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Observing Patti Scialfa's and The Rising's birthday weekend July 30, 2023 This weekend Patti Scialfa (born on July 29, 1953) turned 70 and The Rising (officially released on July 30, 2002) turned 21. There's no better way to mark both occasions than by experiencing or re-experiencing Patti's beautifully moving, powerful, and wordless solo-vocal introduction to the Live In Barcelona performance of "Into The Fire:" Special thanks to Bev Stevenson for the inspiration.

August 2, 2023 Not surprisingly, fans and friends of the great, beloved musician-songwriter-producer-entrepreneur-philanthropist Jesse Malin - who has been unable to stand or walk since suffering a rare type of stroke last May - have been stepping up to support his ongoing recovery effort. It's only fitting that so many want to help the "Mayor of the East Village," given all he's done over the years to support so many fellow musicians, his hometown music scene, and organizations like the Light of Day Foundation. Clearly Jesse's full, Bad-Brains-inspired embrace of "P.M.A. (Positive Mental Attitude)" is inspiring many others to do the same. Among them is photographer Danny Clinch, whose Asbury-Park-based Transparent Gallery has launched a special Jesse Malin Fundraiser. Clinch is selling archival pigment prints of three of his photos, with all proceeds going to help cover Malin's medical bills. Two of the photos were taken in 2007, when Clinch directed the music-video for Malin's "Broken Radio," featuring Bruce Springsteen. (Click here to watch the 2022-remaster version of the music-video.) The third photo is a beautiful image of Bruce Springsteen in concert at Madison Square Garden on April 1, 2023. Click here for all of the details on the Jesse Malin Fundraiser by Danny Clinch's Transparent Gallery. Sweet Relief Musicians Fund's Jesse Malin Fund is where fans and supporters can contribute directly to assist in Malin's recovery. The Jesse Malin Fund also has a collection of shirts that can be purchased, with proceeds directed to the Fund. Click here to purchase a shirt. Our friends at Virgil Films also are planning something special to help Jesse Malin. More details will be announced soon and shared here at Letters To You; stay tuned.

August 4, 2023 This summer marks three decades since Bruce Springsteen first supported the Kristen Ann Carr Fund with a sold-out benefit concert in New York City's Madison Square Garden arena. The fund was organized in memory of the older daughter of former longtime Springsteen co-manager Barbara Carr and music-writer/Springsteen-biographer Dave Marsh. In early January of 1993, Kristen Ann Carr died at 21 of sarcoma. Recalling that June 1993 concert just a few years after it took place, Marsh wrote, "With a beautiful vase of Kristen's beloved pink roses placed downstage left, as if she herself were present, Bruce opened with a spectral version of Woody Guthrie's 'Lonesome Valley'... Four hours later, the show ended with Bruce singing 'Follow That Dream.' I sat in the loge, the kind of seat where I first saw Bruce with Chicago in 1973, and sobbed. Mainly, I cried for my kid, but partly I cried for the kind of friendship and love that had been poured over us. The concert raised more than $1.5 million, more than twice what was needed to hire our sarcoma researcher. Today, in addition to the fellowship, the Kristen Ann Carr Fund sponsors support services for teenagers, young adults, and sarcoma patients. Each year, our friends at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York work with the Fund to sponsor a Christmas party for all the pediatric patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. None of that would be possible without Bruce." This year, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau Management continue to lend their support to the Kristen Ann Carr Fund with a series of ticket-auctions benefiting the Fund. Each winning bidder will receive a pair of premium tickets to an upcoming concert by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. If you win the auction, you'll get your choice of GA pit (if available at the venue) or management-designated seats. (Exact seat location will not be known until a week prior to the concert.) In addition to winning the tickets, if there is an E Street Lounge at your venue, you will receive a pair of passes for that experience, as well. Shows for which tickets currently are being auctioned include the upcoming dates in Philly, New Jersey, Boston, and Syracuse. Click here to see a complete list of concert-ticket packages currently being sold at auction for the Kristen Ann Carr Fund. Next month the Kristen Ann Carr Fund will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in New York City with its annual A Night to Remember gala fundraising event. This year's honoree will be Karen Rosenberg, President of Empire Events Group, Inc., a longtime supporter of the Fund. The event will be held at Tribeca Grill on September 23 and will feature a special musical guest performance by Jackson Browne. Individual tickets to attend, group-table/ad-packages, and raffle tickets all remain available for purchase. Click here for more information.

