Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview

This afternoon, Bruce Springsteen has a lot on his mind. There is the matter of band rehearsals and the thirty-seven-date world tour that he will soon start. There is the new album he has made, Magic, his third release in the past eighteen months. There is also the subject matter of that album, weighty stuff like the direction of our democracy and party stuff that recalls the days when sparks first flew on E Street more than three decades ago. And there is something else as well: His oldest son's soccer game starts at 4:30.

Springsteen's life at fifty-eight revolves around family and music. It was not always this way. For a long time, there was only the music. And then, for a while, only the family. The balance he's achieved — and the creative roll he's been on, four albums in the past five years — is relatively recent. "I spent about ten years where I had no destination, exactly," he says, referring to the time during which he moved to Los Angeles, settled into his second marriage and began a family. He and wife Patti Scialfa have three children, Evan, 17, Jessica, 16, and Sam, 13.

The ten years Springsteen mentions roughly line up with the period during which the E Street Band was idle, from 1988 to 1999. During that time, Springsteen redefined his career and his music more radically than any major artist save Bob Dylan, the eternal trickster. Having reached the level of mass success that his music and ambition always demanded, Springsteen pulled back. His subject matter went first inward and then outward. The most personal albums he ever made — Lucky Town and Human Touch — were, as he's pointed out, his happiest and least successful. In 1995, The Ghost of Tom Joad, a literary album with a political bent — Raymond Carver meets Woody Guthrie — followed the birth of his youngest child. He had gone, in seven years, from stadiums to arenas to theaters, a man alone with an acoustic guitar.

In 1999, a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday, Springsteen went on tour with the E Street Band for the first time in more than a decade. As it always had, the band put flesh and muscle behind the words, reconnecting Springsteen to the rock and soul that had first been the wellspring of his music. This is clear when I watch the band rehearse for its current tour at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey — an arena band gathering in a room the size of a high school gymnasium to stretch out before a long run. In that familiar voice full of gravel, Springsteen traces Sam Cooke-style melodic runs in the air.

Magic returns to the spirit of Asbury Park with a big sound Springsteen hasn't pursued since Born to Run. "Lately, I've had a little romance with my oldest stuff," he says. "There was a lot of freeness in it. When you start and when you finish — that's when the pressure is off. In the beginning, you're too unknown, you're not really competing with people. And at this point, I'm not competing with 50 Cent or trying to get on MTV. I'm playing for myself and my band and my audience." As he explains when we sit down to talk backstage at Convention Hall, Magic uses the boardwalk sounds of the past to put across the feeling of the present: "the uneasiness of these very uneasy times." Often when he speaks, Springsteen laughs midsentence, as if he's embarrassed to be taking himself this seriously. But not when he talks about the course the country has taken under George W. Bush or the war in Iraq. Then the laughter stops.