Lunching with my friend, author, music journalist, and podcaster, Rob Sheffield this past November, he casually mentioned that for the first time a song topped the Billboard charts that was entirely human-free. An AI-generated artist named Solomon Ray, created by Christopher Townsend, achieved this feat with a chain-gang thumper featuring allusions to faith called “Find Your Rest.” As Rob rightly pointed out, this “digital stream” hitting #1 on a Gospel chart and not the Billboard Hot 100 was less intrusive to the greater public, but nonetheless there it was: a song made by a computer atop the Gospel charts. The most spiritual of musical genres dominated by a robot. A ghost in the machine” kind of thing.

There are many aspects of this event to discuss here. I will start with the obvious – controversial backlash. Of course, those in the religious community questioned the worth of a song reflecting God derived from something purportedly not created by humans, who were purportedly created by God. And, of course, this underlines the argument that man created a Godhead to fill a void in the human spirit, and in many ways, the advent of AI is yet another human creation filling voids, whatever they may be. But irrespective of technology, faith, science or philosophy, there is something rather funny if not strange that the first AI creation (it was bound to happen eventually) rose to the top triggered by the faithful.

You make the existential pun here, I’ll let it lie. I have bigger hurdles to traverse.

Next, there is the obvious dispute on whether artificial intelligence is art, or strike that, a creative endeavor. My dear friend, Peter Blasevick, one of our honored subscribers, is vehemently against even considering this. He sees it, and I concur on several levels, as non-music-talents sitting in their basement with a computer feeding “ideas” into some form of AI (ChatGTP, etc) and coming up with “song.” These things are everywhere now, but mostly in social media or YouTube and not “official” releases. One can assume that people who bought/streamed “Find Your Rest” and the entire Solomon Ray album, Faithful Soul presumed this was a person, as all songs for more than a century of recorded music has surely been. Does this matter?  

Ray, sold as a Black Gospel singer in the mode of an Al Green with a heavy influence of blues/soul – I hear “Find Your Rest” as a track not unlike early Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin (all humans) that could slip easily into a secular construct. In fact, the name Solomon Ray, one could assume, is a clever mash-up of the godfathers of rhythm and blues, Solomon Burke (a human) and Ray Charles (also, again, human). So, there is some marketing acumen here that could be considered (beyond the whole computer-generated singer and song) a hoax, a con, or at the very least an attempt to mislead consumers.

An important side-note to keep me from being eviscerated: all the stellar artists referenced above, of course, are far superior to the robot and its robot song, but taste/critique is hardly the point here.

If there was no official announcement that Ray didn’t exist, then that is the most egregious part of this. Jesus, Milli Vanilli, a couple of model/dancers who were marketed as having sung songs two other guys sang in the late 1980s, were first vilified and then ostracized, despite all parties involved being human. And who is to say that you couldn’t have someone “front” a song sung by others? Phil Spector did this shit all the time in the early 1960s. Ask Darlene Love. There were 50 versions of the Drifters. What exactly is Steely Dan? But that’s for another column. So, you know, caveat emptor.

But just in case anyone thought Solomon Ray was a one-off phenomenon, the very week after my discussion with Sheffield, “Walk My Walk,” a white guy chain-gang blues by a faux band called Breaking Rust, reached the apex of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart, hitting three-million streams on Spotify. Ironically, the music streaming platform released a statement this past autumn pledging “stronger impersonation protection for artists” that “features an improved music spam filter and intensified scrutiny” of what they deem is “deceptive content.” But these policies still allow publicly anonymous creators to post AI-generated artist profiles and music, which is, at best, a paradox.

So, is this art? Is this good? Or is this garbage creation by non-musicians and non-singer-songwriters and it is very bad?

Now, I’m old, so I will land on “I’d like my artists to be human and their songs to be created by humans,” but I am also not a head-in-the-sand afraid of technology cranky white-guy grievance dipshit either. I realize there is some “creation” here, and since I have always blathered on about “art being a two-way street,” if people are reacting to these songs one way or the other, then it is art. But I am also no longer a singer-songwriter, as my friend Peter is, as so many friends of mine are, not the least of which is my niece, the 22-year-old, Sydney Leigh, who’s been a pro for a year now and has new music coming out soon that she endeavored to keep clean of autotune and other digital “fixers’ that make the untalented sound less horrible. So, I could see how those who make song, as I make words and columns and books – another craft being invaded by the robots – might be threatened and aggrieved by these faux songs.

And this brings me to the modernization of music in the twenty-first century, where a fair if not major portion of our popular music is in many ways “enhanced” and “manipulated’ by computers. Not to the extent that it is entirely fabricated, but let’s face it, has been a gateway for this ingenuity. No way this Solomon Ray character could have comfortably infiltrated the music biz before synthesizers, drum machines, autotune, digital studios, algorithms, and other aspects of technology that have taken some of the “real” and “life” from our music, those little mistakes and foibles that make recording an organic artform.

In my new book, Revolution – Prince the Band, the Era, many members of the Revolution discuss Prince’s ability to effortlessly combine modern musical instruments with a human touch, antithetical to the bands of the period that relied on synths and drum machines to dehumanize music, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Human League, etc. Prince, perhaps better than anyone in the 1980s into the 90s, balanced the human element with technology, so much so that he had entire albums dedicated to this marriage, starting in 1982 with 1999 all the way through The Gold Experience in 1995 and his use of disseminating new music entirely through the Internet, the first popular artist to do so.  

So, with the advent of two robots and their robot songs topping the Gospel and Country charts, what could be next? It won’t be stopping, that much is certain. Consumers of music have always “liked what they liked,” and invention and technology has always threatened the music business and musicians – from sheet music to radio, and then recordings, MTV, Napster, and on and on and on. The threats from the evolution of humans and machine are real, sure, but is it “pure evil” or “a necessary evil” of that evolution? The humans will decide.

One thing I noted to Rob in our discussion, as I have to many inside the industry, and especially Sydney Leigh, is that I can foresee a backlash to this from the younger generation. I already hear from Gen Z that they want real songs with real expressions, featuring those “mistakes and foibles” and they will seek those out, as youth once found be-bop during the big band era and rock and roll and rhythm & blues when “(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window” ruled the charts, and when punk revolted against the pretensions of prog rock, or hip hop was an antidote to the blandness of 80s soul, or grunge’s challenge to the pretentiousness of AOR pop, and, you get the point.

Where AI and robot songs and robot artists fit into the inevitable, “Cut this shit out!” I don’t know. Disco had its run. And then it didn’t. But it’s no longer coming, folks. It’s here.

Profonde Musique

Dec 30, 2025

Peter Ames Carlin, best known for his biographies on Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen, has created the ultimate look into the chaos, pressure and eventual brilliance during the making of Springsteen’s 1975 epic album, Born to Run, Tonight in Jungleland. Carlin expertly uses previous and new interviews with Springsteen, and a bevy of voices present for the album’s composing and production that would not only come to define the Boss’s oeuvre but place the record into the pantheon of his growing legend.

This is Bruce Springsteen faced with the very real possibility of being dropped from his label, Columbia, due to the middling sales of his previous two albums. He is also embroiled in management issues, which will usher in the era (still going strong today) of Jon Landau as his friend, confessor and champion. The album would also mark the entrance of two E Street Band stalwarts, pianist, Roy Bittan on piano and drummer, Max Weinberg that would calcify the “Jersey Sound” of Springsteen’s music henceforth.

