Friday, April 5, 2024 Entry #83
I have been wanting to write an essay about Bruce Springsteen’s extensive use of the term “promised land” in his songwriting for quite some time. I even refrained from posting video snippets I took of Springsteen performing his classic song “The Promised Land” at the beginning of the tour when reviewing those early 2023 concerts, saving the clips so they could accompany an eventual, more topical post.
I’ve always loved “The Promised Land,” released on the first Springsteen album I ever purchased, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, from 1978. With its driving guitar and harmonica solos and Springsteen’s signature poetic interweaving of despair and hope, “The Promised Land” is a mainstay on Springsteen’s concert playlists. The Boss has said of this song, “It is one of my favorites and it continues to be relevant.”
In fact, besides “The Promised Land” song itself, Springsteen has dropped that title phrase into no less than eleven other songs, according to the website BruceBase Wiki (see the full list at the very end of the post). The concept of ‘promised land’ is clearly near and dear to Bruce Springsteen’s heart.
Of course, the “original” Promised Land is a specific place in the Middle East that the biblical book of Genesis claims God gave as a blessing to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. It was described as a slice of perfection, an area “flowing with milk and honey.” Later in the Torah narrative, the escaped Hebrew slaves, led by Moses, spend forty years in the desert wilderness in search of this place they believed was promised to them. Eventually, according to the story, they entered and conquered it, ultimately establishing two ancient Jewish kingdoms within the approximate boundaries of this storied Promised Land.
However, artists like Springsteen have long secularized the religious myth of the Promised Land. Using that evocative and ancient term helps lend a solid foundation to all kinds of stories about individuals and societies moving from times of suffering, through an arduous but transformational journey, always carrying the deep hope of ultimately reaching salvation and redemption. Springsteen has said that though a number of his songs contain imagery and language he learned from his Catholic upbringing, “They are not religiously based, but they are about basic things. That searching, and faith, and the idea of hope.” Springsteen is particularly drawn to create songs with a promised land theme-though his characters, including factory workers, undocumented workers, Vietnam veterans, and single mothers, are often in great despair, Springsteen yearns to carve for them a legitimate path to a better life. He once reflected, “I could never get that redemption stuff out of my work or out of myself; it’s here to stay.”
Given that California has long been romanticized as the American version of the biblical Promised Land, and here I am posting about my road trip west to see two Springsteen concerts in Los Angeles, this seemed like an appropriate moment to finally put together my thoughts on the subject. It’s certainly easy to feel the promise here in Southern California, a place perennially sunny, filled with hope and opportunity, complete with wide open spaces, and access to the seemingly endless ocean. Like the first Promised Land, California is a good spot to start fresh and create new paradigms.
Springsteen himself labeled the chapter in his memoir that described his parents’ decision to relocate to California (while Bruce stayed behind in New Jersey) “Promised Land.” In addition, in his song “Going Cali” (see entry #77), Springsteen casts his own first visit (though relayed in the third person) to the Golden State in the same terms: “Like his folks did in ‘69, he crossed the (California) border at Needles and heard the promised land on the line.” I will add that I just recently drove into California the same exact way, and I instinctively felt a similar sense of buoyancy and renewal.
However, when Springsteen invokes the promised land in his songs, he is not usually referring to a physical piece of geography. For him, the term is rather a metaphor for something uplifting finally happening to a person or group after facing seemingly intractable obstacles. As Kate McCarthy wrote in her scholarly article “Deliver Me From Nowhere: Bruce Springsteen and the Myth of the American Promised Land” (yes, she beat me to it, lol), the Springsteen storytelling landscape is filled with folks in despair who are “waiting for that moment of change, something to break the ties that bind them, to get out of the traps that are set in their lives by themselves, others, and society.” To Springsteen, the repeated affirmation from our title song — “I believe in the promised land!” — demonstrates the strength and faith that keep the people in his songs hoping for a better reality ahead.
By choosing a precise natural setting for the opening line of “The Promised Land”—“On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” (the exact place was inspired by one of Springsteen’s real life road trips to the region, see Entries #77 & 78), Springsteen reinforces the biblical origin of his song title. The Israelites too journeyed through the desert between leaving the place that enslaved them and finally arriving at the site of their salvation. The protagonist of “The Promised Land” wants us to know that, “I’ve done my best to live the right way/ I get up in the morning and go to work each day.” However, even after doing all of that, “Your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold/Sometimes I feel so weak I just wanna explode.” Ultimately, there’s. “Gonna be a twister to blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground.” But, as bad that reality sounds, Springsteen’s instinct is to instill the belief in his downtrodden and marginalized characters that they will indeed stand their ground and eventually reach their promised land.
