Photo: Press
Bruce Springsteen hasn’t exactly been shy about tearing into Donald Trump but fans expecting a diatribe against the US president on The Boss’ upcoming solo album may find themselves wanting. Springsteen says that it’s “not topical at all.”
Springsteen has just started a solo residency at the 960-capacity Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway in New City and demand for tickets is so high that his run has been extended until February. And while Springsteen will undoubtedly be giving it his all, he’s explained why he’s holding back on laying into Trump.
Speaking of the solo album that he plans to release once the residency has finished, Springsteen told Variety: “It’s not topical at all - topical writing at the moment doesn’t hold a lot of interest to me.”
He continued: “I really got out a lot of what I had to say in that vein on Wrecking Ball. I’m not driven to write any anti-Trump diatribe; that doesn’t feel necessary at the moment.”
Asked why, Springsteen said: “Because it’s everywhere and all over, ya know? It feels a little redundant to me at the moment. And, once again, I always try to look at what I can deliver that’s personal to me and of most value.
“The audience has a wide variety of needs; whatever you’re writing, you’re trying to meet your own need, and as I’ve said in other interviews, Marty Scorsese once said, ‘The job of the artist is to make the audience care about your obsessions.’ So I hope I write about the things that obsess me well enough for my audience to care about them.”
He concluded: “I never wanted to be just a proselytizer for an ideological point of view. That’s not my job; that’s somebody else’s job. And if you even look back to Woody Guthrie’s material, he didn’t do that. He wrote these very full character pieces that, whether you were there in the Depression or not, they live today.
“They weren’t hollow, they weren’t one-dimensional; they were these very full character pieces about the times. I still aspire to that, really, and if it has political implications that’s fine and if it doesn’t that’s fine too.”