With Born to Run, Springsteen transformed from a Dylan-cloned folk-soul balladeer into the living embodiment of The Boss, and Tonight in Jungleland takes us on that journey, visiting pertinent sideroads, as any story of this magnitude must. Carlin delivers both the harrowing and heartwarming with equal measure.

Placed in the context of Springsteen’s long and celebrated career, Born to Run was indeed a turning point and Tonight in Jungleland drops us in the middle of the songwriting, rehearsing and final recordings of a classic American musical statement. It is joyous tale of rock and roll primacy presented in an entertaining way that leaves readers with a new and essential understanding of not only the artist but his art.

I sat down with Carlin for a lengthy and insightful discussion before the book’s release in August. Here it is in its entirely.

jc: Before we begin on the book, you’ve written a biography of Bruce Springsteen and now this in-depth account of arguably his most important if not his finest album, how do you find him as a person?

PC: I like Bruce, personally, a lot. I think he’s really a cool guy. Even before I met him, I liked how he carried himself – his generosity with people, and I liked his progressive values. He seemed, for somebody who was clearly, by his own admission, heavily self-involved and into his own thing, as most artists are, that he was very empathetic. He really understood what people who met him needed from him, who he needed to be for them. And that was a huge deal because so many musicians and celebrities don’t have that bandwidth. But he came away from his own childhood and his own connection or projection of Elvis (Presley) and the musicians, the idols, he had growing up, that he remembered what it felt like to be that kid. And so, when he encounters people and they come up to him, he knows how to be, to make them feel seen and appreciated and not dismissed or made to feel foolish for being engaged with him and his work. I admire that in him.

Yeah, it’s a real art form for sure, because I’ve known a lot of rock stars who are not good at that. And they will tell you it’s awkward. It’s not natural for one person to know everything about you, yet you know nothing about them, and have a “normal” conversation. One of these people are on a pedestal. It’s just hard to live up to that, but he does. That’s an excellent point; he does live up to the iconic status that he has earned.

Yeah, he’ll have a drink with you if you catch him in the right moment. But I think it’s rough to be someone who people know that intimately through their music because you can’t have a bad day, you know?

He carries with him a great deal of the hope and the passions that people have for his music, which gets me to Tonight in Jungleland. First of all, as a fellow author who’s written a book about one album and one song, bravo on this, my friend, you killed it. It took me a mere two days to read this. I couldn’t put it down. It’s fantastic and gripping storytelling.

Oh, thank you.

You’re very welcome. That is the best compliment I could ever give a writer. Telling the story, that’s the whole ballgame. There was never a time you feel lost in this epic and serpentine tale with a lot of moving parts. The whole flow of the book works as a story, a story I knew to some extent – and I’m not a huge fan of this record, as I discussed before we started recording. Nebraska is where I land with Springsteen. For me, Born to Run has too much of that Phil Spector-y, large sound, but it didn’t matter for me, because your writing took me in there. I found myself rooting for Bruce throughout. It is fine work.

Thank you, very much.

You’re very welcome. All right, one of the things you told me, which is a little inside baseball, when I interviewed you for my Hey Jude book, Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, and when you addressed Paul McCartney, you said, “In my experience, I’ve done work on Brian Wilson, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, and they all possess this amazing drive because there was an emptiness in them that could not be filled.” And that is clearly abundant in this book. And I want to specifically cite those little snippets you put in when you’re talking to Bruce at his New Jersey home recently, as he casually throws logs on the fire. Fantastic job with that. He talks candidly about his drive to perfection as a young man. What did you glean from that as a window into the man?

Well, first and foremost, it goes without saying that he’s miraculously talented on a variety of fronts – almost too many fronts! He’s a great guitar player, a great singer, an electric performer, and he writes great songs. It turns out he’s a great prose writer, as well. He can produce; he can do all the stuff. So, you have this “God given” talent, for lack of a better expression, but on the other hand, he has this incredible drive and work ethic. From the time he started playing guitar, he wanted to be a musician so intensely that he spent his entire teen years on it. Other people had friends and other interests. He would be in his room just playing the guitar, looking at himself in the mirror, trying to master his moves while he’s doing it. And then when he started working his bands hard, it was that same thing, and a lot of that I think stems from having parents who had strong work ethics and having a deep need for both mastery and control.

A great deal of lot of that seemed to flow from his response to growing up with a dad who was an upstanding and terrific person on a lot of levels but also struggling with bipolar disorder. So, there was a lot of chaos happening around the house because of his dad’s moods and the fact that he was undiagnosed and untreated. So, as a result, there was very little comprehension of what his problem was and no solution for it other than him basically putting his head down and fighting through his days as best as he could. And then at night sitting in the kitchen and drinking beers and smoking cigarettes, ‘till it was time to go to sleep.

His father was a very difficult person for Bruce to reach, for anyone, really, but especially for Bruce. And Bruce felt severely diminished by his dad’s inability to connect with him. And this set up this overwhelming desire to connect with people and to communicate. And also, he was strung between two very different senses of himself that he got from his family, his grandparents, who, as you know, his mom and dad and Bruce came to live with his dad’s parents when he was a baby, and they had lost a child when Bruce’s dad was young, and the girl was very young, she was five, and there was a terrible accident with an oil truck on the street outside. And that loss completely devastated the family, and, of course, devastated the parents whose grasp may have been a little shaky to start out with. So, they were very odd, outcast-types, and to some degree, very poor. Their house was crumbled down and everything. But when Bruce was born and came into the home, they greeted him like the sun god, because in their eyes, he was the reborn iteration of the child they had lost.

So, Bruce is caught between this idea of almost infinite grace and glory. He was “the golden boy,” he says. But also, that was bracketed by his dad and his sense that his dad thought of him as a loser and a waste of space because that was what he heard his dad telling him, even though really what his dad was telling him that he was desperately trying to get his son to toughen up and prepare for a brutal world that had done him in, in a lot of ways. He didn’t know how to deal with his mental illness, but despite his terrible actions, Doug (Springsteen’s father) did his best.

What you’re saying, in a sense, and you do a good job covering that in the book, is that Springsteen already had built into his DNA, this idea that you just forge ahead and you find the thing you want, which is what made him a star. And that brings me to the record at hand. In the book, you go through the first two records – on the first one, Greetings from Asbury Park, he’s Dylan, or he’s being at the very least Dylan-esque, and they’re telling him he’s “the new Dylan.” Then Columbia wants a hit, so he tries to write the “hits,” like “Blinded by the Light,” but it still rings of Dylan. Then The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, the second record, which I found very fascinating, because I never knew this, and I probably should have, I had no idea they recorded all of it live, where they would go onto to piecemeal and build Born to Run.

So, when he gets to Born to Run, I have two questions specifically about the song and the record. Firstly, in essence, this record is his building the myth of Springsteen and doing it on purpose. The reason why I bring that up in the song “Born to Run,” he becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald saying, “I’m going to write the great American novel” and he writes The Great Gatsby and Springsteen, with a great deal of bravado, announces, “I’m going to write the greatest rock and roll song ever. I need to hear it, so I’ll write it!” That is a fascinating aspect of him in this book and on this record and how you depict him.