August 5, 2023 EDITOR'S NOTE: Our friend Donna Gray at Bruce Funds has launched several campaigns for upcoming U.S. shows, with more to come, as always. The most imminent campaign, of course, is next week's two-night Chicago run, which is officially and unsurprisingly sold out. Donna has been working with Andrew Harris and Brian Reed, who manage two Chicago YMCA Housing sites for low-income residents. Andrew and Brian reached out to Bruce Funds to try to get Springsteen@Wrigley tickets for as many of their interested residents as possible. (And as you'll read below, there are MANY interested residents.) We asked Andrew, who's also a Springsteen fan himself, to share his story personally with our readers. Please read it, and if you or anyone you know happens to have any Springsteen@Wrigley tickets you can spare to donate (for ANY location inside the ballpark,) please click here to donate your ticket(s) to Bruce Funds ASAP. Hi everyone. I am Andrew Harris, the housing manager at the Irving Park YMCA here in Chicago. We are a men’s-only residency, as we rent only individual furnished rooms to our tenants. We rent to men of all ages. Our youngest resident is 21 and our oldest is 92. We are one of the last affordable single-room occupancy centers left in Chicago. Our tenants work at jobs you will see at a typical Bruce Springsteen concert, from operating the concession stands to serving as one of the Uber drivers who drop you off at the venue. It'd be safe to say that all of us have come in contact with one of these typical low-wage workers every day that our tenants fulfill. Each of the Y housing centers in Chicago has a case manager like myself on staff who can help these men try to move upward on the social ladder, but as we all know, this is a very long and difficult process. Recently one of our residents was playing Bruce's album Nebraska (great album) a bit too loudly, and I went up to speak with him about the noise level. We got to talking about "The Boss" and how much of a fan he was. The resident mentioned that Springsteen was coming to Chicago and how he never has seen Bruce in concert, and how much of a dream come true it would be to see him play at Wrigley. That is when I started my search to see if I could find anyone who would donate tickets to our low-income adult residents. I was lucky enough to find Bruce Funds, and I reached out to Donna to see if she could help us secure some tickets to the show. She was immediately on board and was able to secure us a pair of tickets from an amazing fan (Field seats, no less!) We then held a tickets raffle for all interested tenants in both our location and the Lakeview Y (managed by my colleague Brian Reed.) Participation in this raffle was astronomical! I was surprised to learn that most of the residents have never been to Wrigley Field, let alone seen a concert there. Springsteen songs take a rough and unflattering look at America. It makes perfect sense that Bruce’s songs would strike a chord with our residents, as they can relate more than most about how rough times can get. The resident who won the tickets has been walking around with the biggest smile on his face and is PUMPED for the show. Hopefully, as more tickets come in, we can hold more raffles for the interested tenants and send many more of our interested residents to see Bruce at Wrigley Field, as his fans graciously donate. All of our residents would either have a very hard time affording or would never be able to afford typical housing in Chicago. These donated tickets go a long way to help give our guys a sense of normalcy. The lucky residents who attend the show will get to "escape" for a bit into the songs of the Boss, performed in person. Thanks again to Donna and Bruce Funds, without which none of this would be possible. Again, dear readers, if you have any Chicago tix to spare for this campaign, please click here to donate your ticket(s) to Bruce Funds ASAP. Thanks!

August 9, 2023 "'Backstreets'... owes more to the stately, fuguelike music of the electric Dylan. It is led along by organ and piano interplay, the guitar understated and used to punctuate the phrases mathematically (as Dylan described Robbie Robertson's playing.)" - Dave Marsh's review of Born To Run in his biography Born To Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story

August 10, 2023 Chicago 2023 - Night 1 is now history, with Night 2 of this summer double-header still scheduled for tomorrow. We'll be presenting two unique perspectives and reports from the two-show Windy City 2023 run, with much more to come soon. Stay tuned...

