Her own boss

On the eve of the release of her second album, Patti Scialfa talks about her heritage and what it is like to live and raise children with Bruce Springsteen

Herpreet Kaur Grewal
Sunday June 13, 2004
The Observer

Bono says: 'She can sing, she can write and she can tell the Boss off.' Her husband goes even further: 'She busted the boys' club, big time. It went like this, "Okay fellas, there's gonna be a woman in the band. We need someone to sing all the high parts." She's given me the best 10 years of my life.' Patti Scialfa - otherwise known as Mrs Bruce Springsteen - is altogether more pragmatic and self deprecating. 'All you can do is write as well as you can, and sing as well as you can... I am just glad I had a chance to make this record and I am happy with the way it came out.'

The record is 23rd Street Lullaby , her second solo album in 11 years. Most people probably don't know Scialfa as a solo artist, but as the red-headed backing singer and guitarist in the E Street Band. Like other women involved with rock stars who've also had the audacity to sing (Rita Marley, Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono), she's faced sniping criticism and comparisons with her other half.

'It's a real fact with a lot of people, I know,' she says when we meet in the Sony Studios in New York. 'People were a little leery when I was doing the press for my last album Rumble Doll, yes. It's always that thing that this is a dilettante or a pet project. That's just the price that comes from being married to someone who's really famous. You are aware that some people may want you to work harder and prove yourself and don't listen as fresh as you would like them to, but that's okay because I am confident that the music can stand on its own.'

Questions about Springsteen come with the territory. 'You are married and you do work together,' she says. But she thinks interviewers purposely press her about her husband in order to devalue her. Something, she says, the media tend to do more to woman than men. 'I always feel it's the left-over cultural misogyny seeping in.'

Rumble Doll was an intimate album which revealed insight into her relationship with Springsteen. The title track's poignant theme - a world weary woman wanting a real relationship - ran throughout the album. 23rd Lullaby, on which she wrote both the words and the music, is a beguiling mix of Sixties-influenced pop, late-night jazz and mature rock'n'roll. Bruce appears on three songs on her new album, in minimal roles. Was it tempting to bring him on to more material? 'Yeah, but you can't do that. You just can't,' Scialfa says shaking her head slowly, but insis tently. 'And everybody likes to have their work by themselves and I really do love working by myself. I had Steve [Jordan, album producer] in there and a couple of my old buddies and it was just creative and fun. I like having the space of my own project'.

Vivienne Patricia Scialfa is a real-life Jersey girl, born in Oakhurst, New Jersey, in 1953 to Italian-Irish parents. The family lived in a house built by her father until she was 12 when they moved to Deal, a 'more affluent area', because his business was doing well. Bruce Springsteen was growing up 10 miles away but they didn't meet until she was 30.

Scialfa was a quiet, shy girl who would write a poem every day, type it out and put it in a booklet. Then she got a guitar and started composing. 'I don't know if it was any good but I just liked doing it. It was such a great way to express yourself.' She listened to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield. 'I loved a lot of different kinds of music but for my own thing I went for the singer-songwriters.'

Her Irish-born grandfather, who played piano to her when she was five, was an inspiration. 'He'd write the music and then ask me, "What ending do you like better?"' At 14 she started singing in her older brother Michael's band and then found her own to sing in.

After graduating from Asbury Park High School, this bookish student studied music in Miami and New York. She lived in Greenwich Village and then Chelsea, where she'd sit in cafes reading Colette, Djuna Barnes and Edna St Vincent Millay, and meeting like-minded women such as Soozie Tyrell, the singer/violinist who appears on her work and also on a few Springsteen albums. The new album looks back to that time in New York where she lived from the early Seventies to the late Eighties. But it also addresses other aspects of Scialfa's past.

