The Music of 2020

Near the end of every year, I write a list of the ten best films of the year – though last year, I substituted it for a Best of the Decade list. In advance of this year’s top ten films (which may take a little longer to deliver, given that many 2020 movies won’t be widely available until early next year), I thought I’d provide an additional list devoted to the music that shaped my experience of 2020 as a whole.

In these strange, unprecedented last twelve months, music has played as large a role as cinema in my day-to-day experience. As I mourn the end of a relationship and grapple with the fact that our country will never really be the same again, I find myself retreating again and again to the new albums from two of my favorite artists, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.

The songs on these albums may have been arranged and recorded before the pandemic, but both feel like reflective odes written for a world crumbling around us.

That’s not to say that they’re not energetic and rousing – Springsteen’s Letter To You is packed with his characteristic exuberance (not to mention the full-throttle sound of the E Street Band), and Dylan delivers a number of toe-tapping blues numbers (which have become his specialty in recent years).

There are two songs in particular that I think really capture the mood and tenor of this year – for me, anyway. I’ll start with the Dylan song, Murder Most Foul – which, I’ll be frank, is one of the best compositions of his indelible career. The 17-minute song made headlines this summer for being Dylan’s first-ever track to hit #1 on any Billboard chart, a feat that feels precisely in tune with the overall strangeness of 2020 (there were a few other examples of this – for instance, Woody Allen’s long-delayed A Rainy Day in New York topped the global box office in May, when only a few countries had opened their cinemas).

Murder Most Foul is, as Dylan puts it, “a blood-stained ballad” about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but in its astonishingly expansive 17 minutes, the song seems to transcend specifics and become about everything.

I got blood in my eye, I got blood in my ear

I’m never gonna make it to the New Frontier

The song makes us feel like we’re all passengers in Kennedy’s limousine on that horrible day in 1963, slowly rolling toward a tragic end. To numb us along the way, we can switch the radio dial (Dylan repeatedly refers to disc jockey Wolfman Jack), but should we choose to look up, we’ll once again be faced with the horror that awaits us. The song is a slow-moving conveyer belt, and there’s no way to get off. 

Even as we’re engulfed in a comprehensive play-by-play of the most excruciating details of the assassination, Dylan journeys forward and backward through time, going through a litany of references to music and films. The song seems to be about how now, more than ever, pop culture and national tragedy are inseparable – Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young goes hand in hand with the place Tom Dooley was hung – and we turn to music (and other art forms) to numb us to the horror around us (Hush little children, you’ll understand; The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand). In the second half of the song, around the 9:15 mark, there’s an interesting break, as if Dylan is too repulsed to keep recounting the details of the assassination and instead turns to requesting one song or artist after another to Wolfman Jack. And just when you think he’s spun off in a tangential direction, Dylan brings it all back to the murder.

Although Murder Most Foul is a bleak piece of work, Dylan is still as playful and inventive as ever (dare I say the song is occasionally funny, making it even more horrifying). He has particular fun with word association, hopping from Kennedy reference to musical reference without even announcing it (I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline being one of the best).

Most importantly, Murder Most Foul pinpoints the Kennedy assassination as the original sin of modern-day America, around which all of our other cultural and political accomplishments, atrocities, victories and triumphs revolve (The day that they killed him, someone said to me, son; the age of the Antichrist has just only begun). Dylan’s not just singing about the death of a President – he’s talking about the death of a country. This is our national retrospective, and Wolfman Jack is playing America’s greatest hits as we roll along toward the afterlife in Kennedy’s limousine.

The soul of a nation been torn away, and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay…

The entire Dylan album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a delight. I mean, how can you resist lyrics like I’ll take the Scarface Pacino, and The Godfather Brando; Mix it up in a tank, and get a robot commando? As is so often the case, the song that I now find myself playing most often (other than Murder Most Foul) is one I didn’t immediately respond to - Key West (Philosopher Pirate), which never fails to lull me into a relaxing mood. 

I’ll never forget the day that the full album was released – I got off work at 8pm, and my then-girlfriend and I went for a nighttime drive out of Charlottesville and into the Virginia countryside, listening to it in its entirety. By the time Murder Most Foul closed out the album, I had already heard the song many times, but it was still revealing new things to me. It’s the rare kind of composition that asks you to stop everything you’re doing, lean forward, play it loud and reflect. And this was truly the year for reflection.

There’s more uplift to be found in Springsteen’s Letter To You (thought the album is still quite mournful), which is a stone-cold classic in the Springsteen canon. The song that most speaks to the present moment is the eighth track on the album, Rainmaker. It’s a song about a snake oil salesman and the depressing extent to which his followers will hang on to his empty promises. Sound familiar? What differentiates Springsteen’s song from any number of editorials on the mindset of Trump voters (in particular, voters who have been swindled into voting against their own self-interests, time and time again) is the empathy Springsteen brings to the table. Instead of examining the vitriol and hateful rhetoric that rises out of blind loyalty to a con man (which, make no mistake, is as destructive as any threat from outside our country), Springsteen instead examines the very real and unsettling economic realities some of these people are facing.