August 12, 2023

August 14, 2023 If you already are or soon will be in the Philadelphia area for one or both of this week's concerts by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, try not to miss the "50 Years of Bruce Springsteen Music Celebration." It's a free exhibition of photographs, concert posters, gold/platinum-record awards, and other items of memorabilia, some of them signed, as well. Framed photos and other items also will be available for purchase. The exhibition is taking place at Coll's Custom Framing, located at 324 Fayette Street in the Philly-area suburb of Conshohocken, PA. It's open now through September 2, available to visit every day of the week except Sunday, beginning at 9:30 each morning and continuing through the day until 5:30 pm, except on Thursdays (when the exhibition won't close until 6:30 pm) and on Saturdays (when the exhibition will close at 4:30 pm.) Many of the photos being exhibited were taken by the late, great local rock-photography legend, Phil Ceccola. Ceccola first began to photograph and befriend Bruce Springsteen in the early 1970s, as Springsteen was just beginning to develop and nurture his large, rabid, and longstanding fanbase in the Philadelphia area. Ceccola and Springsteen remained friends until Ceccola's tragic early death from brain cancer in 2003. One of Ceccola's photos of Springsteen, caught in a thoughtful moment backstage at the Philly area's legendary Main Point nightclub in Bryn Mawr, PA, became the cover-photo (in slightly altered form to remove all nearby tobacco-associated paraphernalia from the shot) for Bruce's 1998 career-spanning box-set of outtakes and B-sides entitled simply TRACKS. On Saturday, August 19, the "50 Years of Bruce Springsteen Music Celebration" also will feature a special appearance by former E Street Band drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez. Click here for details. And hey, if you're busy zippin' around the Philly area catching Springsteen in concert and in vintage photos, you're gonna need to start off each day with a good, healthy breakfast. The locally-owned (and women-owned) Goodness Bowls mini-franchise has you covered, with their regular menu-item the "Bruce Springreen" bowl: a chilled/frozen base of banana, mango, green spirulina, kale, spinach, and coconut milk, topped with granola, some more banana and mango, blueberries, hemp seeds, and honey. The "Bruce Springreen" bowl is available exclusively at Goodness Bowls' two Philly-area locations: Villanova, PA (site of a pair of locally legendary 1973 Springsteen performances at Villanova University,) and down the (South Jersey) shore, where everything's alright, in Avalon, NJ.

August 16, 2023 As per this afternoon's official announcement... "Due to Bruce Springsteen having been taken ill, his concerts with The E Street Band at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia on August 16 and 18 have been postponed. We are working on rescheduling the dates, so please hold on to your tickets as they will be valid for the rescheduled shows. For more information, please visit Phillies.com/springsteen." Here's hoping you're feeling better ASAP, Bruce!

August 23, 2023 Only a few tickets remain available for the 5th annual Spring-Nuts Seaside Serenade, a huge annual social gathering of Springsteen fans, and time is quickly running out to buy yours if you haven't done so already. This year's event will take place right near East Rutherford, NJ's MetLife Stadium. Inside the stadium itself, of course, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are scheduled to jump-start Labor Day Weekend 2023 a bit earlier than usual. Spring-Nuts' 2023 Serenade will take place on Thursday August 31, the day after the first of Bruce and the E Streeters' three scheduled New Jersey concerts. The Serenade event will take place at Redd's Bar and Restaurant in Carlstadt, NJ, celebrating not only five years of annual Serenades and the return of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band to New Jersey, but also the eighth anniversary of the Spring-Nuts social-media group. As always, all proceeds from the Spring-Nuts Seaside Serenades go to support worthy charitable efforts. Our friend Howie Chaz, the founder of Spring-Nuts, informs us that so far ticket-sales for this year's event have raised $30,000 for WhyHunger. Click here for more information on the 5th annual Spring-Nuts Seaside Serenade, and to purchase your ticket(s) before it's too late.

August 24, 2023 Today Nils Lofgren has released the official music-video for “Ain’t The Truth Enough,” which features Ringo Starr on drums, Kevin McCormick on bass, and "E Street Choir" vocalist Cindy Mizelle. You can watch it directly above. The track is the opener on Nils' newest album Mountains, which also features guests Neil Young, the Howard (University) Gospel Choir, Ron Carter, and the late, great David Crosby. Written in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, the track reckons with the ways that misinformation and demagoguery can tear families apart and silo us in our own realities. “It’s about a fierce mother dealing with her husband who's just home from the Jan. 6 insurrection,” states Lofgren. “No bull, just the brutal truth.” Click here to read "Rocky Ground: Lisa Iannucci on Nils Lofgren's latest solo effort, Mountains."

August 24, 2023 Best wishes to everyone for a great show tonight. (IG screenshot by Scott Cieri @ SPRING-NUTS)