Songs That Make Me Cry #1: "American Land"
Songs That Make Me Cry #1: "American Land"
Why Bruce Springsteen's immigrant song holds a special place in my heart.
I’ve had the idea for this side series since Dan Epstein and I recorded a Crossed Channels podcast about Kate Bush, and I found myself becoming unexpectedly tearful when, listening back to “Wuthering Heights” in preparation, Iain Bairnston’s beautiful guitar solo entered following Kate’s final sung chorus. The connection was visceral, recalling a time of innocence when my mother bought the “Wuthering Heights” single (plus the accompanying album The Kick Inside), and how she is now in a care home, withering away with dementia, and can no longer appreciate music. I recommend you listen to the podcast for a fuller explanation.
On the subject of which, we published a new Crossed Channels episode on Thursday - which was perhaps unduly chipper and upbeat for the events of this past week, though this post today is largely about the positive power of music - featuring the story of a truly all-American rock band, Redd Kross.
Arguably, the greatest of all all-American musical rock icons is Bruce Springsteen, whose often conflicted vision of his homeland connects with people in their own homelands all around the world. I’ve been a fan since buying the Born To Run LP in 1975, at age 11, and though I allowed myself to slip away during the new wave years, I have been thoroughly back on board ever since the juggernaut that was Born In The USA almost a decade later, accompanied by my first time seeing him in concert, at Wembley Stadium in July 1985. There I realized how some artists are capable of playing to a crowd of such an enormous size – 80,000 or so - and can somehow make it intimate, an experience I would witness again all of a week later when I was back at Wembley for Live Aid, and Freddie Mercury in particular had the masses eating out of the palm of his hand.
It follows that someone who can make a stadium feel like an arena would be able to make an arena feel like a club, and to that end, I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen several more times over the years, mostly in mid size venues. So it was, that on November 15, 2007, I attended what was then the Times Union (now the MVP) Arena in Albany, an hour-plus drive from my family’s brand spanking brand-new house on Mount Tremper, to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band touring the new album, Magic.
This is where the story gets not just interesting, but freakishly serendipitous. For, just two days earlier, I had also gone up to Albany for an incredibly momentous personal occasion – my citizenship ceremony. During the first decade of my marriage, I had effectively ignored the question of whether I should become naturalized, but once we moved up to the Hudson Valley, I saw how my potential vote could really make a difference in narrow elections, and I wanted to get involved with the schools but discovered I couldn’t even vote for the school budget without my citizenship. Besides, I’d been paying taxes in the U.S. for years, already had a green card, a valid social security number, and had no immediate plans to live anywhere else.
Crucially, becoming a citizen of the USA did not mean giving up my UK passport. But it did mean studying the Constitution, making frequent drives to the Albany area for interviews, and passing various tests, including medical ones if I recall, but especially on the aforementioned Constitution, just one example of how and why nobody should ever accuse naturalized immigrants of being less intelligent than Presidents. I passed them all, obviously, and on Tuesday November 13, I had the privilege and honor of attending a grand court building in Albany to receive my naturalization certificate in person, alongside a hundred or so other new “Americans.”
The ceremony was conducted by a NY State Supreme Court Judge, the child of Lithuanian Jews who had come to the USA in the 1920s or 1930s, through Ellis Island itself I recall. He was, as he made a point of telling us, living proof that the American immigrant Dream was more than a myth – that the child of penniless immigrants fleeing persecution could rise to a top office in their new land. For my part, I recall being keen to see which nations, or regions, supplied the most new naturalized citizens of 2007, and, at least in my part of the country, it was South Asians (i.e. from the Indian Subcontinent). But they were still just a plurality; we came from all parts of the globe, and we had all chosen to make our home in the American land.
You would already understand why, for me, seeing Bruce Springsteen, that all-American icon, perform just two nights later, just two or three hundred yards up the road from where I had become an American, would feel especially appropriate. But it was about to become more so. As intimated up top, I am a fan, but not such a Fanatic as to study setlists in advance; I like to be surprised, to enjoy a show. And because I’m not a true obsessive, when what turned out to be the night’s concluding song kicked in, I didn’t immediately recognize it.
“American Land” had not been included on the original CD of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Bruce’s previous studio album, recorded with a different line-up than the E Street Band and released in 2006. Nor should it have been: that album was entirely cover versions of American folk songs, and “American Land” is a Springsteen original. It was clearly influenced by the Seeger Sessions material, however, and Bruce’s own contribution to the canon made its debut in New York City on June 22, 2006, not just early in the tour to accompany that album, but at the very start of the night. Clearly, Bruce must have felt good about the song and his band’s ability to capture it correctly right out of the gate, because a recording of that very first live rendition was included later in the year on an expanded CD of the Seeger Sessions.