Well, I think having such a powerful early connection to Elvis (Presley) and seeing Elvis and how Elvis presented himself, particularly in the early days, before the movies and Hollywood and the degeneration of him as an artist, Bruce understood how important Elvis’s clothes were and how important the way he carried himself was. And, you know, when you follow the Beatles career, you see how crucial their image and the way that they presented themselves was and how that evolved in a matter of weeks or months. They would go from one look to a very different look, and when you see the difference between the Beatles – you know the famous photos on the cover of Please Please Me, the first album where they’re at EMI house peering over the balcony – they’re these sweet-faced young kids in suits. Then seven years later, they’re back there to do the cover of what was going to be called Get Back, (later Let It Be) and they’re these shaggy hippies with beards and long hair and hippie clothes and they don’t look anything like those cheeky kids, and it’s only been a handful of years!

For Bruce, even when he began his recording career, you look at the difference of who he is on the cover of the first album, where he’s got the work shirt on and the beard and the long hair, but he’s looking very kind of urban folky and that’s the idea, you know? I don’t think it was his mission to be “the new Dylan.” People called him that. He was obviously inspired by Dylan, but just as much by Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen, like all the great singer-songwriters of the late sixties and into the seventies – that neo-folk singer-songwriter movement. He was the next step along that path. Eight months later with Wild and the Innocent he becomes the boardwalk rat poet with his buddies, the whole band, around him. And they look like a bunch of guys that just went surfing all day, which I think was true. (laughs)

They’re in swimsuits and flip flops, no shoes, and they’re looking sandy in the sun, and it’s a lovely photograph. And then when you get to Born to Run, he’s got the leather jacket and the torn t-shirt and the Elvis button on the guitar strap, which is prominently featured. And in nineteen seventy-five that was a big deal.

He was taking that original rock and roll iconography and updating it for the seventies, as opposed to the whole Woodstock generation, the hippie generation, who were previously like “to hell with all that.” They had lost interest in Elvis. He was the opposite of hip by the seventies – it was mom’s music or grandma’s music; it was for people that wanted to go to Las Vegas and go to a showroom, and that was not rock and roll. But what Bruce understood was, well, wait a minute, there’s the earlier Elvis and I want in! He’s gonna do the cold fusion merging of the visceral impact of an excitement of Elvis with the intellectual heft and excitement of Bob Dylan.

look at Springsteen from this period as a guy that’s effected by the Beats – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road thing. We all read On the Road when we were teenagers, and you could clearly see that Bruce understood it. The first record seems more Allen Ginsberg, very wordy, all this imagery flushing out. The second record has got that Kerouacian one or two lines that jump off the page, even though there’s still a ton of lyrics on Wild and Innocent. For Born to Run, he strips that away and now he’s writing rock and roll songs with big choruses and he’s bringing a little of that Elvis aesthetic in, but I believe after Born to Run, he sets a template for the rest of his career. I think that template is cemented with Nebraska, wherein he becomes more of the Midwestern working class character. He plays with that in Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, (both records follow Born to Run) as well, but really goes for it on Nebraska. But it all begins with Born to Run for me. It is the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen we would come to know forever.

Yeah, well, I think he spent those first couple of years trying to figure out exactly what his creative identity should be and what his voice should be. Let’s begin with the eruption of words in the first album. In some ways that’s the sound of a kid who’s been pent up for twenty-two years and suddenly you get this shot to say anything you want to say and it’s like, “Okay, everything I want to say it’s going to come exploding out!” But eventually what you learn is, “Well, I got to control this a little bit.” Less-is-more becomes part of the progress from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and then into Born to Run. He was learning and figuring out that he had to simplify the structure of his songs and simplify his language and make his lyrics and his songs much more direct, and as a result he became a better songwriter to a degree, not that the songs on Greetings are terrible songs. I mean, there’s some fantastic songs on that album, but it’s a little like anything, you know, you’re looking for the connection, and it’s a little spotty here and there. But, you know, the thing about Bruce, what’s amazing about him, is that even at twenty-two, twenty-three years old, even his lesser songs are really interesting.

Now, I think part of the value of the shock of realizing that he was on the edge of being dropped by Columbia before Born to Run motivated him to find that song that could be “played on the radio” and maybe become a hit single. This leads to “I’ve got to edit myself a little better! I got to reconcile my vision and what’s important to me and the stories I want to tell to what the audience.” Making Born to Run there are those conversations he had with Mike Appel (his manager at the time), “You got to write a song that could theoretically get played on the radio.”

And Bruce is like, “Well, I love those types of songs too!” And Mike is coaching him to leave room for the melody and not clog everything up with a hundred words. And so, it was a little bit of a learning process. Who doesn’t learn in their early twenties, figuring out how to do their jobs?

To your other point about his “working class” evolution, I do feel that there is a lot of working-class consciousness on Born to Run, mainly due to the backdrop to these places – these characters he writes about, who are living and working and being, and somehow surviving until the night falls and they can be free.

The song for me when I was a kid that really pulled me into him was “The Promised Land” (from Born to Run’s follow-up, Darkness at the Edge of Town). I remember the first time I really heard and connected with that verse that begins, “I do my best to live the right way / I get up every morning and go to work each day.” I was the son of a college professor and it’s not like I didn’t have respect for work, I just didn’t see what the satisfaction of it could possibly be. My experience of work was “This fucking sucks and I want to go hang out with my friends!” But “The Promised Land” revealed an honor and dignity and satisfaction in a job well done.

There’s lots of unpack there. Born to Run is a depiction of kids of working-class parents who are going nowhere, so they want to get the hell out. Literally. in “Born to Run,” this is the mission statement. This is also true of “Jungleland,” and certainly “Thunder Road.” And when you get to Darkness, it’s like, okay, you’re accepting your fate that you can’t run away from who you are, but you’re still young enough that you could get out of this. By the time we get to The River, these are stories of real desperate people, many of whom had to marry the girl ’cause he got her pregnant in high school and blah blah blah. There are references to suicide on that record, criminalities on that record.

On The River?

Yeah.

No, well… maybe! That could be it, but that’s never been my reading of the song, “The River” itself. I’ve never been a hundred percent sure, to be honest. What the river symbolized is a place of escape as well. A great deal of characters in Bruce’s songs are forever going down to the river or some iconic place to do this or that. It’s funny you bring this up, because writing about these songs, I’ve been trying to work this out and then I felt like I was spinning in circles. Just when I think I have the ideas, it escapes me. I don’t even know if Bruce knows the motivation or even the outcome of these characters. This is the brilliance of his songwriting. We all see ourselves or people we know in them. They are like a connection to the earth or a connection to the inevitability of life.

Very biblical, yeah.

Yeah, it’s like the river keeps flowing and flowing and if you jump in the river and you end up in the sea then that’s the end of it all, right? I didn’t get the sense that the narrator is killing himself. Although, it is not hard to sense he wasn’t pleased with how things had worked out.

Right, right. Well, that’s where my mind went. So, yeah, it just goes to show you, I’m a glass-half-empty guy.

So, you’re just gonna hurl the fucking glass against the wall and get over it with,  right? I got you. (laughs)

(laughs) I want to get back to the trimming aspect of Bruce’s songwriting you cover in the book. This starts with “Thunder Road.” You quote from the original longform lyrics that he started to cut down to make the song that we know.

It seemed like you were privy to a lot of early takes and demos and things like that. Talk to me about the process of going through that and is this the first time you heard these unreleased tracks, or had you heard them way back when you wrote your Springsteen biography?

