[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On a more pessimistic and a more optimistic way to read a unique Springsteen song.
Bruce has sung in falsetto on recorded songs a couple times in the past, and occasionally does so in concerts as well, so the moments in the chorus of “The Lost Charro” when his voice moves into that upper vocal register are not necessarily new (if certainly unusual). But I think my BruceStudying credentials are strong enough that when I say I’ve never quite heard Bruce sound like he does in “The Last Charro,” you’ll trust me that the sound of this song is quite unique in the Boss’s canon, and well worth checking out if you haven’t already. Even for someone who is first and foremost (and really throughout and last) a lyrics guy, one of the pleasures I found in the Tracks 2 “lost” albums was the chance to hear Bruce do so much musical experimentation that we wouldn’t generally find in his official body of work—including a country album and one built entirely on hip hop drum loops, for example—and I enjoyed that in “The Lost Charro” as well.
If we turn to the song’s lyrics, I’d argue that it’s one of the most interestingly ambiguous tracks on not just this album but also across the whole of Tracks 2. On its face, the song depicts the gradual but unmistakable tragedy captured in its title: the speaker’s loss of his past identity as a charro (a traditional Mexican horseman), which has been replaced by his present work as a migrant laborer in the Southwest U.S. That narrative builds to the song’s most overt and painful lines, in its final verse: “I’ve traded in my leather for the denim of my campesinos/Godmother, I’ll return home soon you’ll see/And tonight in my dreams…” When the two young Mexican brothers at the center of Springsteen’s earlier, similar song “Sinaloa Cowboys” (1995) prepare to migrate to the U.S., their father says to them, “My sons one thing you will learn/For everything the north gives, it exacts a price in return.” The price those two pay is far more violent and tragic than that of the speaker of “The Lost Charro,” but there’s no doubt he too has paid a price, and it’s a sad one.
But y’all know me well enough to know I’m gonna look for a more critical optimistic way to read even a sad song like this one, and I think we can find one in the title of one of the chapters in my book We the People: “Mexican Americans Have Never Left” (I wanted to add, “Motherfucker,” but I hope and believe it’s implied). One of the most pernicious narratives around immigration in recent decades (a very, very, very competitive list to be sure) is the idea that Mexican immigrants (and really any Hispanic immigrants as framed by this narrative, but the focus is frequently on Mexican arrivals) represent a change, a relatively new community in the United States. Literally nothing could be further from the truth. So yes, the speaker of “The Lost Charro” has seen his identity change, from a more traditional to a more modern one; and yes, more importantly, the modern community he’s part of need to be much better paid and supported and respected. But to my mind his isn’t the story of a shift from Mexico to the U.S., because Mexican Americans have never left. Like most of the songs on Inyo, this unusual Bruce ballad can help us better remember those histories.
Last InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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