WIDE OPEN SKIES
SURING the Super Bowl back in February, Bruce Springsteen starred in his first ever television commercial, a solemn clip called “The Middle” that found him driving a vintage Jeep through rural Kansas. Over shots of empty plains and close-ups of sturdy automotive parts, he pontificated about Middle America and the rapidly eroding political and cultural middle ground. “We need that connection,” he intoned solemnly to American football fans. “We need the middle. We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.”
To soundtrack this mythic Centre, Springsteen and producer Ron Aniello deployed a faint shimmer of pedal-steel, performed by guitarist Greg Leisz, which suggested both a vast expanse of prairie as well as a fixed perspective from which to view it. This sound is new in the Boss’s oeuvre but it’s not without precedent, recalling the ambient tape hiss on Nebraska and the soft bed of synths that buoys much of The Ghost Of Tom Joad. It’s intimate and quiet, personal yet public, much like the clip’s message.
The commercial – and more specifically the music – resonated with Luke Schneider, a Nashville-based player who has backed Margo Price and Orville Peck. “It’s easy to see why this sound is being used to evoke feelings of placid nostalgia,” he says. “The Boss is pleading for a de-escalation of bitter divisiveness, and the pedal-steel guitar, a uniquely American instrument, fits as a tranquil soundtrack to his words. Perhaps this suggests that the pedal-steel, especially in the hands of a master player such as Greg Leisz, is an instrument with wide appeal – to woke socialists
