I like what Bruce Springsteen says in the New Yorker's massive profile of his life and work, just published in the July 30 issue. Actually, he says a lot of great stuff in the interview with David Remnick, but fair disclosure: I am a big fan. This good quote is all about what we psychodramatists know as "warm up," and I think that's what makes him such a commanding and exceptional performer. He talks much about performing and how he gets ready for a show that unites the audience.
Here's one of many great quotes:
Here's one of many great quotes:
Then he speaks of what he wants to achieve in a session, er, preformance:“The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time,” he says. “You’re setting out your themes. You’re getting them comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!”
"You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody. You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That’s what we do for one another."
Springsteen also discusses his family, with his grandparents constantly mourning their young deceased daughter; his father coming home as a World War II veteran plagued with drinking and verbally abusing Bruce -- as well as his own depression.
