The Problem of Aspiration

Moral Vision and Bruce Springsteen, Part One

The first in an occasional series of reflections on the religious and moral vision of the Heartbreak Prince. We’ll start with the double-edged sword that is having aspirations. These pieces were once envisioned as a book, but you’ll have to settle for me working it out here instead.

REMINDER: our next book club for supporting subscribers will be on Michael Sandel’s The Things Money Can’t Buy, on September 23rd.

The Moral Life, Imagined

I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen since college, which I think is when most people begin listening to Springsteen. Not “hearing him”, by which you encountered Springsteen on the oldies channel or at an abandoned skating rink. Listening, like the way you finally listen to the advice your parents have been giving you, or listen, the way that you pull off the road to have the phone call about the One Thing that matters.

In listening to him, I learned many important things and found many songs close to my own experiences living the Heartbreak Prince life. I found voice for fears and anger and hunger, and thus, in Springsteen’s work, I found a friend.

It was only after listening to him for about two decades that it occurs to me that what I was listening to was probably what Springsteen himself was listening to: the idea of Springsteen. In his recorded Broadway show from his 2017-2018 run, Springsteen breaks down his songwriting and confesses that most of his songs about working class life and about aspiring to greatness out of the doldrums were fictions.

I had read his autobiography (reviewed here), and knew that there was embellishment, so this wasn’t a surprise: he really did grow up in Jersey to working class parents, and wanted to be a musician from his teen years. And no one really thought that he had held jobs as a mineworker, or as a long-haul trucker, even if there were plenty of lean years as a musician. To be a musician is to embelish the truth, even if there’s plenty of truthfulness to the story, and we routinely forgive that.

And so, in his songs, we find less some kind of psychological chronicle than we do a series of aspirations: a moral map of sorts in which he tries on various lives that he’d like to inhabit¹. A brilliant project recently put Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” as a secularized version of the book of Numbers, a younger man longing for the freedom of breaking out of his unnamed town with Mary at his side. He’s got a guitar, a car, and by God, he won’t die here in this stupid place.