Well, at least temporarily. This is also a theme of Springsteen’s. We can “case” promised lands (“Thunder Road”), and we desperately need to reach them from time to time, but we cannot remain eternally. As Springsteen sings in “Wrecking Ball,” “Hard times come and hard times go (repeat multiple times), just to come again” (see Entry #39). This pattern also reflects the biblical paradigm, by the way. Even after the ancient Israelites finally reach their Promised Land for the first time, they proceed to go through repeated cycles of exile from it and return to it. Ultimately, Springsteen’s primary message seems to be that we need to disabuse ourselves of the illusion of a life without limitations while still holding onto a sense of the glorious possibilities that remain.
As mentioned, though Biblically inspired, the promised lands Springsteen envisions in his songs aren’t traditionally religious at all. They are not synonymous with anything heavenly (some view the Promised Land as euphemistic for the afterlife), instead they are available in the here and now. Springsteen’s secular versions of the biblical destination are found in earthly blessings and pleasures; our highest level actions and decisions, sexuality, and community. In his songs, the promised land is reached in transcendent moments like during the “magic of the night,” or when we are unselfconsciously “out in the streets.” As Springsteen has said, “Grace to me, it’s in the events of our day, the living breath of our lives, the transcendent in the realm of the physical.”
Springsteen often uses evocative imagery in his songs to illustrate arrival into these promised lands, most particularly with a burst of sunshine (as in the Bible’s story of Jacob, who after engaging with God and finally receiving a legitimate blessing, it is written that, “the sun rose above him.”). At the exact moment of redemption for the protagonist in “Spare Parts,” Springsteen writes, “how bright the sun shone.” An instant of grace and hope finally occurs in the otherwise depressing song “I’ll Work For Your Love” and right then the “sun fills the room.” In the song “Paradise” just when a woman chooses life over death, she feels the “sun upon her face.” And of course, when the “Born To Run” lovers finally “get to that place,” they will at long last “walk in the sun!” This is Springsteen’s eternal hope: through our various journeys his characters (and by extension, all of us), will continue to believe in promised lands where, as in his soaring song “Land of Hope and Dreams”— “tomorrow there’ll be sunshine, and all this darkness past.”
Azzan Yadin-Israel has written a fascinating explication of the spiritual side of Springsteen’s songwriting, called The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen. In it, he notes an interesting arc in Springsteen’s promised land songs from using motorcycles and cars as the vehicular means to reach redemption in early songs, to writing more about trains as the preferred mode of transportation to get to salvation in his later compositions. This is an important distinction and a most meaningful poetic change. Motorcycles and cars are built for one, a couple, or an intimate few. Trains, on the other hand, seat far more people, are open to the public, and have a set destination. This method of getting to the promised land is accessible to all, not just to some. (When I read this analysis, the amateur rock historian in me was reminded of Jackson Browne’s “For Everyman,” seen as a response to David Crosby’s “Wooden Ships.” Crosby’s song is a fantasy about the singer and his lover sailing away to escape a dystopian reality, while Browne gently chides that privileged stance, singing that if Armageddon was imminent, his instinct would be to wait “for everyman” before he himself fled.) There is a telling line in a powerful 1995 Springsteen song about social injustice, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” indeed one of the songs that uses the phrase ‘promised land,’ though in a highly ironic context. “The highway is alive tonight,” it starts in a way utterly familiar and comforting to fans of Springsteen’s early work, but then it takes a dark turn: “but nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes.” Here Bruce Springsteen, who helped popularize the open road as the most glorious way to ‘pull out of there to win,’ is telling a bitter truth. Not everybody can escape to promised lands so easily, and the rest of us are sometimes needed to help bring others along.