There were some things that had been on bootlegs that were out there, so I had heard a bunch of that stuff over the years. But then in terms of all the takes and the recording stuff, I discovered Sony had all that stuff in their archives. And if I asked very nicely, they would let me listen to it, (laughs), which they did. So, I got to go into a recording studio in Midtown last June and listen to everything Bruce recorded for the album between April and July of seventy-five when they did the sessions. So that’s where all that insight comes from. It was just listening to take after take after take.

It was like four or five days, most of which were spent in the studio with an engineer who was rolling tape for me. I have both Bruce and Jon for their cooperation. They were like, “Yes, please let him do this.” It wasn’t cheap, I’ll tell you that. I had to pay for the studio time and the engineer’s time, but it was still worth it.

Absolutely. And it really adds to the book, as do your discussions with Bruce I mentioned. Take me back to this time with Springsteen at his place. Was it Long Branch or Lakewood?

It was a little bit south of Asbury Park. I can’t remember exactly where it is at this point. You know, the Jersey Shore goes on and on – I was staying in Neptune at the time, I had to do a few interviews. I had been back east earlier in the summer and spent a couple weeks in New York. I interviewed a lot of people there and did some archival digging and that’s when I listened to the studio stuff and rewatched a lot of the video that Barry Rebo had shot in the seventies. And then I came back and saw the See.Hear.Now Festival (annual Asbury Park music fest) performance and then just hung out for two weeks because I knew I still needed to talk to Bruce and Landau and a few other people in the band on their break from touring after the See.Hear.Now Festival. That was my moment to slot into their schedules. I stayed in an Air-B-B in Neptune. When I wasn’t interviewing, I was just writing, writing, writing, because I was kind of under the gun.

Your descriptions of those outtakes are precious. I love how Bruce motivates the band, or he motivates himself in the studio, jokes around. Marty Appel is yelling shit at him. I love that, it’s intimate. And then the interview with Bruce at his place…

Well, I had talked to Bruce and Jon in San Francisco in March of last year,

’cause I had had plans to go see a show. I only really had the idea to do the book in March of last year and I was catching up with Jon Landau and he said, “Hey, what are you going to do next?” And I was like, “Funny, you should mention that… I’ve been kicking some ideas around, but the one thing I’m most excited about is possibly doing something for the 50th anniversary of Born to Run.” And he was like, “Oh, I think we’d be into that.” Great!

So, then I pitched it to my people at Double Day, who I had just done a book with and they were like, “Terrific, let’s do it! But you have to have it done by the fall because publishing being what it is, it takes a year.” This was already cuttin’ a few months out of the publication thing, but they could get it in under the wire if I turned it in come October or November.       

So, I just hunkered down and there was a lot of high-speed work. I assumed I had a bunch of leftover Born to Run stuff in my archive from writing the biography, but I was wrong about that. I really didn’t have much I hadn’t already used. I still had a big head start in that I knew all these guys and had written about them and knew how to get in touch with them all. But, again, having Jon and Bruce wanting to cooperate meant that all the doors kind of cracked open and so that made a lot of things easier.

Am I answering the question? I got lost. (laughs)

Yeah, no that’s okay…

So, I told Jon, “Look, I obviously have to talk to you guys. So, I went to the performance in Asbury, and then Bruce asked me to come to the after-show party and we reconnected there and I chatted with him for a little bit and eventually he said, “Okay, I’ve got a few things to do over the next few days, but let’s stay in touch and we’ll figure out a time for you to come and we’ll talk.”

On Bruce’s birthday, which was nine days after the See.Hear.Now thing, I just sent him a birthday text. It was his seventy-fifth, so it was kind of a big one. And he wrote back asked, “Peter, where are you?” I was like, “Well, I’m in Neptune.” And he asked what I was doing, “Why don’t you come on over? We’ll do it today.” And I go, “Dude, it’s your birthday!” And he goes, “Ah, it’s okay. The party was a couple of days ago.” So, I went down to see him, and we just hung out and talked for the afternoon. And then what you read in the book is the source of those conversations and a lot of that talk. Although, through the summer when I was researching stuff, if something came up that struck me as super surprising or something I didn’t understand I would send him a text like, “What’s up with this?” and he would write back relatively quickly and clarify it for me.

I love how during the course of this birthday discussion, he reminisces about his younger self, “Man, I wish I can go back there and tell that guy to calm down.” (laughs) I love that all the years of therapy, writing his memoir, growing older, having kids, seeing what it’s like to be a dad, going through all the stuff he had to go through with his therapy for his father and understanding that he battled depression, and then to look back to this guy who’s in the middle of this maelstrom and having sympathy for him was really great. And the way you described him during it with his flannel shirt and he’s throwing logs on the fire, and he’s real mellow sipping a drink – that juxtaposition of a guy towards the latter stages of his life looking at back to his younger self creating that life.

Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting ’cause he’s very fond of younger Bruce, you know? He’s very…

He forgives him.

I think he just understands what his trials were and where he was and what he needed to do and how important it was to him, and also, I think, how much fun he was having, because those months and years of hard touring they did before

they really made it when they’re struggling, you know, and there are certain corners

of the nation where they do really well, and there’s big chunks of the U.S. where no one’s ever heard of them, and they end up “playing to the walls.” Everything was so local or regional that it depended on if they were on the radio.

For instance, they get to Austin, and the place is jammed. And they play like two shows a night for five nights. And, except for the first show, it’s completely sold out because they had been on the radio there. They go to Houston, same story. People fucking love them because they’ve been on the progressive radio station and the place is jammed. They get to Dallas, however, and there is no progressive radio, and so, no one’s at the show. And they’re like, “Ah, okay… huh.” Then they go as far west as they had ever been, except for playin’ LA and a couple of California towns, to Phoenix. And they’re thinking it’s going to be like Dallas – this is the start of a long process of winning people over, building that fan base, but they get there and they’ve been booked into this huge auditorium and it’s jammed because they’ve been on the radio there and people knew “Spirit in the Night” and “Blinded by the Light” and “Rosalita” and they’re like, “We have no fucking idea what’s happening here, but it’s great!”

It was that moment of hope in all the struggle that you’d think he couldn’t appreciate when he was younger. But he told me, “No, all I knew is that my dream was kind of funkily coming true. I was making a living as a musician. It wasn’t that great a living, but I was twenty-two, so how bad could it have been? I’ve stayed in hotels that are nicer than my actual apartment and I get to play music with my friends every night and it’s kind of great and I never had a problem with that!”

Right, right. Well, there’s the optimism, which is probably why the guy doesn’t jump in the river. (laughs) Bruce is a glass half-full guy.

Very true.

I have a couple of more.

I wanted to ask you about the Mike Appel and Jon Landau dynamic in your book. You did a very fair job in depicting that Mike might not have been treated well, but it was right for Springsteen to go with Landau as his manager eventually. I mean, clearly, in retrospect. Your thoughts about that whole thing… did you, I believe you talked to Mike for this book, did you not?

Oh, yeah.

And so, after all the lawsuits and everything else, how do you find his memory of it?

