THE POWER OF PRAYER

Album version

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Dreamy afternoon 'neath the summer sun
We'd lie by the lake till the evening comes
I run my fingers through your sun streaked hair
Baby that's the power of prayer

Summer nights, summer's in the air
I stack the tables with the chairs
It's closing time and you're standing there
Baby that's the power of prayer

It's a fixed game without any rules
An empty table on a ship of fools
I'm holding hearts, I play the pair
Darling it's just the power of prayer

It's a fixed game without any rules
An empty table on a ship of fools
I'm holding hearts, I play the pair
I'm going all in 'cause I don't care

They say that love it comes and goes
But darling what, what do they know
I'm reaching for heaven, we'll make it there
Darling it's just the power of prayer
Baby it's just the power of prayer
Darling it's just the power of prayer

Last call, the bouncer shuts the door
"This Magic Moment" drifts across the floor
As Ben E. King's voice fills the air
Baby that's the power of prayer

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Info

THE POWER OF PRAYER is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and released on his 2020 album Letter To You. The above lyrics are for Bruce Springsteen's album version of THE POWER OF PRAYER as released in 2020.

Music Video

A music video for THE POWER OF PRAYER was released on Bruce Springsteen's YouTube channel on 23 Nov 2020. It was directed and edited by Thom Zimny and produced by Adrienne Gerard. Joe Desalvo, Charles Libin, and Antonio Rossi are credited for cinematography. Sam Shapiro is credited as associate editor. The video was also included on the Japanese Singles Collection -Greatest Hits- compilation album.

The music video consists of black and white clips of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band in studio during the recording sessions for Letter To You, intercepted with old footage, some of which is of Springsteen himself very early in his career.

Writing and Recording

Just like about half the songs on Letter To You, THE POWER OF PRAYER was written around April 2019 (see the "Letter To You" section below for more details).

The album version of THE POWER OF PRAYER was recorded with The E Street Band live in studio in November 2019 (see the "Letter To You" section below for more details).

Letter To You

Letter To You is Bruce Springsteen's twentieth studio album. It was officially released on 23 Oct 2020 on Columbia Records. It consists of 12 tracks, all written by Springsteen, and clocks at 58:17. The album was officially announced on 10 Sep 2020. In the press release, it was described as "a rock album fueled by the band's heart-stopping, house-rocking signature sound."

Three of the album's twelve tracks are new recordings of unreleased songs that Springsteen wrote in the early seventies. The remaining nine were "recently written," as per the album's press release. On 05 May 2019, during the opening night of Netflix's third annual FYSEE event in Los Angeles, Springsteen sat down for a long conversation with director Martin Scorsese. "I've spent about seven years without writing anything for the band," Springsteen told Scorsese at one point. "I couldn't write anything for the band. [...] And then about a month or so ago, I wrote almost an album's worth of material for the band. And it came out of just... I mean, I know where it came from, but at the same time, it just came out of almost nowhere. And it was good, you know. I had about two weeks of those little daily visitations, and it was so nice. It makes you so happy."

In 2017 or 2018, when Springsteen was coming out from one of his Springsteen On Broadway shows, a young fan, from Italy Springsteen thinks, handed him an acoustic guitar. As Springsteen recounted to AARP's Robert Love, the fan told him, "Hey, Bruce, this is for you. We had this built for you. It's very special." The guitar had no case and was made by a company that Springsteen never heard of. "I said, 'Geez, you know, thanks,'" Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "And I just took a quick glance at it and it looked like a nice guitar, so I jumped in the car with it." The Rolling Stone article and the AARP article give two conflicting timelines as to when Springsteen was gifted the guitar. This took place "sometime before Theiss' passing" according to the former and "shortly after Theiss' death" according to the latter. The Springsteen On Broadway concert residency officially opened on 12 Oct 2017 and ran through 15 Dec 2018. Former Castiles member George Theiss passed away on 13 Jul 2018.

