Bruce Springsteen has been busy lately. Over the past couple of months he's been rolling out previews of his upcoming box set Tracks II: The Lost Albums, an archival collection of seven unreleased LPs spanning 1983 to 2018. As is his wont, he's also currently on tour, and the rightfully-disparaging comments he's made onstage about the Donald Trump administration have made him the president's latest shit-talking target. I don't think Springsteen feels very offended, though.
Today Springsteen is teasing one of those unreleased albums, called Inyo, with a Mariachi-inspired song called "Adelita." Springsteen wrote a lot of Inyo during a less-busy period of his life in the '90s, when he was taking big motorcycle trips along the US/Mexico border and up through California, stopping at some national parks along the way. He started thinking a lot about Mexican history, and wrote "Adelita" as "an ode to Mexico’s female soldaderas,” the oft-forgotten women who provided vital domestic (and sometimes combative) help to Mexico's military during the revolution.
And speaking of revolutions, Trump's retaliatory remarks against Springsteen have prompted fellow musicians to voice their support for the Boss, as Neil Young did last week. More recently at Boston Calling over the weekend, Tom Morello paid tribute to Springsteen with a cover of his 1995 song "The Ghost Of Tom Joad": "Bruce, his whole life, has been about truth, justice, democracy, equality," Morello said. "And Trump's mad at him because Bruce draws a much bigger audience."
Meanwhile, during Bono's appearance on a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel live, host Kimmel asked the U2 frontman who's side he's on in the feud. "I think there's only one Boss in America," Bono said.
Watch those remarks and listen to Springsteen's "Adelita" below.
Tracks II: The Lost Albums is out 6/27 on Sony Music.
