The past few years have been awfully productive for The Boss.
Bruce Springsteen went from his Tony award-winning Springsteen on Broadway show to writing and recording his latest solo album, Western Stars, to writing and recording a new album of songs with the E Street Band.
The new album, Letter To You, is due out October 23. You can listen to the title track in the player above.
Springsteen tells Rolling Stone that his recent inspiration was brought to the fore with the help of a guitar that was gifted to him by a fan after one of his Broadway performances.
"I said, 'Geez, you know, thanks,'" he recalled of the too-generous gift. "And I just took a quick glance at it and it looked like a nice guitar, so I jumped in the car with it."
Not long afterwards, Springsteen was on a flight to North Carolina to visit an old friend and former Castiles bandmate who was dying of cancer. On the way home, he started ruminating on former E Street Band members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, who were each lost to cancer in 2008 and 2011, respectively.
In April 2019, a couple months before his solo album was to be released, Springsteen returned to the guitar the fan had given him.
"All the songs from the album came out of it," he said. "In perhaps less than 10 days. I just wandered around the house in different rooms, and I wrote a song each day. I wrote a song in the bedroom. I wrote a song in our bar. I wrote a song in the living room."
The Boss said he recorded the ideas as memos in his iPhone. But instead of building out arrangements for the band, he got the band back together and they built out the song arrangements in the studio.
In a press release announcing the new album, Letter To You, Springsteen called it "one of the greatest recording experiences I've ever had."
Letter to You is Springsteen's 20th studio album overall.
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