Bruce Springsteen

RY: I've noticed that on average you work in cover(s) at each show whether it be instrumental or with words. Are there any songs you'd like to cover or plan to cover anytime soon?

JM: Yes. I will be covering Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" real, real soon. Within the next week sometime as a matter of fact. I don't really cover songs unless I can do something with them. I love the Alien Ant Farm cover, I love it. At first site, you're like this is junk. Well it's not junk. Anyone who can take a Michael Jackson melody and make it better, I think is great. I fully believe in doing something with a cover. So, hopefully I'll be doing something really cool with the Bruce Springsteen cover.

RS: What’s the best lyric of all time?

JM: Well, I think that the best song is Jeff Buckley‘s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.”But then there’s the best line of all time, which isn’t in that song. Bruce Springsteen wrote it, and it’s the reason that he should have won Album of the Year. I love Norah [Jones], I think Norah is amazing. But in “My City of Ruins,” where he sings, “There’s tears on the pillow/Darling, where we slept/You took my heart/When you left” – it’s the greatest line ever.

RS: You think?

JM: If you don’t respond to that, you are an android and you should be melted.

JM: "I'm On Fire" is one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. It's painfully too short, and beautiful. And aching. In a way that some of his music doesn't. It's a little bit of a step to the side for him. It's an 80's song recorded like an 80's song, yet it has not been moved out with the trash whatsoever. And it has this heart to it. this real soft, sweet dynamic to it that was always fun to sing. And I don't even really know, I mean what would you call the style of music of that song? It's like an old rock song. It's almost like an old, like an Everly Brothers tune or something. But done so beautifully, there's nothing else like it, really. The way it's written is so economical and beautiful.

So I latched onto it and played it live a couple of times. I went, Let's go and sing this. I think we plated it twice. It's almost like an Elvis song [sings verse in Elvis voice]. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And you know, I'm treading on sacred ground, covering a Springsteen tune. But it's just that Springsteen tune that just happens to overlap a little bit of how I tick and what I'm able to do as a singer. Which is not as much as he is as a singer. You know, I can't do "Glory Days" or "Thunder Road." Something about the melodic aspect of it was really easy to latch onto and it's still one of my favorite songs of all time.

your favorite song lyric?

The chorus to "Atlantic City" by Bruce Springsteen comes to mind a lot.

Springsteen does it to me now. I hear Springsteen and I go [whispers] "son of a *bitch*, I'll never do that..." A couple songs off Nebraska, when that song starts, the way he holds it together, it's unbelievable. Oh, "Atlantic City." He just knocks me out. I move around through music, and you know, I feel like to be born now is like the greatest time to be born, because you have all this extra music that came before you. So you're still finding out about music. And I was never, like, a full-on Springsteen fan, and now I'm just getting full-on assaulted.

AC: I know that the Broadway show really moved you.

JM: Just messed me up.

JM: I was bawling. I was almost convulsing crying so hard. And I was with my tour manager, and we were sitting watching the show and Bruce begins to talk about the road, you know, in this beautiful way. You know, [says lines from the play], and I start kind of getting choked up. And I hear my tour manager getting choked up and I'm like “oh this is because we do this thing, we happen to be getting upset at this.” Then I start realizing oh, everybody's crying here. You start hearing the sound of people who swear they're not crying. [makes coughing sounds]

DD: Oh yeah, that ain’t me. “Something’s in my eye! This old theatre’s dusty.”

JM: [Laughing] And then when I realized that this was what was going to happen and it was expected, I felt slightly violated because I was not prepared. I did not bring my armor for this. And he spent the next two hours destroying me—basically taking all 206 bones out of your body, stacking them up in front of you, inventorying them, and then putting them back in and going "have a nice night.” 

DD: I’ve never seen a guy like this.

JM: Never seen anything like it. It was a metaphysical—I don't even think a Netflix special can—I don't think you can show anybody the Netflix special.

DD: I wish he never even filmed that.

JM: It's impossible to film. It’s like trying to take a picture of the moon on your iPhone—it’s just like, what are you going to do with this?

DD: People are like “did you watch that?” And I go “no, I refuse to watch it because to see it live was so moving and insane that I don't want to fuck with that memory ever.” 

JM: Where are you from, are you from the east coast?

DD: San Francisco. 

JM: Okay so, and it still fucked you up. See if you're from the east coast, anywhere in the last 50 years, you smell the sky he's talking about. 

DD: Oh, I know.

JM: Even if—I didn't grow up in New Jersey, I grew when I grew up in Fairfield Connecticut—same Drake's Cakes, same Entenmann's, same New York Mets 1986 World Series, the same paper, same things, you know? And same crispy autumn air, same relationship with the seasons, same relationship with the world, and he was basically like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney, and you get in the boat and he takes you through your life. I've never seen anything like it.

And I remember I went back and met him—which I didn't want to do because I was so upset and I knew that he was gonna get a part of me that wasn't so careful with making sure I didn't bother somebody about how great they were.

DD: Right.

JM: I normally like to kind of contain myself. [Bruce Springsteen:] "No no come on down man, come on down, come on down." And I realized something that night that took me a long time to realize. Longer than most people. Bruce Springsteen knows how good he is and doesn't need John Mayer to formulate an interesting abstract way to say it so he could go, Oh shit, really? And that what I had tried to do was what every other person whom he's touched has tried to do, which is try to get the man that good to know how good he is. Which is like pissing in the wind. 

