotion of seeing the figure of one’s idolatry for the first time. I noticed that more this time—a support team who enabled me to follow through on the things that I care about: my brother, Joe, my friends who riffed on versions of “she did it!” and “So glad you made it!!” after I sent them photos of the gig (because it’s still not easy).
When it rained, I had only my white shirt to cover my head, and I screamed to Joe that I looked like Mary (Mother of God). It felt fitting: before ‘Spirit in the Night’ Bruce invoked feeling, seeing, hearing “the spirit” and the crowd raised their hands aloft. I wrote another note back in 2016, to remind myself how I felt in the moment—all it said was “I definitely feel like I’ve transcended the earthly realm”. Bruce’s religion has always been rock n’ roll and the power of music and while in 2016 I couldn’t quite name this, now that I am older, I am acutely aware of the lack of opportunities for this kind of belonging in my everyday life. In the high tides of songs, the rain which had previously stopped would start falling again, gently and refreshingly. And I felt it. The way in which one can temporarily be taken out of oneself, while still retaining an embodied mobility of the soul, the ability to make a choice to sing along and not care who might notice or who might judge but also feel like that choice has been taken out of one’s hands.
There were times when I snapped out of this mode, and was acutely aware of every conversation around me, the sound quality, my envy for the people in the front row. Afterwards, I felt a grief for what might just be my own nostalgic perception of younger me. I had a fearlessness and an openness that I miss. I hadn’t yet had the pivotal heartbreak, and maybe I can pin that as the reason. But with more aging, I feel more jaded. I am aware that I have a possibly oversized emotional investment in Bruce and his music, but the difference in the crowd between 2016 and now felt pronounced. In 2016 I was younger, skinnier and more ebullient: I worry that the world responded to me in a more favourably back then, and I cannot get that back.
At the same time, the world moulded me to be more like I am now. To return to an experience means not only noticing the changes in yourself, but the changes in the world. For whatever reason, I felt safer in 2016 than I do now. To go and enjoy Bruce, I felt I had to pause my feelings on all the injustices happening around me, that implicitly involve me and yet inure me to a certain powerlessness. In 2016, there was concern about Brexit, which hadn’t yet happened. But I didn’t have to pause the world to enjoy Bruce—Bruce was the world.
On the train to Birmingham the next day, I listened to Bruce through post-Bruce blues and thought very much of a much younger me. For whatever reason, I needed a reason to hold on to hope, and the ability to not stay stuck, and Bruce was the conduit for that. That hope still stands, even if has been chipped away at. In ‘The Promised Land’ Bruce sings as a man who feels weak and in pain and yet repeats over and over that he still believes. In a recent podcast episode of Weird Studies where they discussed ‘The Hanged Man’, they talked about the belief that the enlightened person will not and cannot ever feel at home in the world (for example, The Hanged Man is sometimes compared to Jesus or Buddha, a figure who can see the world for what it truly is but looks to others like he is hanging upside down). I keep returning to this thought. The promised land is somewhere, and that somewhere might not be here. Despite everything, and even if just for a moment, Bruce’s music can make me believe that that somewhere is real, and that redemption exists. Maybe one day I’ll figure out what it is.
