Mark Richardson

For a short while I thought hard about pitching a One Week One Band on Bruce Springsteen but it’s impossible to imagine ever having time for it (I am enjoying Mike Barthel’s Hole coverage there this week, and I love the idea of this Tumblr in general). Maybe someone else will do Springsteen—I hope so. But if I had done Springsteen, I surely would have posted a video of him covering Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” on his 2005 tour because it’s one of the few pieces of music guaranteed to give me goose flesh no matter how many times I hear it. I am drawn to the unbelievable intensity of it—the desperation and hopefulness are for me there in almost exactly equal measure. So it’s uplifting in its way but it also feels like a very difficult struggle, one that will ultimately prove to be futile. There is something Sisyphean about the extreme repetition of it, where there is all this tension and pressure but it’ll never be released because the place it reaches for will always be just beyond its grasp. So you go and go until it comes crashing down and, if you are lucky, you remember this dumb and pointless hope and start again just because.

Posted at 12:46am and tagged with: Bruce Springsteen, One Week One Band,.