Mike is a very, very complex guy. And the thing that happened between him and Bruce was extraordinarily complex. And I don’t know that anyone necessarily thinks that Mike was really, you know, hard-done by Bruce, because Mike, in a weird way, in that sort of Shakeseparian characters digging their own grave and make it all the more tragic, was befallen by circumstance. It wasn’t necessarily his fault. By this I mean the contracts he had Bruce sign when they first teamed up were old-school contracts. They were way more tilted toward his end then they were towards the artist. So, he ended up owning a lot more of Bruce’s work and had more authority over Bruce’s ability to work than was ordinarily the case by the early nineteen-seventies. But the weird thing was his behavior and his commitment to Bruce was completely divorced from the actual contracts. The amount that Mike sacrificed, his willingness to dig into his kids’ college funds to keep the band on the road, his belief in Bruce, his willingness to do anything Bruce wanted, whenever Bruce wanted him to do it, those speak of an extraordinary amount of dedication and also his insane behavior with people when he felt that they weren’t adequately taking Bruce into account. You know, he was a screamer. He grabbed people and shouted at them on his behalf. Bruce kind of needed that.

But the problem was when Jon came in and was Bruce’s friend, then also the co-producer, he didn’t have eyes on becoming a manager, that wasn’t his thing, he didn’t want to do that. He was interested in the music and producing the music. But he also knew enough about the music industry to know that “you might want to take a harder look at those contracts” because Bruce notoriously did not read his contracts before he signed them. He was a kid from Freehold, he didn’t know from contracts. He knew from the look in Mike’s eye and Mike’s dedication. This guy is my guy. And they were like this for all that time. But Bruce grew up a little bit and got a little savvier. Then he had this connection with Jon, who was really smart and understood things from a different angle than Bruce did, just in terms of his background, his education, and his knowledge of how the industry worked. And Bruce eventually realized, “Oh, these contracts are actually a little bit fucking me over!” Plus, these deals are all about to expire, so now’s the time to figure out how we’re going to go on. And what he really wanted to do was to continue working with Mike, to continue having Mike as his manager and possibly co-producer, but on a handshake deal.

So, it’s “We shake hands, we look each other in the eye, and if either one of us ever wants to walk, we can walk, because that’s what a good relationship should be.” And Mike’s initial impulse was to accept that, that sounded fine to him because he knew and loved and trusted Bruce. But the problem was Mike’s dad was this kickass insurance executive and a real hard-ass and not always nice to him, unfortunately, when he was growing up. But Mike had one of those relationships with his dad. And so, when he told his dad that he was thinking of doing this handshake deal, his dad was like, “No, you cannot do that. The one thing you have on this guy is this paper. And if you throw that away, you’re screwed.” And so, Mike took his dad’s advice and that was the beginning of the end.

That was, ironically, one of the things that Bruce and Mike had in common, these hard-ass relationships with their dads, and it was interesting and tragic that essentially by taking his father’s advice, Mike screwed himself over.

Right. And in essence, Bruce loses a father figure that he had in Mike. It is Shakespearean or biblical in that way. The second part of the Mike story was Jon Landau. He comes into Bruce’s orbit by writing the famous quote, “I’ve seen the future of rock and roll…” And Bruce has always been coy about that, like, “Oh, that was too much pressure,” like the Time and Newsweek covers. But he was also fascinated by how Landau saw him when he was a rock critic. Jon understood Bruce and what he was after – moving rock and roll into another realm while, as you said, hanging onto its origins.

I love when you describe in the making of the record how Mike and Jon each form these different alliances on song composition and production. Mike and Bruce like this one song, but Jon’s like, “No, I don’t think that works,” or some part of a song. And then there’s another time where Jon and Bruce are into something and Mike’s like, “No, you got to try this!” There’s even a point where Mike and Jon are talking Bruce out of something. I loved how they keep trading alliances. Jon wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m going to stay close to Bruce” or Mike didn’t side with Bruce just to refute Jon’s ideas. All three wanted Born to Run to be the best it could be. I found that so charming and so inspirational because these people did not let their egos or their insecurities, which they were there ’cause you describe them in the book, let them affect this mission.

I remember when I was working on Bruce’s biography, he mentioned “the rule of three.” He repeatedly went through his life building this ecosystem where it’s him in the middle and it’s his grandmother on one side and his mother on the other or it’s Mike and it’s Jon Landau and Bruce in the middle, or then it’s Steve Van Zandt and Mike and Jon, and Bruce in the middle. He goes, “It totally works for me! I set them in opposition to one another!” And essentially what he said, this isn’t a direct quote, but he said, “I know that kind of sucks for them, but it’s totally great for me, because I can watch them fight and figure out which advice that they have I want to follow.” It’s clearly worked for him, if not for everybody else. (laughs) I mean, I don’t think it’s always fun to be in that position, but it’s part of the gig.

Is this your favorite Springsteen record? And is there a song on this record that defines the album? And, finally, do you think Born to Run is his finest album?

I don’t know. (laughs) I mean, how can you tell? It’s like so many of the records are different from others. Is it one of the best ones? Is it up there on the top rank? Easily. Yeah, sure. But you connect with records for a variety of reasons. The record I came in on was Darkness in nineteen-seventy-eight. I love the vibe of that record, the stories he’s telling, the perspective there. That’s the one that I connected with first and most powerfully. But, of course, I already knew like half of Born to Run just by listening to the radio. I already knew and loved “Thunder Road,” and knew and loved “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” I mean, these things are on the radio all the time. And so, yes, it’s a great album. It’s a spectacular record. It’s probably in my top three or four of Springsteen records. But the thing is, his stuff is pretty diverse.

When you think about the distance from Greetings to Wild the Innocent and the distance from there to Born to Run, and then you go even further – you’ve got the folk records – the raw, dark Nebraska you’ve got Tunnel of Love, that was a record I really connected with when it came out, and I love a lot of those songs. There are elements of some of those songs that sound a little dated here and there just because, you know, he did it in the 80s. But his voice and his work had really evolved and grown with him as he grew and changed as a person. And so, that record was a really important step.

You know, you were talking earlier about his overarching idea that is captured first on Born to Run, this need for escape that you get from On the Road and you drive to that place that we really wanna go and “we’ll walk in the sun.” That’s a lot, right? And all those characters are hell bent on getting out of dodge. And then, and one of the things Steve Van Zant said to me was that he thought it was incredibly impressive that Bruce, having finally established himself in the minds of listeners and the culture as the guy who leaves on Born to Run, who hits the road and finds the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, at the far end of the highway, then became on Darkness ever-after the guy who stays because it’s his town. 

He becomes one of the small handful of artists in rock and roll that the audience understands and knows where to find out there searching and then you instantly do a one-eighty and change everything about who you are to become the guy who stays. That’s huge, and really gutsy. Nobody does that.

People figure out who they’re supposed to be and who people want them to be and they stay that guy, Bruce said, “No I’m gonna change.” Because I think he realized that having found in his own way the pot of gold at the end of Born to Run – he got there in the fall of seventy-five – it was like, “Wow, this is equally fantastic and excruciatingly awful.” And so, he figured out a way to stay home, I guess, or he realized how important it was to maintain his connection to home and family and where he had come from. And that’s what I call “the credits roll” thing. He doesn’t talk about the end game in “Born to Run.” It’s just like, “We gotta go, it’s the travel, it’s the journey.” So, the end game. to me, and this is my half-assed attempt to connect Born to Darkness, the very title of the thing is that you make that travel and then you realize, “Oh, shit, I’m still me. No matter where I go – I’m still there.”