In New York City, on that debut, Bruce introduced “American Land” as “an immigrant’s song,” and in Albany, I recognized the lyrics immediately as singing to that experience. Yet I didn’t recognize the song itself: although I had received a promo copy of the expanded album, and for all that it was literally named the American Land Edition, I had not paid attention, it hadn’t hit home. Even then, before the streaming age, there was so much music in this world, and not enough time to focus on every last note of it.
But in concert that night in Albany, I made no such error. “American Land” was presented and received as pure celebration, a jaunty jig to the American Dream with which to send his fans home happy. Bruce’s audience had long been comprised largely of blue-collar workers - cops, firemen, assembly line types who hail from certain European lineages - and as such, it got a special cheer when he referenced the “Irish, Italians…” among the immigrant groups, in the middle of a line preceded by “the Blacks,” and which concluded, placed together with what I assume was a deliberate nod to history, with “the Germans and the Jews.”
As such lyrics suggest, “American Land” is very much set, both musically and lyrically, in the past, recalling that era when Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty at least proclaimed to welcome the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, regardless of what awaited them on the other side of processing. Yet in Bruce’s performance that night, I connected immediately to my own story. “American Land” is a song about dreaming, about taking a risk to seek a better life for yourself, about a certain wanderlust, about starting all over again and believing in the power of your own abilities to carve out that new life, and all those elements are applicable to me and my own life journey.
Still raw from the very process of taking up a second Citizenship, it didn’t now take much for me to well up entirely - most likely around the modulation into the fiddle solo - and emit a tear. Back in the car afterwards, having found the American Land Edition awaiting me and quickly skipped to the end, I played “American Land" as I drove past the courthouse from two days earlier, and played it pretty much most of the way home. Forget the Seeger Sessions’ album’s original title We Shall Overcome: I was overcome.
Not surprisingly, someone filmed “American Land" in Albany the night of November 15, 2007 that I write about here. At least part of it, certainly enough to capture the euphoric nature of the night’s finale.
“American Land” would show up in another concert rendition on the Live In Dublin double set from 2007, a rendition that the E Street Shuffle site, which digs deeper into the song’s background and meaning that I can possibly do justice, proclaims to be better than the E Street Band’s own studio recording for Bruce’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball. And I don’t disagree. However, both these latter renditions are absent that original June 2006 version’s references to “the Arabs and Asians,” for reasons I do not fully comprehend, especially given what I’d witnessed at my own ceremony (and the extent to which these groups have been subject to hostility in recent years, especially those of 2017-20 due to anti-Muslim rhetoric and blame for COVID).
“American Land,” to this day, and for all the different album inclusions, remains something of an orphan in Bruce’s catalogue, lacking a defined home of its own. But despite moments in other Springsteen songs that can cause me to well up – the last verse of “My Hometown,” the middle eight of “The River,” the count-in to the modulation that carries the last verse of “Born to Run” – “American Land” means the most to me. It is hardly my story. But I read my story into it regardless. And that might be enough. Musicians give us that license as their audience.
I would use my newfound citizenship to vote in the Presidential (and down-ballot) election of 2008, the one that elected Barack Obama. A few months later, I would run for office myself, as a School Board Trustee, a role I could only apply for as a citizen. I served two three-year terms, which means that I am batting 100% as an elected official.
Voting is not the be-all and end-all of becoming a citizen, nor do I feel that people should be compelled to vote. If you can make a good case for why you don’t feel anyone deserves your vote, I’m fine with that, just as I expect you to be fine with the ramifications of your choice. Still, after every election cycle, I meet fellow immigrants who lament that, like me for a decade of my own life in the States, they have been here long enough to get married, to get a green card and raise children, but have not got around to the process that would enable them their individual voice in this country’s particularly unique version of democracy. For them, I would recommend a hearty dose of “American Land,” and if it does not bring them to tears… well, that’s fine, it leaves all the more for me.
I wrote a first draft of the above prior to the result of last week’s Presidential election. I had planned to post it on Tuesday, election day, but the copy wasn’t good enough yet, it would have been a bonus post anyway and besides, for all that I was playing “American Land” that morning after voting and enjoying the familiar swell of emotion in doing so, something held me back.
