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Just in time for the Fourth of July: PBS’ “Bruce Springsteen: Finding America in Song.”
“Bruce Springsteen: Finding America in Song” airs on PBS stations July 5 at 6:30 p.m., but is now viewable online. You can watch it, embedded, below.
The half-hour special includes an interview with Springsteen by “PBS News Hour” co-anchor and co-managing editor Geoff Bennett, as well as footage from the recent all-star “Music America: The Songs That Shaped Us” concerts at Monmouth University in West Long Branch. It also offers a detailed look at the university’s Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, whose opening the concerts celebrated.
Bennett also interviews the Center’s founding executive director, Bob Santelli; Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau; and “Music America” performers Ken Casey (of Dropkick Murphys) and Shemekia Copeland.
“Anytime you get to share the stage with Bruce … if you get asked, you’d better be there,” says Casey.
The well-named “Finding America in Song” makes for particularly good viewing on the Fourth of July, as Springsteen talks about the state of the country, the purpose of his music, and his belief in “critical patriotism.” He explains critical patriotism this way: “You love your country so much that you are willing to look at it clearly, recognize its faults, encourage it to be a better place, and believe that you carry in your heart the country that is waiting.”
At one point, Bennett asks, “Where do you see yourself fitting in that longer narrative, that longer arc of American music?”
Springsteen responds: “I’m just a guy that came along at this particular moment, and was interested in writing about the times that I lived through, grew up in — my family’s life, how that connected to America in the second half of the 20th century, during the post-industrialization of the country. I was interested in writing about those things just to try to figure them out myself.
“I had my heroes, of course. Bob Dylan, I always called the father of my country, because he was the first guy that sort of showed me America with the veil pulled back, to where I really recognized the place I was living in. And I wanted to be an artist who encompassed their times, the times that they live in, and wrote about those things.”
Here is the video:
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