DD: Absolutely.

JM: But I had to try.

JM: Every year, theoretically, gets better to be a young person discovering music because there's more to catch up to, and only the good stuff is gonna come out, ya know? For me—Bruce —it took a minute but I had to go through Bob Dylan and Neil Young to understand the flavor of that stuff. 

DD: Well I was always a Neil Young guy, but I wasn't a Bruce guy, which was weird. 

JM: But for me my point of entry—and I started hearing things I really liked, I loved "My City of Ruins," I love that.

DD: Oh my god!

JM: [says lyrics from "My City of Ruins"] "There's a tear on your pillow darling where you slept, and you took my heart when you left." And it's sung, [sings line]. It's unbelievable.

DD: How about when he just comes out [sings line from "My City of Ruins"] "there's a blood red circle in a cold blood sky!"

JM: I got chills going up the back of my head. 

DD: I saw him play that on that benefit—it was the, uh, the telethon thing.

JM: Yeah the 9/11 telethon.  

DD: And you’re like, “What is this song?!” It’s crazy!

JM: It’s unbelievable. And so then I discover—for me what really knocked me out was "Tunnel of Love," cause whenever a record sounds like records I know I find it very helpful.

JM: And then it was like "Tunnel of Love," and then I heard like on that record there's "Brilliant Disguise", there's "Tougher Than the Rest," there's all these great songs on there. 

DD: You played Bruce on this last tour. 

JM: I just played "Tougher Than the Rest" on my birthday just as a birthday present to myself. And then I heard Nebraska and that messed me up. That just messed me up. And then like—one of my favorite things I've ever heard is "Growing Up." Have you heard the acoustic demo of "Growing Up?" Do you realize it's a two-word chorus? And it'll knock you across the room.

DD: It's so great! How about when he plays it in the play? 

JM: That's what made me sob. Have you ever heard someone sing a word or a phrase that way that embodied the very experience of that phrase? He sings Growing Up with all of the bitter sweetness of growing up. 

DD: I’m obsessed. I got all the bootlegs. There's a bootleg called “trust your car with the man with the star," and it's at the bottom line and it was something I played for probably a year and then I got the Fillmore '78 I think, or seven and then the Roxy [...]

JM: Oh, you go deep. I hope to go that deep.

DD: Oh yeah, when you get into—it's really crazy when you get into that mid-70s Bruce the muscle they had but it didn't sound like, you know, it wasn't like metal or anything but you're like, how is this so so strong? And then of course I love "Youngstown" and stuff on Ghost of Tom Joad. I think that's like my third favorite record.

JM: See I have to listen to it. Part of me being a curious dude is not acting like I know everything and I have to go listen to that.

DD: That's great. 

JM: I have to check it out cause I'm on that Linn drum, sit at home, write music with your Yamaha dx7 and a Linn drum thing, which just breaks my heart. I mean I like having my heart broken by people who are just 10 times better than me and make me feel like nothing. I like feeling like nothing in that way. I like hearing a song and going “I am a giant piece of garbage."

JM: Yeah, oh I wish I could someday sit down and write a thing that feels so good as [singing] "tougher than the rest.” I mean these are—if you think about it on a songwriting level—a lot of Bruce songs are verse-refrains. Which means—for those listening—it's not like here's a verse and now here's a chorus. It's a verse that takes you around and around and drops you on the last line of the verse. And that's a lot of his way of writing.

Do you know how good you have to be for the last line to take all of the power that was assembling—that was crescendoing—and drop it on your head and have it work? It is so hard to write eight lines and have the last line go "oh my god every one of those lines was worth it and he multiplied the power of each line by a hundred and it came down.” That's how he resolves it. It's very hard stuff. It's easier to be abstract and you see that a lot now [...]
 
DD: He's so good that I ignore his guitar tone. I would never say anything bad about Bruce, but I've never understood his guitar tone. It's the only thing I don't understand. 

JM: The Takamine thing. But even then you could say his loyalty to Takamine is so strong that he won't play another guitar. Cause you got to imagine that Springsteen playing an old D28 would knock you on your ass. 

DD: Oh shit, can you imagine? It's almost like he went like no that's Neil's thing I'm not playing.

JM: But knowing Bruce he likes a guy at Takamine who's been there the whole time.

DD: He's blue collar!

JM: He goes “I just call Gary.” I can’t disappoint. And then you'd be like that's why that guitar sounds good to me because he would never let Gary down.

It is rare, but not uncommon, for a band or an artist to kind of make a sound all their own. To find some new way of making music sonically. It is even more rare to define the music you make by introducing a new way of structuring songs. Bruce Springsteen has his own way of writing songs that, if you've listened to Sob Rock, my most recent record, a lot of the songs borrow the Bruce Springsteen structure of the last line of the go-round kind of being the one-sentence chorus, and everything builds up to that one moment. Now, it's tricky, because if you don't stick the landing, then everything that came before it is for naught.

"Tougher Than The Rest" is one of those perfect Springsteen songs that underscore the structure of the way that he writes. By the time you get to "tougher than the rest," he takes all the words before it, puts it all together and shoots it at you like a cannonball.

It's also from my favorite Springsteen album, Tunnel Of Love. Big believer in the records that come out after the great big Middle America pop hit records.