#107, “Wrecking Ball,” Bruce Springsteen (2009)

150 Favorite Songs: #107, “Wrecking Ball,” Bruce Springsteen (2009)

There are a lot of things that Bruce Springsteen does better than almost anyone else, but an underrated part of his songwriting game is his ability to write very specific songs that sound, and feel, much grander and more universal than the fairly straightforward interpretation that is available if you listen to the literal words. You can find it in some of his most famous songs. (“The Rising,” for example, is an anthem of hope and unity that threads a very particular needle, avoiding the jingoism of most post-9/11 songs, fully trackable as both a first-person imagining of what it might have been like for a firefighter to climb the stairs in the World Trade Center that morning and also a broad metaphor for life in uncertain times that would have made sense even if he had written it in 1984.) But my favorite example of this aspect of Bruce’s particular songwriting genius is in “Wrecking Ball.”

“Wrecking Ball” is, ostensibly, a song about the destruction of Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, where the Jets and the Giants played for several decades, until it was replaced in 2009. I don’t have any personal sentimentality about Giants Stadium, or any other stadium anywhere in the country. I like sports, and football in particular, but I’m also clear-eyed about the fact that the glamor of the game is manufactured, and the actual product is a business built on human misery (if it makes you feel any better about it, sports fans, pretty much everything else anyone enjoys is, too). I have driven through New Jersey a couple of times, but I have no attachment to the place. I am, in other words, not a great candidate to be moved by a song about Bruce Springsteen’s hometown football stadium being torn down*.

And “Wrecking Ball” is that, very explicitly. The lyrics are not abstract. “I was raised outta steel / here in the swamps of Jersey / some misty years ago / through the mud and the beer / the blood and the cheers / i’ve seen champions come and go.” The second verse, after a brief pre-chorus, is similarly specific: “Now my home’s here in these Meadowlands / where mosquitos grow big as airplanes / here where the blood is spilled / the arena’s filled / and Giants played their games.”

But also: Those sentiments are pretty universal. We were all raised outta steel in the swamps of somewhere, and there’s mud and beer and blood and cheers and champions who come and go in everyone’s life. Blood is spilled as part of life, arenas are filled everywhere, and giants—if not the New York Football Giants—seem to play their games before all of us. It’s all very literal, except it also works as pure metaphor, because Bruce Springsteen, as much as any songwriter who ever lived and probably more than most, writes about feelings first and foremost. “Wrecking Ball” is so hyper-specific about this dumb football stadium, but it’s even more specifically about watching as the monuments of your youth are torn down, replaced by monuments that’ll belong to someone else’s youth, and looking at the wrecking ball that’ll bring them down and accepting that with a defiance that still somehow feels like grace. I love “Wrecking Ball” because it does not go quietly into that good night, but it also doesn’t try to cling to the idea that you could keep the old stadium around forever, or that doing so would make you forever young.

This song was the title track on Springsteen’s 2012 album, but he released it as a live single three years earlier, right around the time that Giants Stadium came down. It is very Springsteenian in its tone—it starts with a simple strummed guitar, and the way he sings the opening lines is classic of the American blues tradition, singing about where you come from over that guitar. Then it grows huge, an organ, a horn section, Max Weinberg’s drums, Soozie Tyrell’s violin, Clarence Clemons’s second-to-last sax solo. All of that drops out at the start of the final verse, though, as he gets to the point of the song, which is that what you get in exchange for watching as the things that defined your life are torn down to make room for new things for new people is a bit of wisdom. It might not be a fair trade, or one that any of us would choose to make, but it is simply the march of life. “When the game has been decided / and we’re burning down the clock / and all our little victories and glories / have turned into parking lots,” he sings, a brutal self-assessment from someone whose victories and glories don’t feel particularly little, but ultimately are because, like, who are any of us, even Bruce Springsteen, in the face of a force as powerful as time? You can be angry about it—in the bridge, he repeats the line “hold tight to your anger” three times in a row!—but this is, in the end, just the nature of life, and so the song concludes with an eruption, starting right as The Boss delivers one of my favorite moments in any of his songs, a transcendent moment that gives me chills every time I hear it, that gives me chills right now just thinking about it even though the room is silent right now**, where the drums come back in as he sings about how “hard times come and hard times go / and hard times come and hard times go / and hard times come and hard times go / and hard times come and hard times go / and hard times come and hard times go / yeah, just to come again” and the band starts coming in piece by piece, and the final two minutes are just this glorious E Street cacophony of sound, a bunch men and women facing down their mortality as if to say “this is what it sounds like when you watch the wrecking ball bring down the things that defined your life.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve gotten older, and also as I’ve watched the politics of America become what they are now. Because there’s a version of the “Wrecking Ball” sentiment that could be “Make The Meadowlands Great Again.” The song is clear that it is painful to watch the transition from your time to someone else’s time occur, and I think that’s honest. I think it’s possible to see the pain that causes and feel empathy for the people who are experiencing it. But what “Wrecking Ball” gets at that I think is critical is the inevitability of it—the world will not look like it did when you were young ever again. All this steel and these stories will drift away to rust. All our youth and beauty has been given to the dust. Your loved ones will die. The world will be unrecognizable. You will feel worse. Things will hurt that did not hurt before, physically and emotionally. The things that meant the most to you in your life will be someone else’s parking lot. Your best hopes and desires will be scattered to the wind.

I understand the appeal of someone who says “but what if it didn’t have to?” It’s the most appealing lie in the world, and I think it explains a lot of (though not everything about) where we are right now. The generational conflict that is a part of life has played out in an extreme form of politics over the past decade—as young people want a world that’s theirs, and older people want the world as they’ve known it, and are afraid that the one that’s being built won’t have a place for them. But that’s not the version of “Wrecking Ball” that Bruce Springsteen wrote, because there’s another truth to all of that, too: If you keep a clear eye on what comes with all that change, you understand that hard times do come, and hard times also go, and this is the true cycle of life. The stadium will be gone, but other things were gone before, and then other things replaced them, and there’s a place for all of us in what’s being built. The wrecking ball changes a lot of things, but it doesn’t ultimately change that. If you’ve been around long enough to mourn for what’s lost, you’ve been around long enough to know that, too. “Wrecking Ball” is about a football stadium, sure, but it’s mostly a hell of a reminder that what comes next can be good, too***.

*with the caveat that I can find myself moved by Bruce Springsteen singing about Philadelphia gang wars, or pro wrestlers, or cable TV, so maybe I am a great candidate for that.

**I’m proofreading this a few weeks after I initially typed it and just looking at those words on the screen, I got chills again.

***The Giants even won the Super Bowl the year after the new stadium opened. Hard times go, indeed.