The guitar ended up sitting in Springsteen's living room for months, until he picked it up around April 2019. "All the [new] songs from the album came out of it," Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "In perhaps less than 10 days. I just wandered around the house in different rooms, and I wrote a song each day. I wrote a song in the bedroom. I wrote a song in our bar. I wrote a song in the living room." "Sometimes instruments have some magic in them," Springsteen told AARP's Robert Love. "The songs for the album were in the guitar that the kid gave me. You try for seven years and you write an album in a week." However, at least three songs were written or partially written at least 15 years earlier. These are ONE MINUTE YOU'RE HERE, BURNIN' TRAIN, and RAINMAKER.

Soon after he wrote the new songs, sometime during summer 2018 as Roy Bittan remembers, Springsteen met Bittan for lunch in New York City while he was performing on Broadway. "He said, 'I wrote a whole bunch of songs for E Street,'" Bittan told Uncut's Peter Watts. "He said, 'Yeah, I did it in about two weeks.' That wasn't the first time he had done something in a quick burst, but I was taken aback as he had been so involved with the Broadway show, the book, and this Western Stars project had been on and off for years. To hear that in the middle of all this he had written a bunch of E Street songs was terribly exciting. So the first thing I said was, 'Great, now don't demo them.' Because when you demo, it's carved in stone. Then you have to play 'beat the demo'." Springsteen knew that Bittan was right. "When I demo, I start putting things on to see if it works," he told Hiatt. "And suddenly, I'm locked into an arrangement. And then the band has to fit themselves into an arrangement. And suddenly, we don't have an E Street Band album. So I intentionally did not demo anything." Springsteen did not touch the songs before he taught them to the band during the recording sessions. He simply played them solo acoustic and captured them on his iPhone just to make sure he remembered them.

According to Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, Roy Bittan's advice had deep implications for Letter To You and echoed what Steven Van Zandt had been telling Springsteen for years. "We have an ongoing conversation and one of the regular topics is that if we do make another record, let's do it the old way," Van Zandt told Uncut. "The old way" is how Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River, and Born In The U.S.A. were recorded. "Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input," Van Zandt told Forbes' Steve Baltin. "The great thing about the E Street Band is they really do produce themselves." Until 1984, as Uncut's Peter Watts put it, "Van Zandt had acted as something like a conduit ― or consigliere ― between Springsteen and the rest of the group." But after his departure from the E Street Band following the recording of Born In The U.S.A., Springsteen's albums stopped being recorded live in studio. On some recordings Springsteen handled all or almost all instruments or musicians recorded their parts separately ― sometimes in different studios around the country ― and producers and engineers assembled the recordings to make up the final songs. Letter To You would be different.

In 2019, while working through his archives for a follow-up to his 1998 Tracks box set, Springsteen came across JANEY NEEDS A SHOOTER, IF I WAS THE PRIEST, and SONG FOR ORPHANS. He decided to record them again for Letter To You. He told The New York Times' Lindsay Zoladz: "It's fun to go back and see how wild my lyric writing was, and how uninhibited it was at a certain moment, and to be able to take that and bring it into the present with the band, and sing it in my voice right now, was a bit of a joy ride. The thing about those songs, every line is insane! And somehow they end up making sense about something. I'm not sure how I did it at the time."

Springsteen has long had recording facilities set up at different properties he owns or owned at some point in the United States. These were named "Thrill Hill Recording", or sometimes referred to as "Thrill Hill East" or "Thrill Hill West" depending on whether it's on the East Coast or on the West Coast. In 2009, he set up Stone Hill Studio, a permanent recording facility at Stone Hill Farm, his horse ranch in Colts Neck, NJ. Letter To You was recorded at Stone Hill Studio and all or almost all of the songs on the album were cut between 11 and 15 Nov 2019. Springsteen told The New York Times' Lindsay Zoladz: "My blueprint for what I was doing was basically the two songs that we'd done in the past that were cut completely live, 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town' and 'Born In The U.S.A.,' which is like two takes." "We basically cut the album in four days," Steven Van Zandt told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt. "We booked five days and on the fifth day we had nothing to do, so we just listened to it." There were some discussions that Springsteen and the band reconvene later that year or early in 2020 to record more material, but Springsteen felt he had enough for the album.