While there are a few train references in Springsteen’s more recent cannon, “Land of Hope and Dreams” (see Entry #53) is the most paradigmatic. Though it is not one of the songs into which Springsteen drops the exact term “promised land,” clearly that is precisely where the train in this song is headed. Here, it’s not just Bruce and Mary from “Thunder Road,” or Bruce and Wendy from “Born To Run” ‘feeling the wind blow back their hair,’ ‘pulling out of there to win,’ ‘letting loose the madness of their souls,’ or ‘walking in the sun.’ On this inclusive and humane train, it’s ALL aboard; saints and sinners, winners and losers, gamblers and whores are all bound for some glory. Trains may be far less romantic than motorcycles, but a bit of lost freedom is compensated in Springsteen’s world view by the satisfaction of the building of a meaningful community. One senses that the diversity and communalism aboard itself is precisely the reason that this train’s destination gets to be a promised land (or ‘ a land of hope and dreams” if you will).
Springsteen the angsty and dreamy teen long ago grew into a socially aware and responsible adult. While he still writes songs about many topics including just plain old having a good time, much of his songwriting and storytelling has matched his personal growth trajectory. As Kate McCarthy wrote:
“Springsteen’s early salvific songs were about individuals and couples and their desire to enter the promised land, his later work is more about a collective effort for the community, and for all humankind, to have a better life.”
Or, as Springsteen often puts it, “Nobody wins unless everyone wins!”
Springsteen’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball is known as his ‘Occupy Wall Street’ record, and it is filled with righteous anger at the unfairness and pain of economic inequality. The album certainly serves up a prophetic scolding that we have failed to live up to our promises to ourselves and each other. However, along with the pointed critiques, Springsteen still almost always manages to turn it around, eventually pointing us to the ideal, the possibility of a better destiny. Throughout the outrage that infuses Wrecking Ball, there are still the “I believe in a promised land!”-type hopeful refrains. Even a song with the telling title “Rocky Ground,” for example, ends with a round of “There’s a new day coming!” Again, Kate McCarthy sums it up nicely:
“Fans adore Springsteen because he offers a vision of themselves as inhabitants of a promised land that is truer, more authentic than their daily experiences.”
Finally, there is the notion that besides attempting to describe the promised land concept through his songs, the very nature of Springsteen’s music and performances actually make Springsteen shows become that kind of mythic place for audiences in the moment. I have written throughout these posts about Springsteen and his sincere belief that rock music can be transformative and offer salvation (see especially my opening essay, Entry #1), and I am not alone in experiencing Springsteen’s concerts as its own promised land of sorts. It is “land” filled with cacophonous noise, an atmosphere alternating bright lights with enveloping darkness, uninhibited joy, infectious and idealistic anthems alongside softer, yearning ballads, full-throated singing in unison, camaraderie, emotive storytelling and messaging, and an overwhelming sense of gratitude. A Springsteen show is like a three hour bubble with all that transpires serving to cleanse, purify, and bring us to a sense of higher ground and rebirth.
“Springsteen concerts suggest that in addition to depicting a kind of promised land, the music also conjures it, makes it temporarily real for those participating.” -Kate McCarthy
“Hey ho, rock ‘n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere!”-from the Bruce Springsteen song “Open All Night.”
When Bruce Springsteen sings it, I too believe in a promised land!
“The Promised Land” by Bruce Springsteen
On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert/I pick up my money and head back into town/Driving ‘cross the Waynesboro county line/I got the radio on and I’m just killing time/Working all day in my daddy’s garage/driving all night chasing some mirage/Pretty soon little girl I’m gonna take charge.
The dogs on Main Street howl ‘cause they understand/If I could take one moment into my hands/Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land.
I’ve done my best to live the right way/I get up in the morning and go to work each day/But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold/Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode/Explode and tear this whole town apart/Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart/Find somebody itching for something to start.
The dogs on Main Street howl ‘cause they understand/If I could take one moment into my hands/Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land.
Well there’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/Gonna be a twister to blow everything down/That ain’t got no faith to stand its ground/Blow away the dreams that tear you apart/Blow away the dreams that break your heart/Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.
The dogs on Main Street howl ‘cause they understand/If I could take one moment into my hands/Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land.
These are other Bruce Springsteen songs that include the term ‘promised land’:
“Break Out,” “Fist Full of Dollars,” “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come),” “Galveston Bay,” “Goin’ Cali,” “Johnny Bye-Bye,” “Racing In The Street,” “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “The Price You Pay,” “Thunder Road,” and “Walking in the Street.”
Day 5