Parched crops dying ‘neath a dead sun
We’ve been praying but no good comes
The dog’s howling, home’s stripped bare
We’ve been worried but now we’re scared

People come for comfort or just to come
Taste the dark sticky potion or hear the drums
Hands raised to Yahweh to bring the rain down
He comes crawlin’ ‘cross the dry fields like a dark shroud

Rainmaker, a little faith for hire
Rainmaker, the house is on fire
Rainmaker, take everything you have
Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad
They’ll hire a rainmaker

Make no mistake – Springsteen is describing a very specific kind of gathering, but examining it from the perspective of folks who really are looking for something to believe in. It’s entirely conceivable that a number of Springsteen’s haunted protagonists over the years could have turned into Trump voters (in fact, many of the blue-collar individuals who so identify with his music are often aghast when Springsteen delves into the political – when, of course, his music has always been political). In an interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in October, Springsteen eloquently described his approach to writing about American’s failures and triumphs as follows:

“I think what the issue is, is that the key to some of my music is you need to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time, which is sort of the measure, a bit of a measure of adulthood. So you need to be able to deal with the fact that a song can be both prideful and critical. And that idea is very central to a lot of my music, because that’s how I feel. You know? I am proud of my country, I’ve had an amazing life and gotten the best out of it through living here, but there’s a lot to continue to be critical about. So both of those things are going into my music. It’s a bit up to the listener to listen well if you want to get the whole picture. But to do so, you’ve really got to be able to hold the idea: pride and criticalness can go hand-in-hand.”

Amen to that.

With Rainmaker, Springsteen also recognizes the people about whom he’s singing aren’t victims, and the song wisely doesn’t let them off the hook for allowing a charlatan to run the land. The key lyrics here are: 

They come for the smile, the firm handshake
They come for the raw chance of a fair shake
Some come to make damn sure, my friend
This mean season's got nothin' to do with them

They come 'cause they can't stand the pain
Of another long hot day of no rain
'Cause they don't care or understand
What it really takes for the sky to open up the land

‘Cause they don’t care or understand what it really takes for the sky to open up the land… you hit the nail on the head there, Bruce. 

As I found myself writing some goodbye letters of my own this past year, the entirety of Springsteen’s Letter To You resonated with me on a profound level. Springsteen even released a film companion piece to the album on Apple TV, titled Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You, which I adored. It is exhilarating to witness the E Street Band record a new album in real time - and one of their all-time best ones, to boot. Just as profound are Springsteen’s musings on loss, the afterlife, recollections of his youth and the importance of living life in a caring and empathetic way.

Letter To You can be seen as a companion piece to last year’s beautiful Western Stars (which accompanied Springsteen’s album of the same name) and the previous year’s Springsteen on Broadway, which I had the privilege of seeing live during its Broadway run. This trilogy finds our greatest living American musician examining his legacy and making a personal statement, both musically and cinematically. Director Thom Zimny, by the way, is an excellent filmmaker - his choice to shoot One Minute You’re Here (the first song on Letter To You) in an unbroken close-up on Springsteen’s face is remarkably powerful.

As a die-hard Springsteen fan, I’m predisposed to love these films - but in the most objective sense, Western Stars and Letter To You are two of the most moving and masterful albums of Springsteen’s career, and taken together with Springsteen on Broadway (and his memoir, for that matter), they represent the late career work of an artist who is never finished investigating, creating and pushing his artistic practice forward in new and revealing directions.

My other favorite songs off Letter To You, by the way? I adore If Was A Priest (first written by Springsteen in the Asbury Park days) – a song I’ve listened to I don’t even know how many times. I still don’t completely know what it’s about, but it continues to lift me up every time I hear it. I also love Burnin’ Train and the titular song, but they’re all equally excellent. I wish we had gotten performances of Rainmaker and Janey Needs a Shooter in the Letter To You film, but I imagine they may not have fit thematically with what Springsteen was trying to evoke with the movie.

I’ve continued listening to Western Stars quite a bit this year, too. Bruce Springsteen and Thom Zimny’s film companion piece from last year speaks to me now as much as it did one year ago - where I am in life, the baggage I’ve accrued, and my ability to make sense of it. I was, quite literally, the only person in the cinema when I saw the film last year in New York - and while I wish more folks flocked to the picture, I’ll admit it was a profoundly meditative experience watching it completely alone in a big auditorium. Kudos to Warner Bros. for giving this film a proper theatrical release (not so much for everything they’ve done since then, but that’s a different topic altogether).

If I had to pick one song from Western Stars, it’d be Stones, the tenth song on the album. Watching Springsteen and Patti Scialfa sing this song together is electrifying - you can feel the love, hurt and triumph of their entire relationship communicated in that piece. There’s a wonderful line, somewhere around this performance, about how we’re sometimes unable to hold onto love, but we can sure hold onto hurt. I feel that.

Just as last year's The Irishman (which opened around the same time as Western Stars, thus the connection in my mind) worked as a reflection and assessment of the lives and careers of its makers, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Western Stars similarly feels like a cinematic self-reckoning for Springsteen. I am so moved to see my favorite artists pondering and expanding upon their legacies, and giving us these heartfelt meditations on their lives in the form of cinema and music.

There were a number of other albums that helped me through the year – all of them older titles, naturally. If my three primary picks are Rough and Rowdy Ways, Letter To You and Western Stars, then I’ll add seven more to make it an even ten: Gordon Lightfoot’s Gord’s Gold, Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection, Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love and Nebraska, Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: The Rolling Thunder Revue, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, and the original motion picture soundtrack to Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood.

And, no matter what my eventual Best Films of 2020 list says, this was my most watched movie of the year.