The band had not heard the songs they were going to record when they arrived in studio. Springsteen had a stack of maybe as many as 15 songs according to Uncut's Peter Watts. Springsteen would first play a song for them on acoustic guitar while they listened and noted chord changes, each writing down a preliminary arrangement, and then they all contributed ideas and discussed the arrangement. Then they played the song live, making further alterations until they were satisfied with the take. Then the same process starts all over with the next song and so on until the album was finished. Each song was completed within half-a-dozen tries. "It's natural, organic with a lot of improvisation but within the structure of the written song," Nils Lofgren told Uncut's Peter Watts. "You aren't just trying to place your part on a great track, you are all there together. It's interactive and you have to focus and adapt to what the others are doing. [...] We had no preconceived notions or parts to chase. We'd just start from scratch." "Sometimes [Springsteen will] give us the cue but we have freedom to try things and use our instincts," Charles Giordano told Watts. "He'll let us know if he doesn't like it and is very good at letting us know what he appreciates."

Letter To You marks the first time that Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band recorded an album together as a unit since Born In The U.S.A.. As Springsteen explained to AARP's Robert Love, "[the album] was all live, no overdub vocals and just a few overdub instruments. It's the first truly live, in-the-studio record of the band we've ever made." According to Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, "a few of Springsteen's twangy guitar leads, played on a Gretsch, are among the only exceptions." Jake Clemons came in on the fifth day to overdub his saxophone parts.

Letter To You was produced by Ron Aniello with Springsteen, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Springsteen (lead vocals, guitar, harmonica) is joined on the album by Steven Van Zandt (guitar, backing vocals), Nils Lofgren (guitar, backing vocals), Charles Giordano (organ, backing vocals), Roy Bittan (piano, backing vocals), Garry Tallent (bass guitar, backing vocals), Max Weinberg (drums, backing vocals), Jake Clemons (saxophone), and Patti Scialfa (backing vocals). The album is available as a single-disc CD and as a two-disc LP set, as well as digital download and streaming. Three editions of the vinyl release were issued: a regular edition on black vinyl, a limited edition on black with white splatter vinyl exclusive to Bruce Springsteen's official webstore, and a limited edition on gray vinyl exclusive to independent retailers.

Letter To You topped the charts in many countries. In the United States, it debuted and peaked at number 2. This makes it Springsteen's 21st U.S. top 5 album. It also makes Springsteen the first act with new top five-charting albums in each of the last six decades.

Japanese Singles Collection -Greatest Hits-

Japanese Singles Collection -Greatest Hits- is a Bruce Springsteen compilation album released by Sony Music Japan in 2023. The compilation, which was exclusively released in Japan, consists of previously released 35 audio tracks and 62 video tracks. The collection is part of a 26-title reissue campaign to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen's debut album. The series, issued in three waves (25 Oct 2023, 22 Nov 2023, and 20 Dec 2023), includes 25 albums originally released between 1973 and 2014 plus a new compilation album that includes all of Springsteen's singles released in Japan from 1975 to 1999. All audio CD's were manufactured using Sony Japan's Blu-spec CD2 format.

Live History

Bruce Springsteen has been performing on almost all the annual Stand Up for Heroes benefits since 2007. THE POWER OF PRAYER was performed during the seventeenth (2023) annual benefit. The song was played solo on acoustic guitar and harmonica.

Covers

As far as it's known, no artist has recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's THE POWER OF PRAYER.

Request

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Available Versions

List of available versions of THE POWER OF PRAYER on this website:

THE POWER OF PRAYER [Album version]

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Page last updated: 25 Nov 2020