It’s hard to put into words what Bruce Springsteen means to me. His music and his persona are so entangled with my teenage years and my 20s, with my relationships with my father, my sister, my cousin Sean. Bruce Springsteen is me listening to the Born in the USA album on the stereo in our living room when I was 13 or 14 years’ old, wishing I could go see him in Slane. It’s finally going to see him when I was 17 in the RDS with Daddy and my sister. It’s going to see him again when I was 20, this time on my own, the night before my final anthropology exam at the end of my degree. None of my friends would come with me, because of…well…final exams, but I’d been to Bon Jovi the night before and now Bruce (I did great in those exams, by the way). I remember standing on my own at the very front of the crowd, crushed up against the stage and Bruce doing an acoustic version of Thunder Road. It’s me on my 50th birthday, standing in a muddy stadium in Barcelona with my sister and my best friend, tears streaming down my face as Bruce sang Thunder Road again. I’m not a Bruce completist. I don’t have (or even know) all of his music, but I’m an all in, unapologetic fan.

My favorite album, not just by Bruce, but my favourite album by anyone ever, is Nebraska. I’ve listened to it a thousand times. I could sing the whole album to you without skipping a beat (not that anyone would want me to). I love that album. From that opening harmonica of the title track, it just grabs me, with its pathos and anger and the death of the American Dream, and Bruce’s gravelly voice weaving stories of the struggles of ordinary people. It simply moves me in ways that no other album ever has.

Two mornings ago I did what I do first thing every morning. I put on the kettle and, while I waited for it to boil, I got my phone and looked at the news. I scrolled down my preferred news site, reading about all the terrible things happening in the world at the moment. Down at the culture section, I see that a trailer for some new Bruce Springsteen film has just been released. Not only is it a film about Bruce, it’s a film about the making of the Nebraska album. Jeremy Allen White is playing Bruce. I really loved The Bear, not really because of Jeremy Allen White but because of the entire ensemble cast. I find him an odd-looking sullen little man and I wondered what he would be like in the role of Bruce. I was thinking about it on my one-hour walk so, when I got home, I found the trailer on YouTube for Deliver me from Nowhere, as I discovered the film is called. I watched the two and a half minute trailer and without warning, found tears streamed down my face. I don’t think a trailer has ever made me cry before. It had such a deep impact on me. I don’t really even know why I was crying, but I think a mixture of nostalgia, joy, excitement about seeing the film, and remembering listening to that album throughout my teens and 20s and 30s and how it has meant something different to me at different stages of my life. Later on, instead of listening to a podcast, as I usually do when I’m making lunch, I did the only thing I could possibly do and played the Nebraska album from first song to last.