Recently, I referenced my current purchasing patterns when it comes to new music. A specific occurrence this week got me to thinking about a time when I approached new music quite differently. Bruce Springsteen released his sixteenth studio album.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, Springsteen was one of my favorite artists. During my teenage years, he was one of the prime creative forces in weaning me away from dreadful drivel to music that could be listened to without overt embarrassment. I got Born to Run, Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. within a short stretch of time, and was duly and thoroughly hooked. The release of Working on a Dream this week made me recall at time when a new Springsteen offering would have compelled me to be at the record store of my choice at the time it first hit record racks. I specifically remember going to Radio KAOS in Stevens Point to pick up Human Touch and Lucky Town, and impulsively swerving into the parking lot of a Madison Best Buy parking lot on a cold November night to procure The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Despite the fact that I’ve largely bypassed the last few Springsteen albums, owning only a copy of the dull-as-dirt Devil & Dust that the college radio station I spent time at rightly had no interest in adding to the library, it was a little odd to feel no compunction whatsoever to seek out the new album. There was a time I concocted plans for a Springsteen quest with college friends, motoring to New Jersey to find the Stone Pony, Pinball Way out on a boardwalk, and giant Exxon light giving a fair city light. Now I couldn’t even be bothered to buy a new CD. It represents not just a disinterest in the new songs or an aversion to godawful cover art (a misjudgment in design that others have corrected identified as not a newproblem).

As Springsteen approaches his sixtieth birthday, nearly thirty-five years after that storied simultaneous appearance on the Time and Newsweek covers, it’s hard to believe in any album release as that vital any longer. His have been growing more and more tepid, to be sure, but it’s also a form that he once mastered and seems less and less relevant with each new sensation that gets its greatest exposure online before it ever gets bundled for shipment to stores. I still get CDs and take satisfaction in watching the collection swell, but the sense of discovery has long sense transferred from that first spin to the first batch of clicks. It’s not just Bruce records that I don’t seek out at the first opportunity, it’s all of them that can wait.

I spoke to the proprietor of that Stevens Point record store noted above not so long ago. He told me the labels were indicating that he shouldn’t expect even having new CDs to sell within a year or so, just electronic options and some vinyl records for the devoted collectors. I initially thought that unlikely, but now I’m beginning to wonder. If Working on a Dream weren’t pressed onto a silver disc, I’d never notice.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)