The one that drew all the headlines was Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.” He wrote it on the Saturday that Pretti died, recorded it on Tuesday, and released it on Wednesday—a rapidity that calls back to that folk troubadour tradition, to Woody Guthrie in the 1930s and 1940s and others across the decades issuing musical broadsides in response to the news of the day. I’m reminded of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, a prolix and often sneakily political songwriter himself, who began one of his most beloved unrecorded tunes with the lines “This is a song with the same four chords / I use most of the time / When I’ve got something on my mind / And I don’t want to squander the moment / Trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say.” On the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Welles put out a song called “Charlie,” which began: “For all the bile, the bold talk, the venom, the hate, and the lies / No one should get killed, no blood should be spilled / Charlie shouldn’t have died.” It objected to the “laughter” and the “glee” about the violence that Welles had seen on social media.
Author: Carl Wilson
Published at: 2026-02-10 22:46:16
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