Podcast Corner: Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen buddy up for new show
Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen have a new podcast series.
Considering their journeys have been so often told already, with each releasing long autobiographies in the past couple years, you might think you've already had your fill of Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. They'd done the podcast circuit over the past half-decade too - their respective appearances on Marc Maron are, of course, worth diving into the archives. But now, through the Obamas' Higher Ground production company, Barack and Bruce have buddied up for an eight-episode series, exclusively on Spotify, titled Renegades: Born in the USA.
A series of conversations between the pair, they probe each other's life while discussing the bigger topics in life, from race to music to 'money and the American dream'. Like The Michelle Obama Podcast last year, it's just nice to hear Barack's voice again - it's so soothing, perfectly suited to wooing you into listening.
Introducing the series, he proclaims: "In our own ways, Bruce and I have been on parallel journeys, trying to understand this country that's given us both so much, trying to chronicle the story of its people, looking for a way to connect our own individual searches for meaning and truth and community with the larger story of America."
You've got to have the egotism - and megalomania - to follow their paths into politics and music, they agree, but pointing out that it also has to be true, that you've got to have "tremendous empathy" for people. Telling his well-treaded family tree, Obama says his grandparents were basically Scots-Irish - "and the Irish were outsiders for a long time".
Springsteen replies that he was brought up by his "old-school" Irish grandparents on his dad's side - they were "quite provincial, quite backward, quite country people... they were just as eccentric as [the] American-Irish could be".
Guitar licks pop up in the background as they riff on their tales, an echoey version of 'My Hometown' embellishing the hardship of race in Freehold, New Jersey, with Obama asking interesting questions like how intentional was it to start up an integrated E Street Band. On 'Amazing Grace: American Music', Springsteen rouses with his relationship with music: "It was both simple and complicated for me. One, it was the only thing I deeply desired to do. Two, it was an essential element of building an identity as a man, as an American, as a human being. When I hold a guitar... it feels like my natural state."
It might sound cheesy, it might sometimes sound sentimental, but you'll come away from your time spent in the company of Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama feeling rejuvenated, empowered, and informed. It might even have you reaching for their autobiographies again.
