SO The Boss (Bruce Springsteen) gathered his E Street Band in the bubble of his New Jersey compound where his studio is located to record "live," within a span of five days or so, a bunch of songs he just finished writing, along with three old songs. Now, if he did this in November this year, you'd say he probably did it in cognizance of the fact that, at 71, he is at high risk of succumbing to COVID-19 in case he contracts SARS-CoV-2 in the current pandemic that has caused the sudden demise of several people in the arts and culture world. But The Boss actually did this in November 2019 before we all got to know of the virus.
  Still, in those four days, what was produced was an album that came out very much like a heartland rock version of David Bowie's Blackstar, even though in one track dedicated to his dead friends, "I'll See You In My Dreams," The Boss implies by the very song's title that he doesn't want to join these friends anytime soon just yet.
  So, again, this was recorded in just a few days, as reported by Rolling Stone and NME, five to be exact. And it was made in a "live" sort of process instead of having each member's part recorded separately, and the visuals on this process could be gleaned on the accompanying documentary film Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You. All in the pandemic tradition, you'd say, that had the likes of Taylor Swift and Charli XCX adapting to, producing instant albums (folklore in Swift's case and how i'm feeling now in XCX's) that had the critics raving.
  Others were more excited about the fact that Letter to You has The Boss of the Born to Run era reemerging after a long drought of Springsteenian classic rock songwriting that many have purportedly been missing. But this call to a former heartland rock sound should be deemed only natural, given that the songs here are sort of the 71-year-old rock star's way of formally saying goodbye, in an album, to the passing of old E Street Band buddies Clarence Clemons (who died in 2008) and Danny Federici (died in 2011). Meanwhile, the three songs in the album excavated from a shelf of unreleased '70s compositions work as Springsteen's elegiac salute to late The Castiles mate George Theiss and his presence in the rock star's life.
  So the tracks here are personal paeans to friends and communities, from the past and of what should be a coming future. Springsteen sings about friends still living and close ones now dead. That should explain the emotional intent of these tracks' melodies and the rocker's seemingly more vulnerable singing of them, not out of effort but due to The Boss's usual sincerity. But shouldn't this record also serve as a liberal inspiration to us in this planet tired of watching those other bosses in our era―at the helm of filial or business or government boats―who are obviously thinking only of themselves and their personal or unregulated corporate freedoms to do whatever the hell they want, as if the world is revolving (with total admiration and acquiescence) around them and is not expecting them to behave as one among the responsible workers of the planet? What the album offers is an old millionaire rocker's singing of songs for and about average Americans' common lives, the way a rocker should, portraying characters' lives against the mysteries of the world instead of against a niche from another race or religion or sex that could be used as a scapegoat for the majority's misery.
  Indeed, if there's politics in everything, then even a singer-songwriter's momentary break from overt political song-writing can be appreciated as a demonstration of a social-cum-political attitude towards people and places as well as death and the life that one has lived, especially in this current era where the line between political decisions and social behavior has all but been obliterated. That demonstration would be as important as the protest oeuvres, maybe more important. And it's equally important that one did it via proven expressive heartland-rock melodic tropes that readily gel with Springsteen's sort of heartfelt prose that chooses to avoid a trendy kind of vague poetry, underlining the truth that this elderly rock star is still not interested in singing to the critics at the artists- and intellectuals-frequented pubs.
  Yes, the album's first five tracks may be said to be boasting a kind of ballad prose, including "Burnin' Train" that's a torch-tribute to his long-lasting marriage to Patti Scialfa, "Janey Needs a Shooter" that's obviously about a woman who's got a kind of "nigga" by her side against the pill mill or pervert docs and the corrupt preachers/priests and the dirty or judgmental cops, and "Last Man Standing" that's of course about his being a kind of survivor to the passing of members of The Castiles.
  But "Letter to You," the second track, is what you might call a prose poem for being a kind of Springsteenian version of The Lord's Prayer.
  Now, from "The Power of Prayer," of course, it's all decidedly pure poetry, with this track being about the religion of life outside of religious living as well as about music-making as a form of prayer (celebrating one's surroundings with gratitude). That track is an apt transition to another poetic piece, "House of a Thousand Guitars," about a time in the last four years where a "criminal clown has stolen the throne," a clown whose demagogic noise would, however, have to face the resistance of "a thousand guitars," sad though the necessity of that might be. On to that song about demagoguery, "Rainmaker," which strikes us as a lovely portrait of the same con man referenced in the preceding track. Even the prose of "If I Was the Priest" actually works as a thesis on the internal conflict within religiousness inside the old West (which contradictory landscape, truth be told, has not exactly changed all that much, the reason why we continue to see Bible-carrying lynching-thirsty racists in that landscape). "Ghosts," a song for Theiss, could also be dedicated to religion's saints; otherwise Springsteen's own roster list of saints which would include his old bandmates.
  "Song for Orphans," meanwhile, is not literally about orphans; it's about all the losers out there, especially the ones inside the rock music industry of which Springsteen has been a worthy and lucky part. It actually references Springsteen's early rebel-band inspirations including The Axis and Confederacy and the "restless loud white boys" that include Springsteen himself and those other African-American-music-influenced white musicians. But just in case these lyrics are read as something else, as one that's singing about grabbing the leadership of a "confederacy," for instance, and forming an alternative "axis," remember that the coup that it sings about is certainly on a mission different from a neo-Nazi or alt-right one, given that the song's narrator finds himself inside a night that "lullabies the refugees with an amplifier's hum."
  Now, despite all that depth we can treat most of the songs here with, we don't have to puzzle our way through the closer "I'll See You In My Dreams," which is a sort of reprise of track one, addressing missed dead friends again, but, as we mentioned above, is also seemingly funnily refusing to see those friends soon in heaven. But the album is totally about Springsteen's kind of early-septuagenarian perspective on his past life, on the present, and on our future life as a global community as well as on death. In the album's accompanying documentary film, The Boss closes his narration with this: "Age brings perspective in the fine clarity one gets at midnight on the tracks looking into the lights of an oncoming train. It dawns on you rather quickly, . . . there's only so much time left. Only so many star-filled nights, snowfalls, brisk fall afternoons, rainy midsummer days. So, how you conduct yourself and do your work matters. How you treat your friends, your family, your lover. . . ."
  Makes you wish the USA (and others) had such a non-juvenile Boss-voice up there at the top, doing work that he would treat as something that could be his last.