cosmolinguist | There's magic in the night (Reply)

I can't remember if I even said here but D's Christmas present for me was finding out about and arranging for us to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Sunderland at the end of this month.

When he told me about this, it felt like a million years away but now that it's May, it's "the end of this month."

Wow.

I'm the one who's been a Springsteen fan since I was three and D has very little idea about what his music is like. So I've been saying I'd educate him, but I hadn't started yet. Finally tonight we commenced, with what I always new was going to be the first lesson: Springsteen on Broadway.

When I first saw that, I described the effect it has on me afterwards: "I cried a lot and by the end of it I felt like my soul had been wrung out, washed clean and replaced better than new."

Being solo and acoustic, Springsteen on Broadway doesn't give you a good idea of what Springsteen's songs famously sound like, but I think it should give a person a pretty good idea of what Springsteen is like and I wanted to start there.

We got two-thirds of the way through it before we wanted to call it a night, it's past my bedtime and after "Born in the U.S.A." I was feeling such heavy feelings and then he starts playing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and I'm like oof... To translate: you're going straight from a song about the misery Vietnam veterans and their loved ones experienced in the aftermath of their time in the war, to a song about a dear friend who died and who Springsteen loves in a way that displays the most wholesome masculinity.

Yeah I need either sleep or more beer after that one-two punch. And it is a school night.

But before I left to have a pee and recycle my empty beer bottle, D wanted to show me what he'd written on Discord:

Fuck, I'm watching "Springsteen on Broadway" on Netflix, and he's just such a good storyteller. He's doing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and telling the story of how he met Clarence Clemons, and there are tears in my eyes.

I knew basically fuck all about Springsteen before I watched this and I think I'm in love with him.

I beamed and gave him a double thumbs-up after I'd read this. I told him is the best reaction I could've hoped for. Exactly this.

I've been in love with D for what feels like a long time but I've thought I was in love with Bruce Springsteen even longer, so I'm delighted to see this connection being made.