the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be

[cosmolinguist]

Well, now I've seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!

Here's the notes I made on my phone during the show.

1) And is the second song of the concert a (minor) favorite of mine that I haven't been able to track down for the playlist that I made for D to "study" from??? Yes. Yes it is. (The song is "Lonesome Day.") ["The Promised Land" is also missing despite repeated attempts to acquire the rest of that album after only half of it made it over from Andrew's hard drives, and that also annoyed me when it got played tonight!]

2) I'm so excited to hear "No Surrender" too. The song that -- when I was finally escaping the feeling we'd now call cringe about having liked him when I was a kid too young to care about taste -- was my way back in to fandom. "We learned more from a three minute record than we ever did in school."

3) I know there are orchestrated E-Street Band versions of songs from Nebraska but I'd never listened to any. Hearing "Atlantic City" now, I'm struck by how the horns and etc. evoke that carnival/boardwalk feel, which is a nice touch. Makes the lyrics even more incongruous.

4) I was not expecting to hear "Darlington County"! I am delighted to hear "Darlington County."

5) At the end of "The River" it just devolved into "ooo"s, sung at the top of his register so sounding unearthly. The melody disappeared, the song disappeared, it was just ooooo. Like it was haunting us(here "us" may be especially those afflicted by catholicism in childhood like I was and like he really was). It sounded a bit like a hymn but maybe more like a Gregorian chant: language I'll never know describing an experience I'll never come closer to having than I am by listening to this description of it.

6) Wow its so funny I never realized its just the Bo Diddley beat under "She's the One". There's so much else going on that I never noticed it!

More later, probably.

Comments

[otter]

Cool!

[sfred]

<3