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Oct 22, 2020The live recording of this record really helps deliver that communal feeling. They feel so present and close that listeners might feel they’re violating the pandemic rules.
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Oct 21, 2020A powerful synthesis of past and present, ‘Letter To You’ shows us the strength that can be found in sorrow. The result is Springsteen’s finest album since 2002’s ‘The Rising’.
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Oct 20, 2020Its beauty lies in the intuitive simpatico of the playing, with different elements rising to the surface at just the right moment. It used to take them months in the studio to achieve this blend. Now these old road warriors can conjure it in a single take.
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Oct 15, 2020His new record Letter To You is an absolute triumph, one that can take its place alongside the best albums of Springsteen’s long career.
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Oct 23, 2020This is no pure nostalgia trip, though. Both House Of A Thousand Guitars and Rainmaker take shots at the ‘criminal clown’ in the White House, and Letter To You is as young at heart as any of Springsteen’s proudest moments, a sign that we’re some way off the credits yet.
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Oct 23, 2020Letter to You is also a letter to himself, to the music and to his steadfast collaborators in the E Street Band, past and present. It’s a potent reminder that together, they’re as good as it gets.
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Oct 22, 2020Springsteen gives us the E Street Band at its rawest. The songs deal with loss and perseverance, but the arrangements make them sound like anthems.
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Oct 21, 2020[The E Street Band are] playing not out of a sense of hunger, but communion. This shared warmth carries Letter to You through the moments where the younger Bruce is perhaps a bit too precious and the older Springsteen is a bit too clear, turning a record that's a meditation on mortality into a celebration of what it means to be alive in the moment.
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Oct 20, 2020These are 50-year-old songs written by a man in his early 20s performed by a handful of 70 year-olds come to life and, thanks to the incredible strength and musical bond of the E Street Band, they dovetail very well with the new material. ... The results are stellar. There’s really not a bad one in the bunch.
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Oct 30, 2020You can say he’s written more consistently great albums this century, but the crispness of the recording as well as the performances ensures that “Letter to You” is the best-sounding album he’s made since the 1980s.
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Oct 23, 2020Not many artists reach 20 albums, and even fewer do it with such aplomb. Or, to put it another way: here’s to 20 more.
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Oct 29, 2020The record is a celebration of life and a reminder of how rock ’n’ roll can help transcend grief and loss. The E Street Band sounds rejuvenated with Roy Bittan’s piano work and Charlie Giordano’s resounding organ swirls and swells driving the songs and echoing early E Street magic.
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MojoOct 28, 2020Ultimately, what redeems Letter To You from notions of idealised nostalgia is the rigour of its performances, particularly those of Springsteen himself, who for the second successive album is in the singing form of his life. [Dec 2020, p.78]
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Oct 26, 2020In truth, Letter to You is cheesier than a Monterey Jack, shameless in its embrace of cliche. ... Conversely, then, Letter to You is exactly the album some people could use right now, a sledgehammer of succour and uplift, a heroic E Street pile-on of the kind fans and guitarist Steve Van Zandt have been lobbying for, for years.
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Oct 22, 2020There are tunes here, including “Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” that feel more spirited than anything Springsteen has done in years, with a touch of the careening intensity that made him and E Street a legendary live act. ... The tunes on “Letter to You” get over thanks to the E Street Band, which drives the songs with purpose and provides a level of detail in the arrangements that keeps anything from getting too mopey.
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Oct 22, 2020On Letter to You, Springsteen is at his rawest and most reflective. ... Letter to You may well be Springsteen addressing his most significant bandmates and his audience with love, but it may as well be something he wrote and sent ahead to 2020.
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Oct 21, 2020They decided not to overthink it — a great move, as it turns out. In just five days, tracking totally live — which, unbelievably, they’d done only twice previously (on “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Born in the U.S.A.”) — the band recorded nine new tunes and three unearthed from before Springsteen had recorded Greetings from Asbury Park, his debut. And yes, some of these songs will take their place alongside his greatest hits.
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Oct 20, 2020As a whole, ‘Letter To You’ is a wonderfully warm experience, perhaps Springsteen’s most human for some time.
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Oct 20, 2020Letter To You provides both a moving thematic adjunct to Springsteen On Broadway and a timely and welcome burst of the sheer euphoria that only the E Street Band can inject. It also, importantly, demonstrates the band’s unacknowledged flexibility.
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Oct 15, 2020Springsteen sounds at peace. Although the LP doesn’t sport the same youthful urgency as the recordings he cut in the Seventies and Eighties — there’s no “Badlands” or “Cover Me” here — you can hear how the anger and depression of his tougher times and his many split personalities delivered him to stability, and the most fascinating parts of Letter to You are when he comes out of the shadows to admit that he realizes it, too.
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Oct 27, 2020Letter To You may well Springsteen’s best work since 87’s Tunnel of Love. There are dips in quality in places on the record, but there is a general tone of a satisfied human who got out of the rundown places he always sang about to that bright future that was always over the horizon.
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Oct 22, 2020The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation.
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Oct 29, 2020While this is one of Springsteen’s most genuinely energetic and exciting releases in ages, it isn’t constantly uptempo.
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Oct 20, 2020Springsteen deserves credit for resisting the crowd-pleasing tug of this kind of album for so long that it feels like a warm homecoming rather than a retread. It’s only when Springsteen leans on the nostalgia with explicitly backward-facing lyrics that the album gets a bit too self-aware. ... The E Street Band proves that when they’re in their element—as they are on this album—they can elevate the Boss to his best.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 57 out of 64
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Mixed: 3 out of 64
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Negative: 4 out of 64
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Oct 23, 2020Man is this good. Didn't even realize how much I wanted to hear Springsteen release this kind of record. Awesome.
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Oct 23, 2020Absolutely loving this. Not a bad track, burnin train, ghosts, if i were a thief. My favorite track changes with every listen.
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Oct 26, 2020