Now that we’ve dealt with Springsteen’s catalogue it’s time to attend to a few new additions that have come along before returning to our alphabetised journey, and what better way to follow The Boss than with a “new” release by Merseyside’s chief exponent of the Springsteen-ian (see what I did there) arts ?  I said about Ian Prowse’s most recent album, “One Hand On The Starry Plough”, that I was done writing about him, until his next album…and then he goes and re-issues this…

Originally released in 2014 on CD only, Ian Prowse’s first solo album has been re-issued in 2024 including 3 songs that didn’t make it onto the original release (“Maybe There Is A God After All”, “Rise Like A Lion” and “Here I Am”, all written for this record but hijacked by the record label for the 2012 ‘Best Of…’ album) and, most importantly for the purposes of this piece, this time on vinyl. This hasn’t been re-mastered, it has finally been mastered. Financial restrictions meant the original release never was mastered which may be one of the reasons it’s my least played of his solo albums, it didn’t sound very good on first release, muddy and limp.

“God And Man” should have been a classic, thundering track 1 side 1, setting the tone for what was to come after it…but it found itself a victim of the overall sound in 2014…here, properly mastered it reveals itself as the huge opening statement it should always have been. Packed full of that self mythologising they’re so good at up in Liverpool (“Born in the city, One of our own, Baptised in the river, Tore down the town, Danced in the Cavern, Scaled the heights, Walked out in the morning, To the Mersey lights”). What was a timid thing hiding its beauty on CD is now a bold, bewitching thing made of shining acoustic guitars, rumbling bass and the sound of The Waterboys big music (I’m guessing Prowsey won’t mind me saying that).

Other songs that I’d not initially been so keen on reveal themselves to have been hiding their lights. Live favourite “I Did It For Love” finally sounds as slinky on record as it promises on stage, a jazzy, soulful tale of fighting the good fight with a hint of Gil Scott-Heron about it (as a later remix confirmed) which I’ve played out in DJ sets more than once since I got my hands on this record. 

There's more, so much more. “Lift Up Thine Eyes” is a hymn to England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland and the part all have paid in building Liverpool as the city it is. “Lest We Forget” tells the story of the pals who went off merrily to fight WW1 and were scarred by it for life, if they came back at all. It’s somewhere around “The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda” seen through the memoir of Harry Patch “The Last Fighting Tommy”. “Raising Up The Clans” sits inside a beauty of a picked guitar riff and is a call to arms for us all, with the obvious message that we’re stronger together, cos as Jason Isbell put it in “Hope The High Road”, “There can't be more of them than us, There can't be more”.

On and on it goes “Anger Mountain”, “We Were Men”, “Bring On The Healing”, “Coming Up For Air”…the whole album is a lesson in melodic songwriting with a lot to say for itself. Prowsey has said “World War I, racism, the Cuban revolution, the NHS, it’s all there”. This is modern folk music, music of the folk, for and about the folk. 

If you have been aboard the good ship Prowsey for some time and were, like me, a little underwhelmed by this album 10 years ago then I can absolutely recommend this fully mastered beast. If you still need to buy a ticket for that voyage then this is as good a place to start as I could point you to.

God And Man - https://youtu.be/VuPYZH406aA?si=BqpSkMIosoAprorU

I did say almost done…this is the soundtrack to a British made film about Javed, an Asian teenager from Luton, who discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen in the ’80’s and has his life completely changed by that. The film is based on the book “Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N' Roll” by journalist Sarfraz Manzoor.

This soundtrack is really a Various Artists comp but as it’s predominantly filled with some of the better known Springsteen songs (“Dancing In The Dark”, “Hungry Heart”, “Thunder Road” etc.) I’m tacking it onto the end of the Springsteen albums but it also includes the Pet Shop Boys, Aha, Heera, Amer Chadha-Patel and AR Rahman. 

There are a couple of previously unreleased Springsteen recordings included, “The River” live from Madison Square Garden in September 1979, an acoustic “The Promised Land” live at the National Mall in Washington DC at The Concert for Valor, November, 2014 and “I’ll Stand by You”, a previously unreleased studio recording which I have only recently discovered was originally written for the first Harry potter film ! The album is pressed on White vinyl. That’s all there is to say about it really…

I’ll Stand By You - https://youtu.be/hwfPtkxF0aA?si=3CebiVolieEESJA6

Bruce Springsteen’s most recent album of original material, his 20th studio album, was released in 2020 and in places reaches some seriously emotional heights.

“Letter To You” is about time, ageing and loss. In 2018 George Theiss, founding member of The Castiles, passed away. This left Bruce Springsteen as the only surviving member of the first band he had been a member of, this affected him quite profoundly. It prompted the writing of the first song for this album, “Last Man Standing”. That and five other songs give “Letter To You” its central story, of those young men coming together to seek rock ‘n’ roll glory, growing old together and finally having to say goodbye.

The title song sees Springsteen offering his audience a testimonial, a summary of what he’s been trying to say to us all these years (“In my letter to you, I took all my fears and doubts, In my letter to you, All the hard things I found out…And I sent it in my letter to you”), not why but what.