And so that’s why, even though I’m not as big as Springsteen fans as others, I get the arc. There is a definite arc to those records. He grows up in them. You don’t see this a lot in youth-oriented rock and roll. You know, there are shapeshifters like Bowie and people who obviously get older, and they change, but Springsteen grows. All those people who grew up with Springsteen, of course, people came in later with the spectacular popularity of Born in the USA, and that is an entirely different animal. But that whole early seventies fanbase who came with him, he grew with them. He’s telling their story. And that explains his fans zealousness about his music.

That make sense to me.

And again, just to wrap it up, you depict that idea really well in Tonight in Jungleland, because this album became his Rubicon. He had to cross this to get there. And that’s why I said before that he’s inventing Springsteen with Born to Run, the whole image of Springsteen, but he is in a way inventing the template for making records of where his characters will go, which I think is just as important for Bruce Springsteen as a man as it is for Bruce Springsteen’s music. His characters are so vivid, listeners end up relating so deeply to him.

Yeah, Before I met him, when I was working on the biography, and it wasn’t clear that I was ever going to know who he truly was as a person, beyond the person he invented, as you say, one person said to me, and it was very cool, he goes, “He’s exactly who you think he is.” And my sense was, “Okay, I bet he’s really thoughtful. I bet he’s really cool. I bet he’s really self-involved. And I bet he’s really complicated.” And all those things are true. And I don’t think anything I just said would be a surprise to him. I think that’s probably how he sees himself as well.

So, all those years of therapy and everything, I think he’s very comfortable with his own complexity and his own foibles because nobody’s free of those. He knows why he’s here and what he’s up to and what his work is and what his obligations are to his family and friends and his art. So, he’s very acquainted with all that stuff. He doesn’t have a lot of illusions about himself.

Very well said. And it comes through in your book. Good way to end our conversation. And, again, thanks to your publisher for sending it. Thanks for this hour talking with me. Best of luck with it.

All right, buddy. I really appreciate it.

Dec 23, 2025 – Profonde Musique

Earlier this month, we learned of Steve Cropper’s passing at 84. It is a spectacular understatement to cite his enormous imprint on the world of popular music in the 20th century. If Cropper had merely been an elite and influential guitarist, which he most certainly was, he would merit note, but as a maker of song – composer, arranger, and producer – the prolific Missourian by way of Memphis put his stamp on some of the most important American music ever created. Cropper, who also found time to discover and develop raw and unique talent, was the genius “behind” greatness, a right-hand man, a pillar of “sound” and the godfather of much of the Memphis Soul that permeated pop culture forevermore.   

 I am confident in writing that Steve Cropper might be the most pertinent White musician of the rock and roll era behind Elvis Presley. But unlike the purported King of Rock and Roll he lifted others up to be stars, while maintaining a dedication to the Black origins of the music. This begins with Stax Records, a Memphis label/studio that emerged from the wellspring of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records (Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, to name a few), and a reflection of the northern blues purists at Chess Records (Muddy Waters, Willi Dixon, Etta James, Chuck Berry, etc) in Chicago. Like Chess’s Leonard and Phil Chess, Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, made Stax the epicenter of the musical melting pot of the Jim Crow South with an integrated staff of gifted and dedicated enthusiasts. Through their efforts, Stax gave rise to a musical revolution of soul and rock and roll unlike any other in the early 1960s.

Like many labels at the time, Stax boasted a house band. This was the indominable Booker T. & the M.G.s with Cropper on guitar, by way of the integrated rhythm and blues outfit, the Mar-Keys. This group of tight knit studio and performance mavens also included bandleader, Booker T. Jones on Hammond organ, original bassist Lewie Steinberg, later replaced by the legendary Donald “Duck” Dunne, and one of the most significant drummers of the genre, the great Al Jackson Jr. This incredible lineup of musicians was the bedrock of Stax and what became a sonic revolution. Cropper was just 20 when he joined this august gathering and would soon elevate into the label’s A & R man.

After the M.G.s scored an unlikely Top Ten hit in 1962 with their cooly languid instrumental, “Green Onions,” Cropper was a ubiquitous presence at Stax and thus the Memphis scene, becoming a star producer and session cat prized by the industry, so much so that the Beatles had sought to work with him until the normal music biz red tape scuttled what we can only imagine as a dream colab. Nevertheless, former Beatle, Ringo Starr, along with Rod Stewart, John Prine, Jeff Beck, and Band drummer/vocalist Levon Helm came calling, as did the fabulous collection of rhythm & blues musicians that made up the Blues Brothers touring band in the late 1970s, featured in the classic 1980 film of the same name. But when discussing Steve Cropper, it comes down to his position behind the console, often gripping his 1956 Fender Esquire or blonde Fender Telecaster, where he composed, arranged, and recorded the legendary voices of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave.

The story of Steve and Otis is a grand one, much of it depicted in spectacular fashion in arguably the finest book written about American music, Peter Guralnick’s masterful, Sweet Soul Music.

Otis Redding was never supposed to record at Stax. The same year “Green Onions” was tracked, he strode into the growing label’s studio as merely a roadie, setting up for Atlantic Records R&B guitarist/singer, Johnny Jenkins, who, according to those in the room, did not impress Cropper. Instinct proved to be Cropper’s finest talent, as he looked at the burly figure in the corner of the control room and suggested Redding take a stab at the vocals for “Hey, Hey, Baby,” the song at hand. It was better than what Jenkins was laying down, for sure, but when Cropper heard Redding sing his own song, “These Arms of Mine” a cappella, he immediately readied the M.G.s and they cut the track on the spot. This is the recording that became Redding’s first foray into inventing the Memphis Sound and launching a partnership for the ages.

Over the next five years, Redding and Cropper became unstoppable, beginning with the 1964 Top 10 R&B standard, “Mr. Pitiful,” which displayed the soul singer’s crossover protentional, reaching #41 on pop charts. Soon, there was the blues ballad, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” covered famously by Ike & Tina Turner, then “Respect,” a song Aretha Franklin remade and tore up the charts, and finally, the Redding/Cropper masterpiece, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” which rose to #1 worldwide, after Redding’s tragic death from an airplane crash in December of 1968. He was only 26.

But before his death, Redding’s influence on rock/pop/soul music was wide-ranging, becoming the first Black artist to appear at Bill Graham’s iconic Filmore West, and as a result of his incendiary shows there, performed the centerpiece set at the Monterey Pop Festival that became the first rock concert film, Monterey Pop. The Rolling Stones would forever alter their live version of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” after the M.G.s, with Cropper right there backing Redding on a blistering version, which featured the horns that Keith Richards had initially envisioned for the song.

Cropper and the M.G.s were also the backbone of the dynamic Sam & Dave (Sam Moore and Dave Prader), a live R&B act of enormous energy, captured forevermore in hits like “Soul Man,” co-written with Cropper, in which Moore famously shouts, “Play it, Steve!” on the recording. This was later revived by Saturday Night Live comedian/actor, John Belushi in his turn as Joliet Jake Blues with his “brother, Elwood, played with monosyllabic glee by fellow SNL pal, Dan Akroyd, on the live Briefcase Full of Blues, a version that once again featured Cropper on guitar in 1978. And although Cropper did not write as diligently or as prolifically as he did with Redding, the M.G.s featuring his guitar chops are all over Sam & Dave’s many hits, “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “I Thank You,” and the soaring ballad, “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.”

