Barack Obama Shares Back Story About Podcast Collaboration With Bruce Springsteen
They may seem like an unlikely pairing, but former President Barack Obama and Grammy-winning musician Bruce Springsteen collaborated on a podcast series that they two have now turned into a book scheduled for release on Oct. 26.
CBS Mornings previewed an interview today (Oct. 22) of Obama and Springsteen that will air on Sunday (Oct. 24) in its entirety on CBS Sunday Morning.
CBS News Senior Culture and National Correspondent Anthony Mason sat down with both men at Springsteen’s NJ farm. It’s the first time they have sat together to speak about the idea behind doing a podcast together.
“The way this came up,” the 44th president recalled. “We did have a bunch of long conversations together. I always say when I first met Bruce, he was surprisingly shy considering he goes out there and sings before tens of thousands of people for hours at a time. We just ended up being in settings where we’d have these long conversations and I thought, the things we’re talking about...what it means to be a man, what it means to be an American...these were things that were just popping up over a meal or drinks. I thought you know, this might be something useful for folks to hear.”
Springsteen joked that he thought the former president “had gotten a wrong number” when he inquired about teaming up in a podcast.
Spotify released the first two episodes of the podcast, “Renegades: Born in the USA,” in February 2021, according to The New York Times. In the podcast series, they discuss topics like race, fatherhood and the painful divisions that persist in American society.
“In our own ways, Bruce and I have been on parallel journeys,” Obama says in the first episode of the podcast, according to The Times. “We still share a fundamental belief in the American ideal. Not as an airbrushed, cheap fiction or an act of nostalgia that ignores all the ways that we’ve fallen short of that ideal. But as a compass for the hard work that lies before each of us as citizens.”
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