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Part 2

Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....)

Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.

But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim that those rarified few received? What is it within a songwriter that drives their art and compells them to write, even if they're not filling stadiums, or winning Grammy's (questionnable why some of the folks who do receive them deserved it!).

I've been fortunate to share many road miles with one of these artists for most of my life, and in today's episode, I introduce him to you.

In 1995, LA Time music critic, Mike Boehm, said this about Mark's first album: "The two albums I couldn’t stop listening to in ’95 were a tie for the number-one position in my Top Ten. [One of these was] Mark Davis, “You Came Screaming”. Davis’ first album is graced by superb melodies and hall-of-fame influences. His intensely realized subject is the embattled condition of idealism in a fallen world."

Other music critics have said this:

"Getting at large truths with songs full of human-scale detail and unsentamentalized beauty. - Los Angeles Times

“Davis is truly a master of his craft… able to lift spirits even while supporting the weight of the world.” - Orange County Register

I hope you'll listen closely to this two part episode. I have a special feeling that when you do, you just might come to love this music and appreciate this artistic soul as much as I do.

Learn more about Mark Davis and support his music through these links:

https://songrites.com/mark-davis-and-the-inklings

https://markdavisinklings.bandcamp.com

Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook.

There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

Get in touch!

Part 1

Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....)

Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.

But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim that those rarified few received? What is it within a songwriter that drives their art and compells them to write, even if they're not filling stadiums, or winning Grammy's (questionnable why some of the folks who do receive them deserved it!).

I've been fortunate to share many road miles with one of these artists for most of my life, and in today's episode, I introduce him to you.

In 1995, LA Time music critic, Mike Boehm, said this about Mark's first album: "The two albums I couldn’t stop listening to in ’95 were a tie for the number-one position in my Top Ten. [One of these was] Mark Davis, “You Came Screaming”. Davis’ first album is graced by superb melodies and hall-of-fame influences. His intensely realized subject is the embattled condition of idealism in a fallen world."

Other music critics have said this:

"Getting at large truths with songs full of human-scale detail and unsentamentalized beauty. - Los Angeles Times

“Davis is truly a master of his craft… able to lift spirits even while supporting the weight of the world.” - Orange County Register

I hope you'll listen closely to this two part episode. I have a special feeling that when you do, you just might come to love this music and appreciate this artistic soul as much as I do.

Learn more about Mark Davis and support his music through these links:

https://songrites.com/mark-davis-and-the-inklings

https://markdavisinklings.bandcamp.com

Join our community and continue your journey through American Song: Visit us on Facebook.

There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

Get in touch!

Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway, Western Stars, and Letter to You—projects that ask what kind of ancestor, and what kind of citizen, you want to be when you’re running out of time.

We follow him into those late-career marathon shows and finally to a 2025 European stage, where he calls out a "incompetent, corrupt, and treasonous administration" and then sings about hope, duty, and “we the people” anyway.

This final chapter ties Bruce back to everyone we’ve studied in 2025 on American Song—including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne —and makes the subtext plain: if we want a better America, we’re going to have to live up to the American values embodied in the songs of the artists we say we admire.

Music In This Episode: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

• My City of Ruins
• Shackled and Drawn
• Rocky Ground
• Sundown
• Hello Sunshine
• Last Man Standing
• One Minute You're Here
• The Power of Prayer
• Long Walk Home
• We Shall Overcome

Archival Interviews

• Rick Rubin/ Malcolm Gladwell

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There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.

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Part Four is where the story cuts close to the bone. Bruce lets the E Street Band go, stares down his own failures on Tunnel of Love, and writes The Ghost of Tom Joad for the people that some Americans prefer not to see: migrants, the unemployed, the left-behind.

The band reunites, “American Skin (41 Shots)” forces a conversation about race and fear, and The Rising and Wrecking Ball turn grief and economic anger into something like a shared civic ritual. We carry all of that forward into Trump’s first administration and Charlottesville, and we hold Bruce’s choices up as a different model of Americanness—one where loving your country means telling it the truth and standing with the people it’s hurting, even when that costs you.

Music in This Episode: Bruce Springsteen (With and Without) the E Street Band

• Tunnel of Love
• Human Touch
• Living Proof
• The Ghost of Tom Joad
• Theme from Ken Burns 'The Civil War'*
• The Price You Pay**
• American Skin (41 Shots)
• This Land Is Your Land

Archival Interviews

• Rick Rubin/ Malcolm Gladwell
• Mark Maron
• Howard Stern
• Bank Street Podcast

*As performed by my second cousin, Molly Hines of Wilmington, NC. A massively talented violinist, during our family reunion in Yellowstone National Park; Summer, 2025. Thank you, Molly! Visit https://www.mollyjhines.com/

** E Street Band backing track; no vocals.

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Factories closing, marriages cracking, the glitter of the ’80s hiding a lot of hurt—Part 3 lives right in that gap between the American dream and the American day-to-day. Bruce digs into Darkness, The River, and Nebraska, writing about people who rarely get a mic: laid-off workers, young couples in over their heads, neighbors hanging on by their fingernails. Then Born in the U.S.A. turns into a worldwide roar, and politicians try to strip the songs of their doubts and their compassion. We end in East Berlin, 1988, with Springsteen singing to a divided crowd about freedom and walls coming down, and we ask: what if this kind of complicated, honest patriotism was the version we measured ourselves against instead of the cheap, loud kind?

