Earlier this week, Springsteen joined Zane Lowe on Apple Music for a deep-dive into his career, his thoughts on writing a book, his Broadway show and so much more.
“It was a great project for us,” he says of the new album, “because I don’t think we’ve ever played live together in the studio and then kept everything that we did on the full take, all the singing, all the playing. It’s The E Street Band really completely live. And I overdubbed a few solos and things, but it’s really the band in one shot. We’ve played live in the studio before, but never kept everything, always gone back in and overdubbed a vocal or overdubbed, put other things on.”
Letter to You was produced at Springsteen’s home studio in New Jersey with Ron Aniello, mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig, and it features the previously-released songs “Ghosts” and the LP’s title track.
All the tracks on it were completed in less than two weeks. “This was the first thing where when I came up with a group of songs relatively very quickly,” Springsteen told Lowe. “It’d been really quite a while since I’d really put the band together and let them play in the studio. And so it’s all just timing and what happens and where you are in different places in your life and everything comes along and it’s time. It was just a good moment for it.”
Letter To You arrives with a companion Thom Zimny-helmed documentary, titled Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You, an exclusive through Apple TV+.
The new set caps a ridiculously busy stretch for The Boss. Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run (Simon & Schuster) and its companion album Chapter And Verse arrived in September 2016.
Later, his Springsteen on Broadway production at Jujamcyn’s Walter Kerr Theatre would run across 236-shows from October 2017 to December 2018, and spawned an accompanying soundtrack album and Netflix special.
Letter to You is the followup to Springsteen’s 2019 release Western Stars. With his long-time collaborator Zimny, he also co-directed Western Stars, a feature film released through Warner Bros.
Stream Letter to You below.