Bruce Springsteen’s Misguided Homage
What is it about reaching their 70s that makes great songwriters want to sing old songs they didn’t write? Paul McCartney reached backwards to pre-Beatles music and released an album of mostly Tin Pan Alley ditties, slipping in a couple of originals in the same style, in 2012, the year he turned 70. Bob Dylan took up crooning vintage standards associated with Frank Sinatra for the first of several albums in this vein when he was 73, in 2015. Now Bruce Springsteen, at 73, has offered up a new album consisting wholly of covers of soul-music songs from his younger days.
The music in all three of these cases is infused with the artists’ pleasure in doing something they had never gotten around to—or perhaps had felt they couldn’t or shouldn’t do—when they were younger. Exercising covers aren’t songs of his grandparents’ time or easy-listening radio; he’s doing mostly Black music from the postwar era of Motown and Philly soul. He’s not just crossing generational lines; he’s crossing lines of color. how cool he is, even as a septuagenarian white guy.
