Just two weeks ago, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner, let slip the news that Bruce Springsteen would soon release a new album, and that it would focus on soul music. Yesterday, Boss himself announced in a video that Only the strong survive will be released on November 11, a double album with versions of the soul songbook.
Springsteen explains in the video that during the recording he rediscovered the power of his own voice after falling in love again with the songs of Smokey Robinson, Jerry Butler, Sam Moore, Tyrone Davis, The Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, or The Supremes with Diana Ross. ... Songs that he listened to since he was a teenager and that have been one of the great influences on his music, and a genre to which he will pay homage on his first album made up of versions since We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
With the announcement came an advance, the song Do I love you (indeed I do), a song that Frank Wilson released at Motown in 1965. The title of the album, Only the strong survive, is also the title of the song that opens the record and was the biggest hit of Jerry Butler's career, in 1968.
There will be 15 songs in which it counts, in addition to the E Street Band, with the voice of Sam Moore in two songs, Rob Mathes in the composition and direction of the orchestral arrangements and a choir section with Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Michelle Moore, Curtis King Jr, Fonzi Thornton and Dennis Collins.
In the promotional video, Springsteen explains that shortly after recording his so far last album, Letter to you, still during the covid lockdown, he returned to the recording studio with his producer, Ron Aniello, and engineer Rob Lebret, to record songs by other artists. Soon he had another record... but he threw it away, kept working and on the second try he realized that "he had found the subject he wanted to explore": vocal music, because he had always "focused on arrangements, melodies, the songs... and the voice was always in the background or third plane to express those elements”. And the music that made her voice shine and “having this epiphany is soul”.
