Steve and I have been on a huge Springsteen kick since his new album Magic was released in early October. Each of us went through a phase of listening to the album nonstop. Then, we were really excited to hear that Bruce had played with Win and Regine from Arcade Fire when he was on tour in Canada - it's not often that you get to see your musical heroes collaborate with one of your new favorite bands. Then, we rocked out with Bruce and the E Street Band (and my mom) at the United Center on October 22. Tunnel of Love, really?! Thunder Road?! Wish they would have played another hour, and that we had another day or two to recover after two nights of Panic in Milwaukee - but otherwise, the show was awesome. I hope that I still have this much energy thirty years from now when I'm Bruce's age!

Clarence, Max and Bruce in Auburn Hills, MI, 11/5/07, from backstreets.com

When Steve hung out with his friends from New Jersey at a wedding in LA last month, they turned him onto an unrecorded Bruce song that he'd never heard, about the town where Bruce was born, called "In Freehold." I sort of tried to track it down when he first mentioned it - I'm firmly convinced that you can find just about anything on the internet if you look long enough - but obviously I didn't make that much of an effort to find this song, because once I did, it was pretty easy to find. This past Friday, I hit the jackpot - I finally found my way to the Bruce site of my dreams. Wow! What a catalog. Not only did it have a few different versions of "In Freehold", but it also had a huge list of live versions of most of Bruce's original songs, plus lots of random cool covers, and it also had a bunch of full shows that I didn't even explore. 

The funny thing is, I would know exactly where to look for a Widespread Panic song that I had never heard before, but since I'm not  nearly as familiar with the Springsteen fan community, I wasn't sure where to go. We were relaxing on the couch with a bottle of wine on Friday night, and we had the best time just downloading interesting-looking Bruce mp3's and then listening to them. Hey, Bruce covered "Run Through the Jungle" and "Ring of Fire"?  But the highlight was listening to "In Freehold" several times - it's a very intimate, personal song, a direct narrative about growing up in this town, but it's also raucous and dirty and hilarious and wonderful. Usually artists construct some kind of a character between themselves and the audience, and their songs are about those characters - often the characters have a lot of the artist in them, but they're still characters in some way - so it's really disarming and touching when you hear a musician just singing about his real life, with all its challenges and setbacks and occasional small triumphs.     

I was born right here on Randolph street in Freehold......
here right behind that big red maple in Freehold....
well I went to school right here....
got laid and had my first beer.......in Freehold

-Bruce Springsteen

First things first:  Before I launch into my observations about the wedding planning experience thus far, I wanted to share the story of our anniversary, April 26, which by lucky coincidence also happens to be our wedding date. We didn’t force it, but we already were thinking about a spring wedding, and our special day just happened to fall on a Saturday in 2008, so we took it as a sign. However, had April 26, 2008, not been a Saturday, we just would have picked a random Saturday in April, May, or June, and let it go at that.

April 26, 2002 is the day that my fiance and I count from. We had first met the previous summer at a Los Lobos concert, and we went out for our “first date” in mid-April, but I like to think that April 26 was the day that both of us truly realized we had found something worth exploring. It was also the date of a momentous Widespread Panic show at Oak Mountain in Pelham, Alabama, the first Panic show we attended together, and the last Panic show we attended together before the original lead guitarist, Mikey Houser, succumbed to pancreatic cancer. The two of us had attended some of the same shows in the past, but at this one we were alone together, away from our larger group of friends. We had traveled down to Oak Mountain separately – me at the last minute, having decided after two great shows in Raleigh the previous weekend that I needed to go to Oak Mountain too, because the rumors among the hardcore fanbase suggested that these might be Mikey’s last shows at Oak Mountain, and sadly, they were – but we ended up with extra tickets from a mutual friend that were right next to each other. There was a massive downpour right before showtime, which was alarming, especially for a girl who had thrown caution to the wind and "called in sick" from a parking lot in Pelham that morning, but the weather cleared up just in time, prompting the lead singer John Bell (usually and henceforth known as JB) to welcome the crowd with the words, “Bless all your soggy warm hearts for coming out tonight.” 

The concert was superb, with impassioned playing from all involved, and a fantastic setlist – a great mix of the light and uplifting and the dark and dirty, the classic originals and the new originals, the regular covers and the rare covers, including a bustout “Werewolves of London”, which hadn’t been played since 1996 and seemed particularly appropriate under the full moon. The encore featured a beautiful, heart-wrenching cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home”, a song with lyrics that resonate with both me and my fiance, as we are wanderer-types who also have a deep appreciation for the comforts of home.  As our relationship blossomed in the following weeks and months, I kept thinking back to those lyrics…

You are the reason I’ve been waiting so long
Somebody holds the key

At that point in my life, I really hadn’t been “waiting” very long, as I was only 22, and I had ended a serious relationship of four years soon after I graduated college the previous summer. On the other hand, my fiance is five years older than I am, and he had never been in a really serious relationship, so the longer ours continued, the more I liked to flatter myself that perhaps I was the reason he had waited so long. Regardless, I love the idea of one significant other “holding the key” to the other’s mysteries – I suppose it’s not a particularly esoteric reference, but it’s a bit more subtle than Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” – which, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I loved as a child.