The Band on Bruce: Their Springsteen

When I first heard Working on a Dream it made me think of The River crossed with Exile on Main Street, with all of those guitars and the vocal harmonies shooting up in the mix. But on headphones, I could hear all of the little details too, in those guitars, the harmonies and the strings.
I see these records [The Rising, Magic and Working on a Dream] as a trilogy. They make sense together in terms of sound, concept and writing style. The three records have been a projection more toward the pop-rock form — this one more than the other two.

Is Bruce loosening up? It's like he's going back to something he did a long time ago.
Very much so, I think. Every song on Tracks [Springsteen's 1998 box set of outtakes] was a lost argument — I'm not kidding. That is my own personal favorite style of writing. It was extremely frustrating for me to see him suppressing that side of his talent, which he is ridiculously gifted at. He was consciously squashing that.

I'm a pop-rock-band guy. That's all I am. Intellectually, I understood what he was doing. I respected and supported it. But you're throwing away "Restless Nights?" [Laughs] "Loose Ends"? What's wrong with that? I think if you asked him about it now, he could see what I meant. But he wasn't wrong. He was doing it for a specific reason. He had his eye on history. He knew that in order to have a place in history, to be relevant in the truest sense of the word, you must find your own place.

When did you first hear the songs on the new record, before you played on them? Bruce cut the rhythm tracks with that core four: him, Max, Garry and Roy. When do you come in?
It's a different world now, a different process. [Producer] Brendan O'Brien has become his partner, and by the time I get involved now, it's no longer in the early stages of arrangement and discussion. It's been arranged; the stuff is there. You play whatever they have in mind for you, and you add whatever you have as an idea. I think it's probably the way most normal bands record.

Does it still feel organic — like a band?
Yeah, it does. Because now he's self-editing. He's self-arranging with us in mind. It's like writers on a TV show. By the third or fourth year, you know the actors so well that you're writing for them. It's very seamless, effortless. and occasionally we cut something all together. We did that a couple of times for this album.

How different was it on Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River?
It was, "I wrote a song last night. This is how it goes." I got an arranging credit on Darkness, because at that point, he wanted to start tightening things up from the epic nature of Born to Run. And that's up my alley. I'm Mr. Two-and-a-Half Minutes.