Sure enough, the result of the Presidential election this time around did not go my way. Not even close. I know I am not alone in feeling distraught. I know I am not alone in feeling that the consequences for this nation are dire. And I know am not alone in feeling that I struggle to understand those among my fellow Americans who voted freely for these consequences. In the subsequent hours and days of the election, like many of those others that I know, I felt angry, sad, disappointed, scared, and very unpatriotic. Naturally, I was glad I hadn’t posted an earlier, purely positive version of this article in my undue optimism.
Nonetheless, I won’t gain anything by finger-pointing and venting on Facebook. (I have, in fact, taken a break, currently running at 72 hours; perhaps, like quitting Twitter the moment Elon Musk b ought it, I will feel more contented as a result.) My life must go on, and the music and the writing about it likewise. Playing “American Land” now, today, five days after that election, obviously I don’t well up with emotion in the same way. I am not feeling pride. But the song still holds its ground. Yes, the chorus sings to a Whittington-esque view of the Big Cities, that which drew so many across the seas:
“There's diamonds in the sidewalk, there's gutters lined in song
Dear I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long
There's treasure for the taking, for any hard working man
Who'll make his home in the American land”
But the final verse, which follows the name-checks to those certain nationalities and the names they brought with them (“The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis too”) offers a more realistic vision of what awaited so many after they landed:
“They died building the railroads, worked to bones and skin
Died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
Died to get here a hundred years ago, they're dyin' now
The hands that built the country we're always trying to keep down.”
If anyone understands the contradictions of the American dream, certainly capable of extending it, it is Bruce Springsteen, and for its lyrically conflicted if musically optimistic view of this country, “American Land” means no less to me today than it did in 2007. It will also have the power to tear me up.
The fact is, I made my own home in this American Land. I have raised two children here – each of whom was born in the greatest city I’ve ever known, New York – and as of now, the younger one is still not fully grown. I am more fortunate that many in this country in that I have an alternative in my British passport, but as a reminder than votes based on fear of immigrants are not restricted to the U.S. of A., post-Brexit that passport no longer gets me freedom to live elsewhere in Europe. As for the UK: hey, I left the country of my birth, in significant part, after a previous election did not go my way (Thatcher’s third triumph, 1987), and one can’t keep running. If part of me got to live out an almost-utopian version of the visioned promised in “American Land”’s chorus, another part of me owes it to protect that land from its own worst instincts, to stand by the latest group of immigrants to be on the receiving end of bigotry and hatred from those who received it before them. And if I am going to be true to my vision of myself, the person I aspire to be, I have to include in that number those who voted against their self-interest, those who did not know better. Anger is an energy, as John Lydon sang, but as you get older, it gets increasingly self-defeating; taking the blame, absorbing one’s anger, and moving forwards with positivity is the far more affirmative action.
America – at least the U.S.A. – won’t be my Land forever. I have always yearned to live somewhere else before I die, to resume the journey I found myself on in 2016, roaming free around this planet (blessed, I should note, by my two particular passports, an English accent, and a white skin – and also blessed by company). So maybe the perfect place to leave this for now, before too many tangents open themselves up (a whole side-plot about Bruce’s “American Skin” perhaps?) is with the last line Bruce utters after that first ever live performance:
“For all you travelers out there.”
In my heart, I am a traveler. In my present State, I have no choice but to keep my home in this American Land. I am fortunate to have music to keep me company. Music can encourage, endorse, persuade, provoke, inspire, influence, comfort, confront, and occasionally just emote. Music is that amazing art form that is entirely intangible – you can’t put your arms around a melody – and yet can bring you to tears. Thank you for reading. Now let’s all get on with making our Land a better place to call Home.
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week. Most posts are free, but if you like what you read, please do consider a monthly or annual subscription. Not only will you receive access to all the archives, occasional bonus posts, and the Crossed Channels podcast, but you will be helping keep the site going for others.
I understand your feelings about living abroad, they are much the same as mine though I left UK more from a need for adventure than anything else - and my job of course. Here in Hong Kong, I am a permanent resident and can vote accordingly. But, due to recent electoral rule changes and China's intrusion, we can only vote for who we are told to, so we don't bother any more. Nevertheless, we live in hope that change will come one day. Having said that, it's a great place to live and have no regrets about being here. Funnily enough, I have a much stronger sense of belonging now than I ever did in the UK !
Fantastic piece, Tony. Very little in the way of post-Nebraska Bruce has the power to move me, but this song certainly does. (And you know I’m right there with you on all the other stuff.) Keep on keeping on, my friend.