When Bruce Springsteen announced a few months back that he intended to walk the boards at the intimate Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway, many were left scratching their heads. “The Boss” is the kind of guy who could fill nearly any football stadium in America multiple nights in a row with supreme ease, what made him all of a sudden decide to scale down? Well, as it turns out, it was a parting performance he gave at the Obama White House that sparked his desire to get more intimate.
In a new interview with the New York Times to promote the show, Springsteen said of the gig in the East Room, “There was a lot of storytelling, which goes back to our early days at the Bottom Line when you were in front of a couple of hundred people…It worked in a very, very intimate setting.”
The way he described the performance gives ticket-holders their clearest sense yet of what they might expect when the see him this Fall and Winter.
“My thought on it was, well, I’ve had a long writing life, and over those years I’ve set out a certain set of values. And the best you could do at that particular moment was just to find a show that expressed those things as best as I could. There’s nothing Trump-centric about what I’m doing. My idea was really just to present the work that I’ve done for the past 40 years or so and let it speak for itself. I didn’t feel like I needed to get on a soapbox or be real ideological about it. I wanted the night to play very naturally, and be broad enough to be about all the things I’ve written about over the years. And in that way, in the contrast, it would comment.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Springsteen offered a revelation that is sure to make his fans across the world quite happy, “I’ve finished a record,” he said. “I had some inspiration. When you’re locked into a period of creativity it’s very similar to being hungry all the time. You have an appetite to write. It’s one of the nicest feelings in the world for a songwriter because you know what it is to be without that appetite.”
You can read his entire interview over at the New York Times.
