As a songwriter, there’s no topic that Bruce Springsteen is frightened of approaching. However, occasionally, it can become taxing on the mind to constantly write about subjects of such hefty weight, and sometimes, Springsteen needs to provide himself with a moment of relief by taking on the lighter side of life.

While he’s used his voice to highlight oppression, from the mistreatment of Vietnam War veterans by the establishment and his own personal struggles, Springsteen also specialises in making anthems to make listeners feel good. Not every song he releases needs to make a grand statement about the world’s plight, and ‘The Boss’ has successfully collated an eclectic back catalogue by varying his body of work.

Although Springsteen will always be intrinsically linked with the world of rock ‘n’ roll, he’s a soul boy at heart. In recent years, the New Jersey native has revisited these influences on his 2022 album Only The Strong Survive, which saw him reconnect with a set of songs which helped him become the artist he is today.

He said to Edith Bowman of the record: “I said well, maybe I’ll orient myself towards soul music, because it’s how I grew up, and all my great mentors were soul men that came, Sam Moore and, of course, James Brown, Smokey Robinson as a writer. I mean, just so many. And the great singers, David Ruffin, Levi Stubbs, all masters. They were all my masters, and I said well, let me try and sing some of this material.”

While Only The Strong Survive didn’t include any covers by Smokey Robinson, Springsteen still viewed him as an inspiration for the project. He’s a figure who Springsteen has mentioned in the past as one of his musical idols, including when he appeared on VH1 Storytellers to discuss the story behind his track ‘Waitin’ On A Sunny Day’.

“That’s pretty simple, that’s what I write these for, y’know. I write to hear them come back at me like that. It’s fun, just pure pop songwriting is a lot of fun, it’s fun to play with the words simply,” Springsteen said of the track before performing a snippet of the creation.

Springsteen continued: “The master of this of course was Smokey Robinson, and when I write these, I tend to think of him singing them, and it gives me an idea of the phrasing.” Springsteen then sang part of the song again, but this time in the style of his hero.

Springsteen wasn’t the only lover of Robinson, he was a massive influence on another musical legend: John Lennon. “‘There’s A Place’ was my attempt at a sort of Motown, Black thing,” Lennon explains in the book All We Are Saying. “It says the usual Lennon things: ‘In my mind there’s no sorrow…’ It’s all in your mind.”

It wouldn’t be the band’s only attempt at approximating Motown. ‘This Boy’, written and recorded shortly after ‘There’s A Place’, was intended to be a take on Smokey Robinson, as the band had only just recorded ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’. “Just my attempt at writing one of those three-part harmony Smokey Robinson songs,” Lennon claims. “Nothing in the lyrics; just a sound and harmony.”

Harmony and musical nuance are what set Motown apart. It wasn’t for a particularly crowd, it was a universal sound that seemed to hum lik the city itself and drive the public wild much like their cars.

“There’s not much else to say about those,” he added. “They speak for themselves. They’re fun to write, ‘Hungry Heart’, ‘Dancing in the Dark’; you get out on the stage, and it happens. Also, they are songs that free my mind from the interminable bullshit I put myself through on a lot of the other stuff and allows me to go, ‘It’s raining’, like I’m Smokey Robinson”.

Although Springsteen has many strings to his bow as a songwriter and takes influence from many different subsections of the musical spectrum, when it comes to the deceitfully difficult task of crafting simple pop songs, there’s nobody he admires more than Smokey Robinson.

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