Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

"I noticed there's a Springsteen thing on Netflix," my fellow Springsteen devotee Stuart said when I went over Sunday evening. We agreed it sounded like a good thing to have on in the background while we had dinner. "We can chat and stuff," he said.

Like fuck we could. It's Springsteen on Broadway and it's absolutely captivating. We hardly spoke. We muttered gueses at what songs he might be starting to play and got almost all of them wrong. At one point Stuart said "You can tell he misses Clarence," and this was before he talked about missing Clarence; this was just when the saxophone was the most obviously missing from the song when it's just one guy and his guitar on stage. But mostly we were silent, just taking it all in.

It reminded me of the old VH1 Storytellers series, only he wasn't telling stories about the songs (this is why we couldn't guess them), and he wasn't playing The Hits for the most part -- he was using some songs to tell the story of his life. His parents, the neighborhood where he grew up, driving cross-country before he had a license to go out to L.A. and get famous, his family, his band, losing people, politics being horrible, going back home, things changing...

I cried a lot and by the end of it I felt like my soul had been wrung out, washed clean and replaced better than new.

Today I'm working on my essay and I listened to some choral Christmas music for a while (trying to remind myself it's Christmas in a week because it still feels a couple of months away) and then I tried my current favorite chillhop playlist but for once it wasn't good music to work to and so when I wondered what else to reach for, I thought I might go for the unorthodox choice of this Springsteen best-of that's never far from the top of my Spotify playlists. He's on my mind because of the other evening (when Stuart and I could talk again, we talked about it so much that he ended up lending me Springsteen's autobiography).

I say "unorthodox" because some of these songs are terrible for me to listen to when I'm trying to do anything else. I remember once hearing "Thunder Road" in a shop and I was just paralyzed; I had to stand still, I marveled that they're even allowed to play stuff like this in public, and I think the fact I nearly cried indicates I might not have been the most spoonful that day but still. I know to almost everybody else it's another boring old classic rock song, and it's pretty acoustic and mellow so probably fine for background music in stores right? But it just floors me.

So I had to skip around a little while I wrote (I still have ~1000 words of essay to do), and the last strains of this lovely version of "Born to Run" were fading away as Andrew came up the stairs and says "I just heard about a thing on Netflix that you might like..." and I thought wouldn't it be funny if this is what he came here to tell me about?

And then it was. He'd seen Nicole Cliffe talking about it on Twitter and thought I'd like it. It was nice to be able to tell him he was right...

I've reverted to the best-of playlist again now, and I really appreciate the way these new songs have been integrated into it. The best is that "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," which is interspersed with words of so much love for Clarence Clemons, is followed by "Rosalita," the song I most strongly associate with his playing (and the one I included in the LJ post I wrote when he died (though it looks like that particular video is gone, which is just one of the reasons I hate YouTube; seven years is such a long time ago in internet time...and honestly I didn't think it was seven years ago that he died; it feels like two or three).