Bruce Springsteen stars in a poignant new Super Bowl ad for Jeep marking the first time The Boss has appeared in a major brand spot in his career.
The ad, while for Jeep, centers around the message of meeting in the middle as symbolized by a tiny chapel in Kansas. Springsteen provides the moving voiceover narration which is as follows:
“There’s a chapel in Kansas
Standing on the exact center of the lower forty-eight.
It never closes.
All are more than welcome
To come meet here, in the middle.
It’s no secret the middle has been a hard place to get to lately
Between red and blue
Between servant and citizen
Between our freedom and our fear.
Now, fear has never been the best of who we are.
And as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few.
It belongs to us all.
Whoever you are, wherever you’re from
It’s what connects us.
And we need that connection.
We need the middle.
We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.
So, we can get there.
We can make it to the mountaintop
Through the desert
And we will cross this divide.
Our light has always found its way through the darkness
And there’s hope on the road up ahead.”
Per Rolling Stone, the ad was shot over a period of five days last month in Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska by Thom Zimny, who also directed Springsteen’s 2019 concert film Western Stars. Variety noted that Jeep “…had no idea the commercial would even be made until a few weeks ago. Springsteen only agreed to do it after the start of 2021.”
Rumors of Springsteen’s Jeep ad started getting national attention just a few days ago with Ad Age reporting, “Local media reports out of Nebraska documented his travels in the state in recent days that appear to be related to shooting a Big Game ad for the car brand. NTV, an ABC affiliate in the state, on Wednesday cited a now-deleted tweet from an airport in Hastings, Nebraska that stated ‘Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen lands in Hastings to film a Jeep commercial in Blue Hill for the Super Bowl,’ referring to a small town south of the city.”