and the greatest of these is love

Bruce Springsteen is one of my heroes. I have loved him—NOT too strong a word—since I first heard “The Meeting Across the River” in 1975. He recently said in an interview with Rolling Stone, about being a 16-year-old kid in a band, “I was very isolated. That’s a common story with rock musicians. We all feel like that. And it makes you mad…..I mean, REALLY mad! But if you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just being about you, you start to communicate. I wanted to be a part of the world around me.”

He went on to say about his writing, “I will steal directly from life…things everyone goes through. I’m not interested in the solipsistic approach to songwriting. I don’t want to tell you all about me. I want to tell you about you.”

Back in April, five nights after Danny Federici (his bandmate of more than 40 years) died of melanoma, the interview says, “Springsteen opened his show in Tampa, Florida, with a film tribute to his old friend and a version of ‘Backstreets’ without organ—and a spotlight shining where Federici should have been. ‘That was Bruce’s way of saying, “OK, everyone is wondering about our loss,”’says (bandmate Nils) Lofgren. ‘“Well,let me show you how bad it is.”’

Upon the death of a friend, looking into the face of one’s own mortality, mortality sometimes seems to smile back. “It’s a funny thing to say. But I’ve got a deadline! And that fire I feel in myself and the band….It carries an element of desperateness. It also carries an element of thankfulness….We are perched at a place where we want to continue on—with excellence,” Springsteen then said. “That’s our goal. All the rest of the stuff—we’re gonna figure it out.”