Features The Key Notes Of Youth: Bruce Springsteen & My Musical Education

In all honesty, I was an exceptionally lucky child. Now, that sentence would usually be completely irrelevant in regards to this subject matter, however, on this occasion, I mean it in terms of my musical education.

For as long as I can remember, my life has been enveloped within the music and lyrics of one Mr Bruce Springsteen. Hell, I can still name at least five members of The E Street Band off the top of my head. I spent my childhood fascinated with the softly spoken manner with which Nils Lofgren spoke, and the fact that Patti actually married Bruce. Every Christmas, we’d abandon traditional festival albums in favour of bootleg copies of The Boss’ December shows, when he’d crack out that heart-warming rendition of ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’. I even believe that when ‘The Rising’ was released in the early 2000s, we owned four separate copies, to go in different rooms of the house.

Some of my earliest memories involve that one man’s music; from living room dance routines to genuinely convincing people that my favourite album was ‘Born In The USA’. However, I must’ve been about five years old when I said that, so god knows how reputable my opinion actually was.

Now, as I grew closer to those awkward teenage years, I did as any young person probably would, and spent most of the time becoming extraordinarily embarrassed by my roots. The music sounded outdated, I was too innocent to understand the message and my friends had never even heard of him! I became more fixated on figuring out why the hell someone from such an awesome TV show like Friends would bother to appear in the ‘Dancing In The Dark’ video, whilst repeatedly asking my parents to turn his music down. Or off entirely, depending on how much I wanted to piss them off.

So, despite being born into a household of Springsteen – amongst an endless list of legends that my parents tried to pass on to me – I, instead, sought safety within the charts. I fell in love with the bubblegum pop of the noughties; the sugar-coated, lycra costumes of all-singing, all-dancing groups that would one day, return to reclaim their ‘former glory’.

It wasn’t until I fell in love with my first New Jersey band though, at the ripe old age of fourteen and a half, that I began to realise that all of those years had become the basis of my musical nurturing. Then, as time elapsed and my love for rock music grew, I turned once more to the man I had then been so familiar with. Those nights I had stumbled downstairs to find my father curled up, choked with tears, listening to ‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’, came flooding back into my mind with a fondness. The words he spoke to me, telling me stories of shows he and my mother had witnessed, the people they had met, and simply the emotions that had been evoked along the way; everything became indescribably special.

It was then, towards the end of my teens, he told me quite simply that he hoped I could one day love an artist as much as they loved Springsteen. That I could have someone around for most of my life to draw inspiration and hope from, all the while remaining in love with their entire back catalogue. And from that point onwards, things began to click into place.

I have since returned to those early albums to see whole new meanings within the expanses of sounds. What once sounded outdated, I have to come to realise was exactly what the band had then hoped for; bleak, dark, hurt, but ever consistent. His lyrical tales still stand as picture perfect narratives portraying how hard life can truly be. The contradictory and conflicting nature of his entire art: a toughened beauty, enhanced by the human experience itself. But the most prevalent quality of his music? The unwavering sense of hope that glimmers through even the darkest of tracks. The hope my parents once found; the hope I am still discovering.

So, why would any of this over-indulgent and romanticised autobiography actually be relevant? Well, Bruce Springsteen was indeed recently the keynote speaker at this year’s South By Southwest conference and it was then that he did much the same. Stepping up to the podium, he came armed with nothing but a few sheets of paper and an opening joke, but listening to the live stream, you could almost hear the standing ovation he received as he walked onto the stage.

In a twist of the term ‘keynote’, The Boss guided us through what he expressed as the ‘key notes’ of his own life, documenting his influences from The Beatles to James Brown, The Animals to The King himself. And it’s thus, that we return to the idea of musical education. Whether it was his fascination with Elvis’ hips that made him pick up a guitar, or me, the five year old, cluelessly in love with ‘Born In The USA’, it’s evident that our youthful influences may indeed reign champion one day. However, it was his concluding sentiment that I feel most key: an address – a lesson - to aspiring musicians, and no doubt, listeners, everywhere.

“Rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears, and open your hearts. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town, and, you suck: it keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. Stay hard, stay hungry, and stay alive. And when you walk on stage tonight, bring the noise and treat it like it’s all we have. Then remember, it’s only rock and roll.”

And it’s now that I realise, that when my father wished I was to find a musician not unlike Bruce, I was inevitably destined to share in that love all along. A lifelong lesson that saw the student finally striking those same key notes as her teachers.

Class dismissed.