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Music

The People Should Know That Bruce Springsteen Loves Kanye West

The Boss also weighed the state of the world and a potential gubernatorial run ("Pssht, nooo") in a new interview with Variety.
Bruce Springsteen photo by Danny Clinch/Kanye West photo by Demetrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Ahead of his much anticipated Broadway run, Bruce Springsteen appeared on the cover of Variety this week. In the interview, he touched on news of a long-awaited solo album and evaluated the possibility of running for governor of New Jersey ("Pssht, nooo," he rebuffed), among other things of varying interest depending on if you managed to score tickets to those shows or not. But in a supplement to the interview published today, he also gave the Variety writer a "tour of his iTunes playlist," briefly weighing in on the music that he's been spinning lately.

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Like most cool dads out there, he had some especially kind words for Kanye West's most recent record. "I thought that was an amazing creation, especially the arrangements," he said. Which is cool because that means you have at least one thing in common with Bruce Springsteen. Elsewhere his tastes skew kinda NPR-ish, favoring brooding rock bands like The National, as well as downcast singer songwriters like Iron & Wine, Ben Harper, and Sam Amidon.

Of Sufjan Stevens, he had but two words to say: "He's great." One, I agree and, two, I find this delightfully terse, because whenever someone asks me—who they know as A Music Person—what tunes I've been listening to, I go entirely blank and start to feel my brain juices leaking out of my ears. You can head over to Variety to read all his thoughts, none of which are much deeper than that, but are still cool nevertheless.

Elsewhere in that Variety article, he also touches on the state of political music as a whole in the Trump era. He explains that writing a screed against the president in his music would feel "redundant."

"I'm not driven to write any anti-Trump diatribe; that doesn't feel necessary at the moment," He says. "Yeah, because it's everywhere and all over, ya know? It feels a little redundant to me at the moment. And, once again, I always try to look at what I can deliver that's personal to me and of most value."

Some people could probably stand to hear such a diatribe right now, but hey, maybe that's why he has months of sold out shows and I'm sitting here blogging.