"Springsteen Hears Voices" . . . Rolling Stone . . .

[OneBlueSky]

For his new album, he digs into classic labor and protest folk songs made famous by Pete Seeger

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/9961901/springsteen_hears_voices


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EU1PNC/sr=1-1/qid=1145776272/ref=sr_1_1/002-7025532-7996803?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=music

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The band has three weeks until its debut performance, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Scheduled afterward are a ten-date European tour and a monthlong American roadshow, which kicks off on Memorial Day. However, this ensemble is not Springsteen's walloping blood-brothers the E Street Band. It's a mix of old friends and new faces, a thirteen-piece outfit that has been nearly ten years in the making. In various incarnations, it has convened exactly three times before this stretch of rehearsals. Those three times led to Springsteen's newest and perhaps least commercial album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a collection of labor, civil-rights, protest and story songs from the repertoire of Pete Seeger, the pillar of the midcentury folk revival, now eighty-seven and laid up with a bad leg in upstate New York.

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Where most of Springsteen's repertoire is for the people, the new songs are music by the people; they're field songs, not stage songs, many originally intended to be sung by civil-rights marchers, dockworkers, draft dodgers. These range from ultra-canonical songs etched into the brain of anyone who's ever been in a grade-school music room, like "John Henry" and "Froggie Went A-Courtin'," to spirituals that faced hardship head-on, like "Eyes on the Prize" and "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." He doesn't attempt to recontextualize the songs so much as to resuscitate them, to pick up and pass them on to, as Springsteen puts it, "the next guy with a guitar out there on the highway willing to come along and give them a ride.

"The songwriting was what struck me, how alive the songs were," he adds. "You have all those lost voices floating in there. And that's something I pursue in my own work all the time. I'm interested in lost voices. I don't know if I'm chasing that or if it's chasing me."

Though one might expect sparse, haunting acoustic ballads in the vein of The Ghost of Tom Joad, The Seeger Sessions is more of an old-timey party album, with influences reaching into jazz, zydeco, bluegrass and, in the newest songs, gospel, which has been Springsteen's kick lately.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/9961901/springsteen_hears_voices