Music in this Episode: Bruce Spingsteen (With and Without) the E Street Band

• I Fought the Law - Live
• Badlands
• The Promised Land
• Prove it All Night - Live from Hammersmith Odeon. 1978
• The Ties That Bind
• The River album medley: Point Blank/ The River/ Hungry Heart/ Cadillac Ranch/ I'm a Rocker/ Drive All Night
• Atlantic City
• Johnny 99
• Born in the USA
• Born in the USA Nebraska era demo
• Downbound Train
• Dancing in the Dark
• Chimes of Freedom - Live in East Berlin 1988

Archival Interviews

• Letter to You era interview
• NPR/ Loren Anki - Born in the USA
• NPR/ Terry Gross

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Part two picks up in the clubs and dives where Bruce and the band are trying to outrun obscurity. We walk with them through the struggle to get the first records heard, the critics who saw the spark, and the brutal work of making Born to Run: months of second-guessing, endless mixes, and the very real possibility that it might all collapse under its own ambition. We hear about Jon Landau’s famous “I saw rock and roll future” review, the Bottom Line breakthrough, the U.K. trip that almost derailed him, and the strange, exhausting new life of a band suddenly under the lights. This chapter closes with one of the great stories in the Springsteen mythos: the bomb scare in Milwaukee, the evacuated club, and a night that turns from chaos into a legendary, delayed show—a perfect snapshot of how fragile and how powerful this whole thing really was.

Music in this Episode: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

• Born to Run
• Thunder Road
• Jungleland
• Tenth Avenue Freeze Out
• Kitty's Back
• Mountain of Love
• I Fought the Law

Archival Interviews

Mark Maron Interview

Rick Rubin/ Malcolm Gladwell Interview

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We start the episode in 2025, at Springsteen's show in Manchester, UK where he makes a landmark statement about America's "leadership" before we flash back to his formative years.

A cramped house in Freehold. A father smoking in the dark kitchen. A kid staring at the radio like it’s a way out and a way in. In Part one, we meet Bruce not as a legend, but as a working-class American kid learning early what struggle, pride, and community look like. As we follow him into those early Jersey bar gigs and up to the Cherry Hill shows, we start using his story as a counterexample to our current politics: a picture of American life rooted in responsibility, neighborliness, and the refusal to quit on your own town.

Music in This Episode: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Land of Hopes and Dreams

Growin' Up

Baby I*

It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City

Spirit in the Night

Rosalita

* Bruce's first teenage band, The Castiles.

Archival Interviews

Mark Maron

Howard Stern

Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell

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For over five decades, Jackson Browne has stood at the intersection of melody and message—crafting songs that speak not only to the heart, but also to the conscience. In an age of division and disinformation, his music feels like a lifeline to an older, more grounded sense of American democratic values—truth, empathy, accountability, and moral courage. This episode dives into Browne’s lifelong journey as both a master songwriter and a tireless activist, examining how his music has evolved into a public reckoning with the soul of the nation.

He grew up in Southern California, crossing the "Orange Curtain" from the sleepy bedroom towns of Orange County and making his way into Laurel Canyon, and from his earliest days playing shows at the Troubadour, Browne’s lyrics were already infused with a deep introspection and a search for authenticity. But as the political landscape shifted in the 1980s and beyond, so too did his writing—growing sharper, more explicit, and unapologetically political. With albums like Lives in the Balance and The Naked Ride Home, he began naming names, challenging war, corporate greed, and environmental neglect. Browne wasn’t content to merely reflect the times—he wanted to change them.

This episode traces the arc of his transformation—from a quiet observer to a clarion voice for peace, climate justice, and human rights. We explore his deep friendships with figures like David Crosby and Bonnie Raitt, his influence on the Eagles and the Southern California sound, and his early alliances with causes like MUSE and the anti-nuclear movement. But we also go deeper: into the heartbreak of Phyllis Major’s death, the personal toll of activism, and the spiritual core that drives his pursuit of justice.

Jackson Browne’s legacy is not one of stardom chased or fame inflated. It’s a body of work that demands we pay attention—not just to the world around us, but to the values we claim to stand for. In a moment where America seems to be asking itself who it really is, Jackson Browne has never stopped answering with clarity, humility, and song.

In This Episode

Songs by Jackson Browne, except where noted otherwise

• These Days
• Where I’m From
• These Days (Nico (From Chelsea Girl)
• To Ramona - Bob Dylan
• Doctor My Eyes
• Take It Easy (Jackson Browne/ The Eagles mash-up)
• Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
• For Every Man
• Running on Empty
• Before the Deluge
• Lives in the Balance
• I Am a Patriot
• I’m Alive
• Which Side
• Downhill From Everywhere
• Standing in the Breach

Dig Deeper

To learn more about several of the topics discussed in this episode, I encouirage you to check out these other American Song episode.

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There, you'll get more information, video content, and more about the music and personalities covered in all our episodes.