Kingdom of Days was never supposed to be a book, let alone a twelve-volume series.
It wasn’t supposed to go viral on social media, or get read aloud daily on satellite radio.
It wasn’t supposed to run for more than a year, and it certainly wasn’t meant to outlast everything else on the blog.
When I started E Street Shuffle in January 2018, I wanted it to be about the songs. The blog derives its name from my original conceit for it: an unpredictable series of deep-dives on songs Bruce Springsteen had in some way touched.
I didn’t set out to publish an essay every day–that just sort of happened. I think I was a week or two in when I realized I had yet to take a break. I was flush with ideas and enthusiasm, and in those days words poured out of me at a speed and with an ease that I long for now.
So in the belief that I couldn’t sustain a daily pace, I decided I needed something to post each day. (I had consulted with experienced bloggers who impressed upon me the need to feed the beast daily lest your readers forget you.)
I also knew I wanted a way to organize all my media links, newspaper scans, personal concert reviews, and such. The fan community already had the long-lived, meticulous, invaluable Brucebase, but at the time I found it unwieldy to navigate and search, and I was too shy to contact the admins to share my personal research discoveries.
Out of that convergence of needs, Kingdom of Days was born. Relying heavily on Brucebase, I supplemented with personal newspaper and magazine scans and copious YouTube videos.
I thought it would run for a year. But at the end of Year One, I realized how easy it would be to update and repost the articles, so I kept it going.
By Year Two, I had started doing deep daily research and had purchased subscriptions to several newspaper archives. I found myself unearthing evidence of unknown shows along with articles about what Bruce and the band did during off-days between shows.
I discovered that there were a ton of articles out there that I had missed because in the early days, there was no Internet to spell-check a performer’s name. I started searching for Bruce “Springstein,” “Springstien,” and “Springfield” and uncovered a trove of new concert reviews and advertisements.
I searched for album advertisements and contemporaneous TV and newspaper interviews with fans lining up to buy newly released albums and discovered that most of the “official” album release dates on Wikipedia and Bruce’s own website were off by days, weeks, or in a couple of cases months.
Gradually, and almost resentfully, I found myself becoming increasingly committed to Kingdom of Days. With each new year, I challenged myself to find new information to add each day.
And then there was the day, driving home from vacation on the Oregon coast, that I made my wife pull over to the roadside so I could verify what I was hearing: a satellite radio DJ reading my words! Although my daily readership already averaged in the mid-to-high four digits, that was the moment I realized Kingdom of Days had taken on a life of its own. I am forever grateful to Jim Rotolo and the E Street Radio staff for the daily acknowledgement.
Even though in my mind, Roll of the Dice was the star of the site, people started referring to the blog as Kingdom of Days instead of E Street Shuffle. I’d often downplay Kingdom when asked about the blog, but eventually the conversation would come back to it. Kingdom is what kept readers coming back each day, even when the song of the day was an obscure outtake that I’m sure no one but me cared about.
I’ve long since given up trying to keep Kingdom at arm’s length. I’m proud of the historical archive it became, grateful for the many photo, newspaper, audio, video, and I-was-there accounts contributed by fellow fans over the years (some of whom have forever sworn me to secrecy, or I would acknowledge them in these pages). Several previously unreleased songs, performances, and videos made their way into the E Street Nation community via Kingdom of Days.
And while I’m expressing gratitude, if the pages that follow are typo-free, that’s thanks to Lori Pierce, whose eagle eye catches (I hope and trust) every typo in blog post. (I didn’t run this introduction by her, though, so any typos here are all on me.)
Thank you also to the Brucebase team, the foundation for any historical Springsteen undertaking. You guys do yeoman’s work, and it is appreciated.
I’ve tried my best to credit photographers where I’m able to. Some come via bootleg CD artwork or Brucebase, where I’ve been unable to identify the original source. If you recognize your uncredited work, I apologize–please contact me and I will update the blog (or remove it if you prefer).
For years, I couldn’t imagine how Kingdom of Days could possibly work in print. Every day’s post was chock full of media, and I didn’t know how to replicate the blog experience in book form.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to. With some light editing, pruning, and layout magic, Kingdom of Days is transformed into a living scrapbook, punctuated with scannable QR codes that will transport you back in time to… well, wherever Bruce Springsteen was on that day in history.
You’ll need your camera-equipped mobile device to bring each page to life, but in my opinion the newspaper reviews work much better on the printed page than they do on your device.
(Note: The video and audio links are hosted by a variety of channels and posters, so I can’t guarantee that every QR code will work as time goes on. In fact, I pretty much can guarantee that someday they won’t. Every year, I’ve had to repair around ten percent of the links, so that’s probably a pretty good benchmark for the “QR decay” over time. I hope you’re able to enjoy the full experience now, and that the book holds up as good reading even when the media someday expires.)
As reluctant as I was to even consider it, I think Kingdom of Days works pretty darn well as a monthly almanac.
I hope you think so, too, and I hope you enjoy this road trip through Januaries past. See you next month in Volume 2.