Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You, review: passionate, brilliant, and unashamedly old-fashioned

“One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone,” Bruce Springsteen croons on the pensive opening of his 20th album, Letter To You. At 71, the veteran singer-songwriter seems in a reflective mood.

One Minute You’re Here is a folky gem, as poignant as anything Springsteen has ever sung, his bruised vocals softened to match his acoustic guitar. It is, perhaps, what you might expect from a grand old man of rock and roll, entering his seventh decade in trying times with a tender rumination on the fragility of life.

But then something rather wondrous happens as we roll on to the title song. With a dramatic wallop of snare drum smashes, a grand descending piano motif, a twisting howl of electric guitar and the high soaring flutter of a Hammond organ, the E Street Band announces itself in all its sinuous, spectacular glory. And Letter To You takes off like a rocket.

Late last year, Springsteen summoned his long serving seven-piece band to his New Jersey home studio and recorded an entire album in just five days. He had a set of songs dwelling on mortality, memory, loss, hope and faith, shot through with a vein of defiance, a conviction that music itself has the power to heal and restore.

“Rock of ages lift me up somehow,” Springsteen pleads on Last Man Standing, commemorating his first schoolboy band, The Castiles, of which he is the only surviving member. “I’m alive!” he roars with hair-raising conviction on Ghosts, whilst paying tribute to those the E Street Band have lost along the way: saxophonist Clarence Clemons and organist Danny Federici.

Over the years, the Springsteen oeuvre has enumerated the ordinary struggles of blue-collar lives, but on House of a Thousand Guitars he addresses his own occupation as a working musician, serving his community. It is given a contemporaneous political setting where “the criminal clown has stolen the throne” but its core is mythic, to locate “a lost chord / That will band us together as long as there’s stars.”

Recorded live, with no overdubs, the album is a celebration of performing music; a roar against the silence enveloping the world. It is deeply and unashamedly old-fashioned – almost the opposite of the stripped back, carefully layered and technologically processed digital pop of today.

The E Street band build a towering wall of sound, a tsunami of instrumental attack. Its beauty lies in the intuitive simpatico of the playing, with different elements rising to the surface at just the right moment. It used to take them months in the studio to achieve this blend. Now these old road warriors can conjure it in a single take.

The past is alive on three lost songs revived from Springsteen’s early days. The passionate commitment Springsteen brings to the wordy Song For Orphans, rambunctious If I Were the Priest and absolutely storming Janey Needs A Shooter (a title borrowed by Warren Zevon in 1980) demonstrate that, in essence, he hasn’t changed much over five decades of recording. Elegiac closer In Your Dreams has a wiser, more lived-in tone, but the optimism remains undimmed – a conviction in the power of music to lift us up, even in the face of death.

Springsteen remains the gold standard in rock and roll, a singer-songwriter who never gives less than everything. Letter To You is another first-class missive from the Boss, signed, sealed and delivered with love.

Letter to You is out now on Columbia Records