But perhaps Steve Cropper’s most lasting and influential turn as a songwriter, arranger and producer, is his collaboration with the great blues-shouter, Wilson Pickett on “In the Midnight Hour,” one of the most imitated and covered soul songs ever. The swing-addled sashaying backbeat and rolling bass/guitar groove conceived in a Memphis hotel room between the two men, was brought to life by the M.G.s, with inexorable charm by drummer Al Jackson Jr., whose insouciant style laid the groundwork for the genre’s most enduring backbeats. “In the Midnight Hour” was no mere hit, it was a seismic explosion in 1965, amidst the British Invasion and Motown dominance.

Steve Cropper loved rhythm and blues like few others, and his adoration was poured into his playing on those recordings forever. His pop sensibilities brought out the best in the acts he worked with, never taking from them the instincts and talents they displayed, and understanding what it meant to support and buttress their goals for the best sounding templates of their most cherished art. Like all the seminal sounds of popular music in the latter half of the American Century, Cropper’s canon stands the test of time, forever cementing him in the annals of the greats of any era.

Profonde Musique

Dec 16, 2025

This is going to be fun. If nothing else, it’s a challenge. Everyone who knows anything about me knows it is holiday music (any holiday music) that’s my least favorite. Themed tunes for seasons do not do it for me. Of course, I write about music, and I dig all genres, but on the whole, holiday music is not my bag. I believe the word “hate” has been thrown around far too often this time of year, especially since the Christmas nonsense starts in September, when we are inundated by a phalanx of seasonal theme music. Restaurants, department stores, offices, elevators, etc. are ringing out these tunes from every corner. And most of these songs are not good. And a few don’t have a thing to do with the season (I don’t know when Leonard Cohen’s gorgeous pean to sexual depravity became a holiday standard but listen to the lyrics to “Halleluiah” and tell me I’m wrong.) I’ve covered this in Profonde Musique before. It’s just odd. But, then again, like all music, there are, indeed, holiday gems. And that is the core of this week’s “List.” Let’s celebrate those tunes that get this right. But what is right?

Glad you asked.

Some parameters before we begin – because as much as I mostly despise holiday song cycles, I adore parameters in music essaying.

Firstly, none of these songs are about a character – no talking snowmen or odes to jolly St. Nick or an outcast reindeer with nasal electricity. If these characters appear in a line or two to evoke a sense of comfort for the listener, I allow it. Nothing against Santa-centric tunes, some have merit, but they’re not relevant here and are mostly for children. Maybe next year, if I am still around and Profonde Musique is still a thing, I’ll do “Best Children’s Holiday Songs.” Deal? Cool. Also, no classical pieces. This includes anything by Handel. No soundtrack stuff either (apologies to the late, great, Vince Guaraldi, you define this season for me, but I need lyrics.) And, finally, no joke tunes or novelty records about slain grandmothers, singing chipmunks, or a list of Jewish celebrities under the guise of a Hannukah song.

If we’re all on the same page, let’s do this thing!      

10. “Winter Wonderland” – Ella Fitzgerald

Now, to be fair, anything sung by Ms. Ella Fitzgerald, arguably the finest American voice of the Twentieth Century, means we’ve entered Bonus Land. So, this version of the exceedingly charming “Winter Wonderland” from 1960 is my go-to. But “Winter Wonderland” was never supposed to be a “holiday song” (maybe it’s why I dig it?). Originally written and recorded in 1934, its composers, pianist and bandleader, Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith constructed it as an ode to the snowy tableau of Smith’s Pennsylvania hometown, Honesdale, specifically its Central Park. But when Christmas tunes became a chart-invading concept, thanks to a certain Jewish fellow whose initial secular holiday song exploded the genre (further up this list), it became a seasonal standard.

I could be wrong, but it may be the first song of its type to mention making a snowman, and in this case a doppelganger for a clergyman named Brown. And like most songs on this list, “Winter Wonderland” has legs, boasting a ton of covers, some 200. Its delightfully trite melody and brain-scarring refrain make it a serviceable singalong, but in Ella’s hands it becomes a toasty delight.

9. Father Christmas – The Kinks

This is hands-down the best rock and roll holiday song. Yeah, it’s about Santa (I broke my rule already?), but no! This is no mere North Pole chunky pixie fest. “Father Christmas” is a Dickensian dream of a snotnose English rant about the crushing weight of capitalist fervor heaped upon this once solemn, and to some, holy holiday. It is also about hooligans mugging the neighborhood Santa, because they don’t need any of his “silly toys” that should instead be given to “the little rich boys.”

Songwriter and vocalist, Ray Davies, who sings ‘Gimmie your money!” with unnerving glee, spent a lengthy career as leader of the seminal British rock band, the Kinks penning themes, concepts, and full albums exploring the odd meanness and weird aspects of the human condition. In 1977, he took on the voice of a Holden Caulfield-esque urchin primed to rob the corner Santa of whatever charity money he may have successfully entreated from the locals.

Behind its raucous guitars and infectious rhythm, the song cuts deep into the underlying troubles with consumer madness, turning the concept of giving into wanting and the idea of presents as fiduciary obligation. And all of it is anything but precious or preachy.

8. Silent Night – Sinéad O’Connor

We’ve settled on the most beautiful melody of the bunch here. “Silent Night,” originally titled in German, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,” in 1818, when it was composed by a schoolteacher, Franz Xaver Gruber (music) and a Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr (lyrics), has been recorded an astronomical 137,000 times. Who counts this shit? Mohr’s childlike rhymes, in an almost seesaw couplet, are sweet, but pale when floating upon the gorgeous notes below them. It is the music that evokes the proper reverence of its subject matter.

The spiritually dulcet finesse of Sinéad O’Connor’s voice, (in its absolute prime in 1991), underscores the song’s passionate solemnity. It’s as if it were written for her – the subtle modulation of her pristine phrasing is stunning. Why not? This a woman who was a Catholic priest and as a kid was routinely chased down Dublin streets by schoolteachers.

\The emotionally urgent nature in which O’Connor approached her songs, and the bevy she’d interpreted, were all part of a lifelong battle she waged for the oppressed. Her preternatural expression of unbound empathy that was silenced forever just two years ago fills this elegant ballad with a gravitas that floors me every time.

7. Sleigh Ride – The Ronnettes

This is another one that appears on this list based purely on one performance. There is no version of this, none, that remotely compares to the ebulliently festive restation of this airy ode to a wintry activity penned in the middle of a heatwave by composer Leory Anderson in 1946. Anderson, who worked at the Pentagon after his service in World War II, when most of the beloved holiday songs were written and recorded, was primarily known for instrumentals, but in 1950, publisher Mills Music commissioned Tin Pan Alley stalwart, Mitchell Parish to add jubilant lyrics with some thematic input from Anderson.

To become a holiday standard, however, it took a 1963 recording by the Ronettes for Phil Spector’s brilliantly conceived and executed, A Christmas Gift for You, the greatest of all holiday-themed albums, to embed it in our seasonal psyches. On the strength of Ronnie Spector’s furious belting, “Sleigh Ride” eventually reached #8 on the U.S. pop charts that year. Featuring the resounding Wall of Sound, replete with signature clip-clop and whinny of the horses at its prelude to the phalanx of bells echoing its clarion call from car radios and storefronts, it is arguably Spector’s finest work during his halcyon period of pop domination. This is, of course, years before he went mad and shot a woman in the face, but that’s for another column, so grab some eggnog and turn this baby up!

