My latest article on Bruce Springsteen has been published in the journal Rock Music Studies. The title is ‘Authenticity as Physicality: Energy, Endurance, and Longevity in Bruce Springsteen’s Late Career’. It’s part of a special issue of the journal on ‘authenticity as process’ and has been published as open access.
In the article, I use Allan Moore’s authentication framework to show how Springsteen adapts his persona to remain credible as he ages. I argue that, through performances, memoirs, and media projects, Springsteen redefines rock authenticity by embracing vulnerability and longevity. I’d already been thinking about the ideas in the article for some time before seeing Springsteen and the E Street in Sunderland in May 2024, but that concert became the case study that opens and closes the piece. This was the concert where Springsteen’s encounter with the ‘hellacious weather’ of NE England took his already suffering body and voice over the edge, bringing a temporary halt to the European tour.
The article brings together many of the things I’ve written about during my academic career: authenticity, the rock faithful, music as life companion, resistance to ageist narratives.
This is the third in a trilogy of essays I’ve written about late Springsteen. The first appeared in Persona Studies in 2019 under the title ‘Brilliant Disguises: Persona, Autobiography and the Magic of Retrospection in Bruce Springsteen’s Late Career’ (open access). The second came out last year in the book Rereading Musicians and Their Audiences: Popular Music Autobiographies, edited by Tom Attah, Kirsty Fairclough and Christian Lloyd (Bloomsbury Academic); my chapter is ‘“You’ll Need a Good Companion for This Part of the Ride”: Navigating Bruce Springsteen’s Sonic Persona in the Born to Run Audiobook’.
Late Voice 