I was really proud of Springsteen for doing this Jeep ad, shown during the Super Bowl. It’s the first time The Boss has ever done a commercial, and he did it for the right reasons. Asking for Americans to rejoin, to unify. Variety has a great article about how the ad came to be and how involved Springsteen was in it.

I’m still a little puzzled about how the raucous rocker of the 70s, 80s and 90s evolved into a cowboy. He and I went through a period in the 2000s where I lost enthusiasm for his music, but somewhere in the last decade I’ve rejoined the Bruce fan club and started enjoying his music again. His music and personae in Western Stars (the documentary/concert) is 100% consistent with how he showed up in the Jeep ad – a wise old cowboy poet, a truth-teller. Western Stars is on my top 10 list of feel-good video concerts. I sure would have liked to have been in that barn at the time.