What I Know Now

What I Know Now

Источник: https://barbaraoneal.substack.com/p/what-i-know-now

My husband and I finally watched Deliver Me from Nowhere, the biopic about Bruce Springsteen channeling his album Nebraska. I’m sure this is a place filled to the brim with fans of the Boss, so I’m not claiming any special ground by saying that I love him. Love his music, his devotion and commitment, love him even more for speaking out so fiercely right now.

There were a couple of things about the movie that made me both very much want to see it and also one that made me hesitate. The album Nebraska is one of my top five of all time, and I have written innumerable books to it. My ex-husband used to call it “music to commit suicide to,” and had no idea why I listened to it so often. It’s dark, for sure, but that echoey sense of hopelessness appeals to me. Used Cars is such exquisite poetry, capturing a perfect sense of working class joy and yearning.

But listening so deeply to the songs in the movie would mean sitting with parts of myself I hadn’t visited in a while, and I wasn’t sure how that would feel. Music transports us like nothing else, and did I really want to hang out with that young woman, pouring her heart out on the page? As Bob Seger says so poignantly, wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

The other pull toward the film was the fact that Jeremy Allen White is a big favorite, and that casting gave me shivers.

But White reminds me of my friend Tom, who died two years ago, a musician himself who adored Springsteen. The combo…ugh. Would it break my heart? All of it together?

You know, it kind of did. Revisiting my old self, revisiting the friend who never quite got what he wanted and then died too young.

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

Some days.

The film dives into the making of a personal passion project, a work that was unlike the big rock ballads Springsteen was known for. He was under pressure to write something more like those things—do the Next Big Thing.

But the music in his head haunted him. This dark, echoey, intensely personal story album. It tortured him quite a lot. It was hard to reproduce the sound he discovered on crappy equipment in a bedroom; once they actually did it, the studio execs were highly unhappy.

In the middle of all that angst, the struggle to create this work of art that obsessed him, he popped off another song, which was only mediocre in its first draft. In the studio, with the band and all the energy that brings, it became Born in the USA, one of the greatest rock ballads of all time.

What struck me in the contrast is the fact that sometimes the work is very, very difficult, and sometimes it just shows up. As his manager says to Bruce over the first take of Born in the USA, “the muse came down and kissed you on the lips.”

We all long for that experience, don’t we? Most of us wonder how to make it happen, how to at least create the conditions for it.

The only condition is showing up. Doing the work. Day after day after day. When it’s hard, when it seems impossible, when it’s easy, and when it feels like you’ll never get it done. Showing up and showing up and showing up. You have to be sitting there when the Muse wants to kiss you.

The world anointed Born in the USA as a great song, and it is. Bold, beautiful, passionate, a little raw.

Nebraska, released all at once, with no singles, is also a masterpiece. It’s not the same thing, and it doesn’t necessarily appeal to every person who loves Born. But it is itself, and in being true to it, doing everything in his power to get it down right, Springsteen was faithful to his own muse. I deeply believe the muses reward that listening, that they pay attention to who is serving the work. How did that hard listening lead to other songs, ideas, albums?

We don’t have much control over the ideas that seize us (though commercial writers always are aware that we have readers, and a body of work, and we have to serve those things, too), but we are in control of how much devotion we show in serving those works.

When I first knew Tom, he was a passionate guitar-head who created a band with my boyfriend. They practiced in our basement and played parties around town, dreaming always of the next big thing. I was trying to figure out how to be a writer, a quieter pursuit, but I was pretty damned serious about it. I wrote short stories and sent them to magazines, learning and getting rejected and trying again. And again. Some were terrible and some were not. They got better.

I broke up with the boyfriend and didn’t see Tom again for decades. He’d gone to music school and dreamed the big dreams of playing guitar. Instead, he had a big life running shows for very famous bands around the world. It was enough. It was good.

By the time we reconnected, I’d gone through a marriage and a divorce and all the hard things, and I wasn’t a pretty young girl anymore, but I’d stayed true to my dream of writing novels, and had written a lot of them. He was a bit sad, the big jobs lost in the pandemic, his marriage falling apart.

When I watched Deliver Me from Nowhere, I felt him with me. I felt my old self with me, too, that girl who dreamed of writing, and the young woman who did the writing to that music that was so powerful.

In the morning, I went into my office with my coffee as I always do. The book is giving me some trouble. In fact, it’s truly misbehaving, but I remember that sometimes books are just like that, each one needing its own brand of tending.

I know things now I didn’t know then. How hard it can be, how much can be lost.

And still, I sit down. I listen. I write.

Are you a fan of The Boss? Have you seen the movie? Is there an album that shaped you? (Or more than one?)

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Pre-order my newest novel, coming August 11 “A lush and colorful look at the first half of the twentieth century―and the colonial politics that played out as world wars raged―through the eyes of a British artist born in India who longs, during the Blitz in London, to return to the town that holds her heart in the foothills of the Himalayas. Those hungry for epistolary novels will enjoy Barbara O’Neal’s A Thousand Painted Hours, written largely in letters of love, regret, and duty that span continents and decades.” ―Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author