Description
Near the end of last year, Bruce Springsteen invited the E Street Band to his New Jersey home studio. The group recorded an entire album in just five days—a breeze compared to the laborious, years-long sessions that defined their work together in the ’70s and ’80s. In an alternate timeline, they might have spent 2020 carrying that energy to stages around the world. After all, where Springsteen’s solo music is a place for his character-driven stories, the E Street Band is his conduit toward community, and emotional uplift.
Letter To You is a vibrant and energized album, maybe even just a bit raucous at a few points — but even in its heavier moments you can feel a sort of palpable joy coursing through it. All the decades lead to this, the band being able to get back together and knock out an album so spontaneously & freely giving . Letter To You exudes a casual, almost intimate, feeling even while the album echoes bits of that old-school E Street sound…. that carefully managed & arranged bombast.
Letter To You partially plays like one passage of the E Street Band’s infamously long concerts, and there are plenty of ways in which it also boasts the same thematic cohesion Springsteen always prides himself on.
