Letter #5: My Hometown & My City of Ruins

Dear Bruce,
People always wonder how a Songwriter in New Jersey can have such a connection with fans around the world and maintain it for decades. What is it that draws people to your music? Why do folk relate to it? To those who delve deep into your lyrics we are fully aware of the answer, you manage to capture something that is going on with our lives whether it be our relationships, our working life, our economic situations, our hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates, and our experiences as kids, teenagers and as functioning adults.

A good example of this is your song 'My Hometown'. We all have a story or two to tell about the place we grew up. We relate a bit to the fatherly view in the opening verse: "I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick/And steer as we drove through town"; the tension in the community due to racial division and violence: "There was a lot of fights/Between the black and white/There was nothing you could do" (verse 2); the changing face of our town and the economic hardships: "Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores/ Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more/They're closing down the textile mill/Across the railroad tracks/Foreman says, these jobs are going, boys and they ain't coming back/To your hometown" (verse 3) and our grown up perspectives whether we should be "Talking about getting out/Packing up our bags, maybe heading south". But instead we stay in the hope of better days.

Almost 20 years ago you released another song about your hometown, My City of Ruins , and listening to the song today it almost feels prophetic. As I look around the town in which I live and it seems repeated up and down the Country and possibly all over the world as the pandemic has impacted our personal lives leaving such tremendous loss of loved ones and friends and our very livelihoods as shops have closed their doors, our offices shut down never to reopen and industries crashing all around us unlikely to recover anytime soon:

"Now the sweet bells of mercy drift through the evening trees
Young men on the corner like scattered leaves
The boarded up windows, the empty streets
While my brother's down on his knees
My City of Ruins"

What I always find in your songs is that no matter how bleak things look or how dark the days, there is Always Hope:

"Now with these hands, with these hands
With these hands, with these hands
I pray, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for the strength, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for the faith, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for your love, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for the strength, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for your love, Lord (with these hands, with these hands)
I pray for the faith, Lord (with these hands), alright (with these hands)
I pray for the strength, Lord (with these hands), come on (with these hands), come on
Come on rise up, come on rise up
Come on rise up, come on rise up
Come on rise up, come on rise up
Come on rise up, come on rise up
Come on rise up, come on rise up"
Come on rise up

That prayer for Divine Intervention is interesting because we live in a world where we have pretty much abandoned a reliance upon the outstretched hand of heaven and presume we can do it all ourselves. We shout loud, "We can bring the comfort to those stuck in the Valley of Tears and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. We have the power within to bring racial unity and stop the violence and hate toward each other. We have the ingenuity and the political determination and passion to transform our broken communities and make them thrive once again". But maybe we got it wrong and we do need help from outside of ourselves? Maybe it's only by that realisation we can (in the words of Frank Turner), "Rejoice, rebuild, the storm has passed".

Maybe it's only when we come to that understanding that we, like the son in the song, who has grown up and is now a Father himself, will be able to sit our sons or daughters down and say with a sense of real satifaction:

"take a good look around
This is your hometown"

All the best.
Doug