In November, Bruce Springsteen released Only the Strong Survive, his 21st studio album. It is the second of those albums, following 2006’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, that contains no new original songs. Indeed, it is billed on the sleeve of the album as “Covers: Vol. 1,” suggesting that more of the same is in the pipeline. Springsteen has been in the habit of releasing something every holiday season for some years now, putting out anniversary box sets with unreleased stuff from his vast archive, old concert releases, or side projects like Springsteen on Broadway in years when he has no new studio work to promote.
In one sense, Only the Strong Survive is a bookend to The Seeger Sessions. The former album mined American folk and gospel, while the new album goes back to Sixties soul and R&B sounds of Motown, Stax, and other black-music powerhouses of the era. Combine the two strains with basic garage-band guitar rock n’ roll, and you have the elements of the rich roots-rock Jersey Shore sound that has characterized Springsteen’s career. As before, Bruce approaches the source material with love and reverence. Only the Strong Survive includes only two pervasively covered standards (“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and “Don’t Play That Song”), filling the rest of the album with deeper cuts from artists such as the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Commodores, Ben E. King, the Supremes, and Frankie Valli. These are not obscure songs, many of them having been hits, but they are mostly not songs you have heard on the radio any time recently.
The E Street Band is absent, other than some backing vocals by the band’s violinist, Soozie Tyrell, who was also part of the Sessions Band. Eighty-seven-year-old soul veteran Sam Moore of Sam & Dave joins Bruce on backing vocals on a few tracks. Moore backed Springsteen on three songs on 1992’s Human Touch. His voice meshes so well with Bruce’s on this material in part because, when you hear them together, it is a powerful reminder that Springsteen’s longtime wingman Steve Van Zandt has spent his whole career singing in the style and tone of Sam Moore.
The good news is that the resulting album is a pleasant listen, alternating between smooth soul and energetic uptempo tracks. Bruce is in fine voice, and the songs are professionally arranged around him. If you like Springsteen’s voice and you like this genre of music, you’ll enjoy the album. This is, however, missing the spark of originality that marked The Seeger Sessions. Then, Springsteen assembled a new band and put his own stamp on the old folk standards, even touring with the band to retool some of his own songs in folky arrangements. As we discussed in part two of the Political Beats episodes on Springsteen, the 2007 Live in Dublin album contains some innovative reworkings of songs such as “Open All Night,” “Atlantic City,” “Blinded by the Light,” and “Growin’ Up.” There is no such creativity at work here: Bruce is just wallowing in nostalgia and singing songs he likes, and hopes you will like hearing him sing and bring back those memories. The album literally opens with the backing singers repeating “I remember.” Springsteen has chosen tracks that name-check Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, and other long-departed greats of the genre. This is a love letter to a time and its sound, rather than an attempt to breathe new life into old material.
Nostalgia and imitation, of course, have always been a big part of the Springsteen experience. Bruce takes a lot of guff for being a rich rock star who playacts at being a workingman. In his autobiography and his Broadway show, he cops to this, saying he built his career writing about things he had “absolutely no personal experience” with: “I made it all up.” But this misses the point: The people plopping down hundreds of dollars a ticket for Springsteen concerts aren’t blue-collar and working-class people, but many of them are — like Bruce — the children of blue-collar and working-class people, the Boomer and Gen X white-collar workers who connect with songs about Bruce’s factory-working lunchpail-carrying dad and dying-industrial home town because that describes the world they, too, left behind. They got out while they were young.
At 73, Springsteen can be forgiven for a certain amount of creative exhaustion and self-indulgence. This is the tenth of his studio albums released since he turned 50; by contrast, he released only eight albums in his 20s and 30s when he was writing songs in a gusher of musical catharsis. Some of the albums of the past two decades had something fresh to say, and others did not. Letter to You, his last E Street Band album, was released in 2020, and it was the best original Springsteen album since The Rising in 2002. While Letter to You was padded out with a few songs written as far back as the early 1970s, the best material on the album was newly written reflections on mortality. It followed Western Stars, released in 2019, which took a mellow solo detour into the sounds of the West. Maybe those were the last chapter of fresh ideas in the Springsteen songbook, but even if that proves the case, he was strong enough to survive.