Word: bruce
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...Bruce Springsteen has a songbook that reads like a union membership log. He has written about cops, fire fighters, soldiers, road builders, steelworkers, factory laborers and migrant workers. Springsteen himself has held exactly one real job. For a few weeks in 1968 when he was 18, he worked as a gardener. But his gift is not horticulture. His great gift--the one that makes him the best rock 'n' roll singer of his era--is empathy. Springsteen doesn't know what a 40-hour workweek feels like, but he knows how a 40-hour workweek makes you feel...
When Springsteen cut the band loose in 1987, Bruce was a major American somebody who had made his name singing about nobodies. But money shines a lot brighter than empathy, and after Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen wasn't just rich; he was loaded, and everyone in America knew it. Rather than continue as the wealthy rock-poet of the American grunt and risk being labeled inauthentic, Springsteen set out for new territory. As he put it in Better Days, a 1992 song, "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor...
...important fact about Springsteen: he thinks a lot about being Springsteen. After Tom Joad, he did some hard thinking--about himself, his family and the job of being Bruce--and decided to move back to New Jersey, where he now occupies a sprawling estate just a few minutes' drive from where he grew up. "Patti and I, we're both Irish-Italian," he says. "We have a lot of family here, and we wanted the kids"--they have three, ages 12, 10 and 8--"to have that experience of knowing people who do lots of different kinds of jobs...
...fire fighter with Manhattan Engine Co. 4 and, as his obituaries noted, a lifelong Springsteen fan. Recalls his widow: "At the beginning of October, I was home alone and, uh, heavily medicated. I picked up the phone, and a voice said, 'May I please speak to Stacey? This is Bruce Springsteen.'" They talked for 40 minutes. "After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little smaller. I got through Joe's memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call...
Listen to Farrelly on the subject: "Let me tell you, I have more CDs that people have sent me, just random people that wrote songs or whatever. I won't listen to them. But I trust that Bruce is sincere, that he really believes in what he wrote. I know the firemen are going to have a hard time with some of it, but then you sing along, and you just feel a little better. I trust him with all my heart. The only thing that bothered me is when he married Julianne...