6. I’ll Be Home for Christmas – Sarah McLachlan

As noted above, most of the secular holiday songs that reverberate around our skulls for at least two months a year were originally composed and recorded during World War II – somber if not heartfelt odes to returning safely from foreign shores to be with those for whom the boys were fighting, home, hearth, and good cheer. Of all those, the 1942-penned, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” hits every emotional touchstone with a spectacularly tender reveal in its refrain. Mainly because it is literally a letter sung as the song’s narrator during wartime.

Inspired by an actual poem written by noted doo-wop songwriter, Buck Ram, (“Only You,” “The Great Pretender,” “Twilight Time,” “The Magic Touch”) in 1922 as a gift to his mother and taken on by Jersy-ite lyricist, by way of Brooklyn, Kim Gannon and film composer, Walter Kent, it rings true. Considering the density of its subject, soldiers at war, they got Mr. Christmas, Bing Crosby to croon it, which predictably, considering his track record for such songs (again, higher on this list) catapulted it into a Top 10 hit.

For my money, singer-songwriter, Sarah McLachlan’s sultry voice dancing above a gentle piano bed, crushes this tear-jerker with the kind of vulnerability it deserves. The centerpiece of her 2006 Wintersong album, she whispers, “I’ll be home for Christmas… if only in my dreams,” and I’m toast.

5. “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)” – Nat King Cole

For all intents (and there are many with these songs) and purposes (essentially the same thing), this is the ultimate Christmas song. For one, it’s cleverly titled, “The Christmas Song,” but it’s also chock full of direct references to cool shit we dig about this time of year jammed into ONE VERSE! You know, roasting chestnuts, tiny tots with eyes aglow, presents beneath the tree. ONE VERSE! Oh, there’s a bridge about Santa (calm down, this song is not about Santa!), but even that is the font of brevity.

Written, once again, by two Jewish guys, Robert Wells and Mel Tormé, in the middle of the summer (what is it about heatwaves that make people yearn for “jack frost nipping at your nose” – no air conditioning?), its 1945 post-war ambiance of blessed relief abounds with reuniting the wanderers back into the fold.

But then, one year later, here comes Nat King Cole, who records the seminal version. From the opening lines, he owns this sucker, lock, stock and barrel. It is difficult to think of another holiday song, or any song, that is a better marriage of tune and voice than Cole and this one. An accomplished jazz pianist and smooth vocalist for his trio, the then 27-year-old Cole insisted that Capital Records provide him a small string section to accompany him, and, the rest, as they say, is holiday history. 

4. Silver Bells – Burl Ives

For years, this was my favorite holiday song. It brims with the sights and sounds of the big city, my hometown of NYC, where I spent those precious childhood years of dreaming and waiting and hoping for Santa Claus to arrive, and when awaking at an ungodly hour before the sun’s rise meant the world. Those weeks leading up to Christmas morning were the best. And “Silver Bells” took me there, time and again. “City sidewalks, busy sidewalks / Dressed in holiday style / In the air / There’s a feeling of Christmas.” Laughing kids, bustling streets, and everyone (at least in a child’s imagination) is smiling on every street corner. Which was not the usual fare in the Bronx.

All of it serenaded by silver bells. Whatever the hell that is. You know who may know? Two more Jewish guys, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who wrote the song for the 1950 Bob Hope film of the same name. Another Tin Pan Alley gig for two pros who only knew about the secular aspects of the holiday, the Americanized version, if you will.

I don’t love traditional versions of these songs, and Burl Ives holds sway in my decaying memory banks for his turn as the narrating snowman in the Rankin/Bass Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special from the early ‘60s. Hearing his well-traveled folky tones on any song conjures holiday cheer.

3. Happy Xmas (War is Over) – John Lennon and Yoko Ono

When John Lennon, and new bride, fellow artist/activist Yoko Ono, wrote and recorded this call for peace it was during that frantic period when the ex-Beatle wanted his songs to be like newspaper articles; fresh, immediate and relevant. This may be why a wholly original and painstaking craftsman fully nicked its melody from the traditional English ballad, “Stewball.” Nevertheless, Lennon and Ono nail the sentiment of pacifist utopia set to truly ebullient soundscapes engineered by that font of Christmas bombast, Phil Spector (another Jewish guy, by the way).

The “war is over” refrain, sung by the pre-teen Harlem Community Choir is the highlight – the war in question, Viet Nam, which was a half-decade old, despite every corner of American politics claiming to have a plan to end it. Lennon and Ono, who tenderly whisper a holiday message to their children, Julian and Kyoko to begin the recording, put the onus on the “want” rather than the “need,” which is the other side of holiday consumerism traded in for an elusive reverie of faith. Lennon, no longer hoping we can “imagine” a world without violence, enacted it in song. Pretty neat trick, if you can swing it.

2. White Christmas – Bing Crosby

And so, we get to the “historical significance” part of this list, because while “White Christmas” doesn’t floor me, it is arguably the most important holiday song ever conceived, written and recorded. Before Irving Berlin, the first Jewish guy to tackle the secular Christmas concept, composed this song, there was no such thing. That’s right. Berlin invented the modern Christmas song. This is it. First for a movie of the same name, and as a result he turned Bing Crosby from pop crooner into Mr. Christmas in one fell swoop. The song, which has been covered, played and sold more than any other in the long history of popular music (holiday or otherwise), topped the charts year-after-year, prompting the copy-cat greed of the music biz to get on the snow/presents/eggnog bandwagon and start cranking out the holiday junk food.

When researching other books written about one song for my Take a Sad Song – the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude back in 2020, my friend, singer-songwriter Eric Hutchinson suggested I read Jody Rosen’s excellent, White Christmas: The Story of an American Song. So, now it’s my turn. Read this book. It will blow your socks off.

As far as Crosby, he sells the thing like a pro, but, again, not a big fan. But I am a fan of a man whose religion and culture marked him as an outcast in a supposed free society, and despite being reminded every year around this time of this, decided, “Fuck it, I’m going to circumvent the whole thing and create something from whole cloth with my colossal talent.”  

1. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Billie Eilish

And yet another classic penned during WWII, and for yet another movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane created the simplest, most direct sentiment imaginable for the season. Whatever creed, race, generation, be merry, exhale, “let your heart be light” and believe, if, in fact “the fates allow” that we’ll all be together, which is so very true. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” reminds us that life and happiness and family is not guaranteed for anyone. We must pursue it with vigilance and cherish its presence. For it is here, then it is gone. The crucial line, of course, being “Until then, we’ll muddle through somehow,” which Frank Sinatra refused to sing because it wasn’t “jolly enough.”

But what Ol’ Blues Eyes missed is the underlying beauty of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” These holidays arrive at the end of each year., which for many of us, means we take stock of our lives, our triumphs and tragedies, who and what we ‘ve lost and what we have gained, our past, present and future clashing into each other. When I hear this song, this is what I take from it. And this is not even marking its enchanting melody that when singing it (my wife and I give it a whirl on occasion) reveals itself as an airtight, indestructible masterwork that gets into your bones and stays there within three friggin’ minutes! The interlude about “olden/golden days” is high craft, folks.

I have recently become enamored with Billi Eilish’s version from a December 2023 Saturday Night Live in which she embraces the intimate quality of the song’s romanticism with an adoring veneration. Her whispered opening of the word, have in both verses reminds us that lullabies are not just for children, but the child in us all.