There was a time when I knew almost everything by listening to it on a squeaky cassette Nebraska by heart. Not the piece, but the 40 minutes of the album. Yet if I had absentmindedly heard the first verse of this version of the title track I would have said with great certainty: it's Bruce Springsteen, what a masterpiece. And instead it's Jeremy Allen White, from the soundtrack of Deliver Me from Nowhere which will be released on December 5th and which was anticipated by an EP released at the same time as Scott Cooper's not-so-successful-film. Listening more carefully to the Nebraska the actor's differences are evident, obviously, and are even more marked in other pieces of the soundtrack, but the degree of verisimilitude of certain passages is remarkable. It's a question of voice color, inflections, nuances. Whoever sang, played and produced these pieces knew what they were doing. However, a question remains: do we do anything with the records (records, not films) in which the actors imitate the songs we have listened to, loved, memorised?
It is almost becoming a recording trend that goes from Timothée Chalamet who plays Bob Dylan to Taron Egerton who in the album Rocketman he sings almost all the songs and ends up duetting with Elton John himself. The fiction goes from the screen to the stereo, oops, to the telephone. It's a class apart from fictional artists like Daisy Jones and The Six or John C. Reilly's Dewey Cox. Inventiveness is banned here, the rule is to become a compliant copy of a model.
Returning to Springsteen – Free me from nothingit is curious that the soundtrack of the film focuses on the period of Nebraska opens with a version of Born in the USA in which Jeremy Allen White is accompanied by a fake E Street Band that replicates the sound – incidentally, Roy Bittan says that it is no longer possible to recreate the sound of the album 100% because the settings of his Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer cannot be replicated, «they weren't traditional switches with fixed positions, you moved them and then good luck if you wanted to bring them back to where they were the day before». Also from the 1984 album there is a version of I'm on Fire: it's hard to believe that the base isn't the original one, even if Allen White interprets it with a feeling closer to country. However, the bulk of the album is made up of covers of songs by Nebraskathere are seven of them and they replicate the recordings made by Springsteen on that tape which fortunately entered the history of rock.
The expected, but still curious and funny thing is that, having never taken it on tour, Springsteen wanted to include in the box set Nebraska '82 a recently recorded live version without an audience of all the songs from the album. Well, thanks to the production and Springsteen's voice which has changed over the years, Jeremy Allen White's versions are closer to the '82 originals than their author's. We live in an era in which the copy is more similar to the original than the original and this is also an era of re-enactments. Just as there are the reenactment of the battles of the Civil War, there are the reenactment of rockers' battles. In any case, the fact that the Atlantic City played today by its author has been listened to on Spotify approximately the same number of times as that of Allen White which was released on the same day and that no piece of that Springsteen live performance reaches the number of streams of the “pretend” I'm on Fire taken from the film. It's the Spider-Man meme with Springsteen in his thirties, Springsteen in his seventies, and Jeremy Allen White imitating the young Springsteen.
Those interested in certain details should know, if they don't already know, that in the scenes of the film in which Springsteen performs with the Cats on a Smooth Surface, i.e. Bobby Bandiera's band that played at the Stone Pony, in 1982, there are members of Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet, as well as musicians from the Nashville scene. “His ability to play Bruce Springsteen is masterful,” Jake Kiszka said of the actor. «He managed to find the right balance between capturing the essence of the character and making it original» (in the scenes with the E Street Band the part of drummer Max Weinberg is played by Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). The band was put together by producer Dave Cobb, who in the past produced both Greta Van Fleet and Rival Sons. The three pieces played by this formation are covers of Lucille, Boom Boom And I Put a Spell on You and represent the strange bar band ending of a record that tells of Springsteen's young anger and dark side, but the compilers of the soundtracks are allowed to assemble compilations and not conceptually cohesive records.
Not all the protagonists of rock biopics sing in the films they star in. Sometimes it is preferred to use the original tracks in playback, in other cases the actors mime the main songs and sing live only in secondary moments of the film, in other cases a mix is chosen (seeElvis by Baz Luhrmann). In the most successful rock biopic of all time, Freddie Mercury sang, not Rami Malek. On the contrary, in A Complete Unknown it is Chalamet who interprets Dylan's pieces. “Singing and playing live was important,” said the actor. “If I can do it, why put an element of artifice in it?” In the first cases there is less naturalness, in the second there is a risk of effect Such and such showsee Marisa Abela's Amy, but maybe up Back to Black The paucity of the film and Winehouse's peculiarities also weigh heavily.
The debate on what is better is open. There are those who prefer films with original music and those who appreciate the naturalness of the transitions between the actors' speech and singing. There are those who want to hear Bohemian Rhapsody sung as Freddie commands and who appreciates the possibility that actors-turned-singers have to underline certain nuances of the text and integrate the songs into the script. The actors who try their hand at singing acquire prestige and give credibility to the operation, but when their interpretations end up on record they lose meaning. They become souvenirs, at most they can evoke the interpretative lens of the film or some particularly significant scenes, but most of the time you listen to them once to understand what they are like and forget them immediately, even if Chalamet has roughly the same monthly listeners on Spotify as the Violent Femmes and JJ Cale (sigh).
In a beautiful moment of A Complete Unknown Chalamet/Dylan performs in Newport, where he presents The Times They Are A-Changin'. The audience learns it instantly and joins in singing. Edward Norton/Pete Seeger looks admiringly at the young folksinger, everyone smiles and hangs on Dylan's lips. Only Elle Fanning/Sylvie Russo hears those words as a condemnation to sentimental irrelevance. The others are amazed and if you care about Dylan's music from that decade, you are a little moved because you feel that something is happening, that that song has a revolutionary force, that it is an anathema hurled against the conservative forces of society in an era in which popular music still had great political force. Then you listen to that same version again on Spotify and hear a folksinger imitating Dylan.
Likewise, when you put on Deliver Me from Nowhere you say “he's good” and move on. They are not creative interpretations, they cannot tell us much about that repertoire. Extreme verisimilitude never works in music, which is why a discreet author is worth more than a sensational tribute band. Who wants to spend 40 minutes listening to a good Springsteen impersonator? We want imagination, different points of view, shifts in meaning, stories we don't know, the unexpected. The more similar they are to the originals, the less interesting they are, the better they are at the cinema and the more useless they are on Spotify.