A song called State of Grace is especially intriguing. On it, Scialfa sings: 'With no English my family came/And money left a stain on their foreign hands/I don't know how some people do it/They just walk away and they don't look back/Under a river in a cold mud tunnel/My grandfather's ghost is slamming the jack'. As the daughter of immigrant parents myself, I'm intrigued by these lyrics. She explains that 'slamming the jack' refers to her grandfather's work on the Holland Tunnel. What was it like coming from an Irish-Italian background living in America?

'I did feel funny about being fair and having red hair and freckles,' she says. 'I did not like that because I grew up in a neighbourhood where no one had red hair. I felt very conspicuous but not in a nice way. I was aware in a non-intellectual way, that we were first generation and that my parents had come here to make a better life but that we were not from here. I knew that because my grandmother had a very thick Scottish accent and my grandfather had a thick Irish accent. My grandparents on the other side didn't even speak English.

She remembers hearing the Chiffons' He's So Fine on the radio when she was eight and realising that there was a life outside her family. 'Sicilian families are very male-based,' she says. 'To hear a woman singing on the radio, I started to realise that there are a lot of choices out there beyond the confines of my own hometown and people'.

Bruce Springsteen first noticed Scialfa at the respected Stone Pony club in Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1983. Scialfa was living in New York and would sing at the venue at weekends. 'Once in a while I'd bump into him - we'd be in the same bar and we'd sit and talk and when the night was over he'd always give me a ride home or we'd go out for a hamburger. We just became friends, casual friends.' It was soon after that Scialfa was invited to sing in the E Street Band.

Bruce asked her to sing at the rehearsals for what would become the mammoth Born in the USA tour. 'He said, "I don't know if I have a place for you" - it was very off the cuff. But he said he might need some harmonies covered. It was really vague and nebulous. So I hung out and sang with the band but I only thought it was going to be for one day and I was stuck there for three days in one pair of jeans and a Hanes t-shirt.' Singing with the band was exhilarating. 'The power coming from them was very palpable. It was like being hit by a train and I thought, wow, this is what a band who is playing together and really focused is like.' When she was asked to join the tour she panicked: she knew and liked Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge of Town but the rest of his catalogue was a mystery. 'I took a big notebook on stage the first couple weeks I performed with him.'

In 1988 Springsteen's marriage to the actress Julianne Phillips began to break down and there was a media frenzy when rumours began to surface about Springsteen and Scialfa. They got married almost 13 years ago. Now they have three children: Evan, 13, Jessica, 12, and Sam, 10.

Like any working mother she struggles to combine her professional ambitions with family life. 'My job on the road appears glamorous but it is a job like any other and you do worry about whether you are doing it perfectly.' On the Human Touch / Lucky Town Tour in the early Nineties, the plan was that Scialfa would sing on three songs. 'I had to go on stage and I had my son Evan with me. So I started to give him to my cousin who was there. Onstage on one side, Bruce was beckoning "Come on!" because he'd already introduced me and it was a big venue, and offstage on the other side my son is going "No, Mommy, come here!" with his arms out and I just thought: this is it. This is the complete cartoonish encapsulation of what I am going to be feeling for the rest of my life!'

Does Bruce also feel the pressure? 'He really does. But I don't think men ever feel it as much as a woman does, except if they are single parenting, but he will feel it. On tour he was always trying to make sure everything was working, but the mom is always the "last chance cafe" who has to cover the last base.'

The children are now old enough to make their own decisions about whether to come along on tour and most of the time they would rather not. 'They just watch and get bored - because it's their parents.' When they were too young to say they didn't want to go, the Springsteens would have a table set up for dinner every night to keep some kind of routine, but it still felt abnormal. 'But it is the parents' responsibility, it's how you behave at home, that is where they are going to take their cues from. Seeing people screaming for a parent could be weird for a small child. But so long as you are not strange when you come off stage then I think it's OK.'

Do the kids like their parents' music? 'If I walked into a room where one of my kids was listening to Bruce's music I think I'd faint!' Sometimes, she says, they will ask her more about her music 'because they have this perception that "Oh mom doesn't do this very often, let's help her along here, let's pretend we're interested, let's throw her a bone!"'