Join me in this live 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned I’ve Learned about the ways that Bruce Springsteen’s lifelong balance of talent, art, and artifice has shaped who he is – and all he still strives to be today.

Hello out there. I’m Peter Ames Carlin, the author of Tonight in Jungleland, which is about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album, Born to Run. I am also the author of Bruce, a biography of Springsteen that was published in 2012, and have published several other books. In forty years writing about popular culture I have also worked as a newspaper television critic, a senior writer at People magazine and a free-lance journalist for publications ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Men’s Journal to Spy to the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

I have been publishing biographies of musicians for the last twenty years and let me tell you: It’s always a challenge to locate the real human behind the flash and bang of pop stardom. The vast majority of rock stars package themselves in enough layers of artifice to underscore the distance between actual human experience and show business. But there are exceptions to that rule, and Bruce Springsteen is probably the most striking one. Now, I’m hoping you can join me for my class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Artistry, Identity, and Authenticity, from Bruce Springsteen, which is about what makes Springsteen such a powerful and inspiring artist, even in the face of overwhelming commercial success.

You may know the outlines of Bruce’s story. In a recording career stretching more than fifty years the son of blue-collar Freehold, NJ has built a reputation as a kind of working-class rock star superhero: the heavily muscled rocker in jeans, leather jacket and work boots, his Telecaster guitar as sweat-stained as his t-shirt; the spokesman for the downtrodden and advocate for old-fashioned American progressivism who also happened to be A GREAT songwriter; a blazing  guitarist and one of the most exciting stage performers in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. And on top of all that, the guy radiated authenticity. No matter how many records he sold and mountains of cash he accrued, when he sang that he had debts no honest man could pay, you knew that deep inside his troubled heart he was telling the truth.

But hang on a second, because Bruce ALSO SAYS THAT the real him isn’t quite the man he has portrayed in song, on stage and his descriptions of who he actually is. “I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” he proclaimed at the start of the one-man show he staged on Broadway in 2017. “So am I.” But hang on another second, because that statement is also a bit of a fiction, and not just because Bruce actually comes from Freehold, a blue-collar town about twenty miles inland from the Jersey shore.

I spent quite a bit of time around Bruce when I was writing about him and also got to know nearly every member of his family, his friends, girlfriends, bandmates and collaborators. What I learned along the way is that the real Bruce Springsteen, and the concept of artistic authenticity, is the product of a few crucial elements: life, art, artifice and, as Bruce would be the first to admit, a little flim-flammery.

In our 90-minute class I’m going to introduce you to the real Bruce Springsteen. I’ll tell you how he’s managed to maintain both his artistry and his moral vision even while being one of the world’s biggest rock stars. You’ll learn about his childhood home of Freehold and his haunts around the Jersey Shore. And you’ll understand why he’s spent his life on the stages of the world, and how this seemingly remarkable working-class kid turned himself into the performer nearly everyone, for good or ill, persists in calling the Boss.

Along the way, we’ll also talk about something more: the ways in which every famous performer invariably becomes some combination of who they are and who they want to be, and how they use their artistry to bend the internal darkness into a light strong enough to illuminate the lives of people all over the world.