God sent us Bruce Springsteen for moments like this. So do yourself a favor, and take a break from despondency and doom loops about democracy dying to watch Road Diary on Hulu — the behind-the-scenes story of Bruce Springsteen’s recent world tour.
It will do you good to be reminded that the American spirit is continually renewing and resurrecting, even when it feels like the sun just got extinguished. Yes, of course it matters who occupies the Oval Office. But America is just as much the setlist of a Springsteen show as it is an executive order from the Resolute Desk.
The story of Springsteen and the E Street Band feels like the story of the nation, in a Whitmanesque way. They began with wild, unruly energy and crazy dreams. They hurled their young bodies across every imaginable dive bar on the Jersey Shore in the early 1970s. They made mistakes. They once played a gig inside a refinery — the kind with fire shooting out the top. They got booed off the stage at one show. They drove nine hours through the night in a cramped van to the next one.
They dealt with loss. Our nation’s might come in the form of a president targeting political enemies and attempting to tear down democratic institutions. Theirs took the form of what seemed at the time like the end of their journey — the deaths of Clarence Clemons, their saxophone player, and Danny Federici, their keyboardist. They mourned those men, but then replaced them and resurrected the band, honoring their memory at every subsequent show.
Death, of course, comes for everyone and everything. The E Street Band survived. The nation will replace and resurrect and survive as well.
Why? Because there really is such a thing as the American spirit and, like karma, it is born again and again and again.
If you need some help thinking about how inspiring the American spirit can be at this moment, turn on Road Diary and watch the scenes of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing live in Europe.
Take a close look at all those people from Germany, Spain, Italy, Norway, and everywhere else across the continent, with tears in their eyes, singing themselves hoarse to an artist deeply identified with this country, your country. It’s OK to feel a sense of American pride. In the flushed and happy faces of those European fans, singing along to what can only be described as American songs, you’ll see evidence for yourself of just how energizing the American spirit is and how that spirit electrifies the world. I got to experience it for myself in London on July 4, 2023.
Bruce Springsteen is so necessary to the idea of America that if he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. And what’s the one overarching theme of his songs? That you, and your work, are necessary to the idea of America.
That is why there are so many ordinary people in his music, just trying to be decent, just doing their best. Cops and firefighters doing their jobs, grandparents showing their grandchildren around their hometowns, petty criminals trying hard to go straight, immigrants scratching out a living. All of it, all of us, are America — even those who voted for a candidate we dislike and disagree with.
Springsteen ends Road Diary by reflecting on why people continue to show up to his shows in such large numbers. It’s not, he believes, to hear their favorite song or to see the face of a celebrity. Rather, he says, it’s for “the intensity of your presence. How alive you are on any given evening. That’s the beating heart of my job, to be there and only there. To play for all the stakes …”
Springsteen’s hope is that the intensity of his presence, the contagious aliveness he delivers every show, infects the audience “with life’s possibilities, with energy to take outside of the concert gates and bring into your life.”
Positive energy. A visceral sense of life’s possibilities. This is what Springsteen sees as his job.
Maybe it’s your job, too.
Whether you are employed at a food bank or a philanthropy, a hospital or a university, bring the best of the American spirit to work tomorrow. Give it the same everything-you’ve-got energy that Bruce Springsteen offers to the audience in his shows. If you’re lucky enough to be employed in the nonprofit sector — which is to say, you get paid to do work that makes a difference in the lives of other people — you have a candle. Light it.