“Last Man Standing” is the song that kick started this whole album. Lyrically it’s a list of memories of those early days in your first band, the people you played with, the places you played, how it felt, all capped off with the realisation that all that is now in the past and gone and “I'm the last man standing now”.

“We all have our own ways of praying. I restricted mine to 3 minutes and a 45 rpm record…Life in 180 seconds or less. If you get it right, it has the power of prayer.”  –Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You (2020). “The Power Of Prayer” ain’t about going to no church, it’s an offering to the power of the 7” single, and extension of the lyric in “Bobby Jean” from Born In The USA” that told us “we learned more from a 3 minute record baby than we ever learned in school”.

“House Of A Thousand Guitars” (probably my least favourite track) I find it confusing. It’s a hymn to the church of rock ‘n’ roll, the gig, and to rock ‘n’ rolls most revered symbol, the guitar. But the whole song hangs off a classic bit of Roy Bittan piano thumping ! Guitars barely feature at all, go figure.

“Ghosts” may well be my favourite song on this record. “I hear the sound of your guitar, Coming in from the mystic far…”. It’s that joyous rush of youth and the noise you make in your first bands. Memories of standing up there with your brothers giving it all you have, allied to the feelings of other songs knowing that those days and people are gone and all that’s left are the ghosts of those times.

“I’ll See You In My Dreams” in this incarnation is a full band workout. On his current World Tour it’s the song Springsteen has finished the set with on the majority of nights including both the shows we have seen. If the central theme of “Letter To You” is ageing and loss then that is the same message he’s been trying to get across in his recent live shows. The song is the partner of “Last Man Standing”, it relates the same story of those young boys looking for rock ’n’ roll Valhalla and although Bruce now knows he’s the last of them he’s afforded them some immortality by writing about them and committing that to record. Someone said to me at a funeral recently that you only truly die when the last person talks about you, this is that statement in song “I'll see you in my dreams, yeah around the river bend, For death is not the end…”. It’s a fantastic end for this album, all swooping Hammond Organs  and twangy, Duane Eddy style guitars and the belief that “I'll see you in my dreams when all our summers have come to an end, I’ll see you in my dreams, we'll meet and live and laugh again…I’ll see you in my dreams”, we all need that, right ?

In a similar vein to “High Hopes” half of “Letter To You” is made up of songs that have been around for some time. “Janey Needs A Shooter”, “If I Was The Priest” and “Song For Orphans” all date back to the early ‘70’s. “Janey…” was originally recorded for “The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle” and was considered for inclusion on both “Born To Run” and “The River” although it would have sounded very conspicuous on all of them. “Burnin’ Train” was first demoed in 1993, album opener “One Minute You’re Here”, which does fit this albums themes of loss well, dates to around 2004. “Rainmaker” was written around the time of “The Rising” and this recording likely comes from the “Magic” sessions, it would have fit well on either.

Fans at Springsteen shows bring banners with them in order to request songs. He usually pulls 2 or three of these up on stage (the banners not the fans) each night and plays them. “If I Was The Priest” has become quite a popular request song and he played it in Europe for the first time ever when we saw him recently in Cardiff. It’s not bad, it’s not great either, it’s an early example of the sort of song he perfected on “Jungleland”, “Incident On 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade”, the epic. romantic street songs. But this one talks of Sherrif’s, Dodge City and Cheyenne so didn’t really fit the cityscapes he was writing in the early 70’s which is maybe why it didn’t surface on record for 50 years !

There are fans out in the world that aren’t big fans of “Letter To You” citing its less than coherent theme. The theme is age and loss but of the old songs that have been included only “One Minute You’re Here” fits that. I liked the album on first hearing and hey, can’t a guy just make a record without everything being tightly thematically linked ? I said when this album was released I couldn’t wait to hear some of it live. In the two shows we’ve seen since this albums release we’ve been treated to performances of “Letter To You”, “Ghosts”, “Last Man Standing”, “If I Was The Priest” and the heartfelt acoustic run through “I’ll See You In My Dreams” neatly wrapping up the album and shows. “Letter To You” isn’t Bruce Springsteen’s best album and by a long shot it’s not his worst, it is one I really like though. 

This is where we end our dive into Bruce Springsteen’s albums (we won’t be touching the ridiculous covers album “Only The Strong Survive”, the first Bruce Springsteen album I have no interest in hearing…what were you thinking Boss ?), well almost. There’s a lot more I could have said about all of them but I wanted to keep them as concise as I possibly could so I didn’t bore you all. Alongside David Bowie and Paul Weller, Bruce Springsteen has probably had more effect on me musically than any other. Only two of those guys are still with us and making music and The Boss is the only one of them I’m still interested in…only the strong survive huh ? If any of this made any of you take a listen to Bruce Springsteen where you haven’t before then I’ve done a decent job. Thanx for indulging me these past 4weeks…

Ghosts - https://youtu.be/Lo5QNcFioZ4?si=Pg9zVDWtUkzY9qXO