(On Feb. 8 Bruce Springsteen was honored as the 2013 MusiCares Person of the Year at a star-studded gala in recognition of his exceptional artistic achievements and philanthropic work.The gala featured performances by Alabama Shakes, Faith Hill, Elton John, John Legend, and Sting, among others.)

Perhaps more than any other recording artist today, Bruce Springsteen celebrates the power and glory of the gospel of rock and roll. After more than 40 years of strapping on a guitar and fronting a band, Springsteen has reached a point in his career where he could rest on his laurels and few would blame him. Only he hasn't. And won't. Not now. Not tomorrow. Probably not ever. 

Here's proof: Instead of slowing down, he's sped up. Instead of playing less, he's playing more. Instead of becoming soft and more forgiving, he's become hard and more pressing. Springsteen used to play three-hour-plus shows — with an intermission. Now he plays four hours — with no intermission. 

Given a long, distinguished career that includes world tours, sold-out stadium shows, No. 1 albums, 20 GRAMMY Awards, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and a Kennedy Center Honor, Springsteen could write safe and secure albums that cater to modern pop sensibilities and the charts. But Wrecking Ball, his latest effort, is a masterpiece of intensity and fury. It pokes a finger in the chest of our national leaders and demands answers as to why we've come to a place where the American dream is in jeopardy of losing its soul and promise.

Recently, I met up with Springsteen in Portland, Ore., at the Rose Quarter where he and the E Street Band were to perform. He had just finished soundcheck, which, after finalizing sound levels and lighting cues, turned into a playful romp through the catalog of Paul Revere And The Raiders, a Pacific Northwest group from the '60s particularly popular in Portland.

I first interviewed Springsteen in 1973 when I was a budding music journalist for the Asbury Park Press on the Jersey Shore. Back then he was hoping to make an impression beyond the bars and boardwalk of the Shore with his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. To say he's come a long way is an understatement. Now, he participates in presidential campaigns and owns a body of work that tells us as much about America as reading John Steinbeck or listening to Woody Guthrie.

Thoughtful and certainly aware of his musical and cultural importance, Springsteen takes his role as one of our greatest music treasures quite seriously. Giving back is something that he's most concerned with, be it through his charitable endeavors, his benefit concerts, or his committed care for people who have been dealt a lesser hand. It's the main reason why Springsteen is the 2013 MusiCares Person of the Year. 

What does it mean to be honored as MusiCares' 2013 Person of the Year? You're joining an impressive list of honorees.
It's really nice, really an honor. I remember I was a part of the program when MusiCares honored James Taylor. As a music event, it was very enjoyable. It's a great organization. I’m glad to be a part of it.

 Over the years you've supported many causes and charities, but none seem closer to your heart than feeding the hungry. How did this act of philanthropy get to the top of your list?
In the early 1980s, at the start of the Born In The U.S.A. tour, I went to Pittsburgh and met a labor organizer there who told me about how the area had been affected by deindustrialization and widespread unemployment. He had set up a food bank for steel workers who were having problems feeding their families. The whole food bank program was just beginning to form back then. I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community.  It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.

More recently, you've been very involved with relief efforts for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Being from the Jersey Shore, where so much damage has occurred, must make this a very important project for you.
Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique. I've watched Asbury Park try to get back up on its feet for 25 years. It's hard to see any setback at all. The Jersey Shore is the kind of place where the policeman has a little cottage that might have been in the family for years and many other people call home. The destruction was unimaginable. It's going to take years to overcome.  I'm trying to do whatever I can to help my neighbors get back to some sort of normal life.

In 2012 the United States celebrated the centennial of the birth of Woody Guthrie, one of our greatest songwriters. Can you describe his influence on your music as well as your life?
I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie. I had made my way through rock music and then turned to country music. But I still hadn't quite found something that addressed the issues I was interested in at the time. Woody was like a path to a full and active musical citizenship. With him, there was a deep awareness of the social forces at work in people's lives. I was interested in addressing those ideas and having them become a part of the music I made. 

Many of your songs, like Guthrie's, reach out to people who don't necessarily have a voice in our democracy. The songs echo their fears and frustrations and perhaps their diminished belief in the American dream. 
In a way, I guess you could say that. You could hear someone sing the blues. You could hear frustration and anger in rock music. But you couldn't quite experience or hear a broader human thoughtfulness about where you could go with those feelings. Where do you put that energy? Woody was the first guy that showed me what to do with it.

Bob Dylan has also been an influence, especially early in your career.
That's true. After Bob, I went, more or less backwards, to pop music's antecedents. The thing about Bob's music is that it was beautiful — beautifully written, kind of wry and tough-minded and I liked that. It was direct and quite colloquial and I liked that too. He was writing about a whole number of broader issues that were touched upon in rock music at the time, but not directly addressed.

You had the opportunity to sing Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" with Pete Seeger at President Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009. I imagine that was a memorable event for you.
Yeah, that was quite a moment. Pete's bottom line was that we sing all verses —including the politically charged ones — and that we get all the kids in the choir who backed us up to sing them as well. It was a lovely moment, you know, a very lovely moment.

A few months ago, you were active in the president's re-election campaign, squeezing in appearances at rallies between tour dates.
For the past three presidential election cycles, I have been a part of a political campaign.  This time it was different because it was for the president, not just a candidate who wanted to be president. For me, the choices were particularly stark this time around. I was really glad to be there. I'd been a supporter of President Obama all along. 

How is playing for a campaign audience different from playing for a Bruce Springsteen concert audience?
Well, the campaign audiences are incredibly broad. I go to Ohio with Jay-Z, so Jay-Z's audience is there, my audience is there, and then there is a purely political audience that's there. So you're playing to an enormous cross section of people, including children. On tour, I don't quite have an opportunity to reach this varied audience when I'm playing just to my fans. Basically, you walk onstage and you're looking at this broad spectrum of America. The people may or may not know some of your music. So you're depending on how good your language is. You need to communicate in a very fresh and direct way. For all three times I've helped out on a campaign, that's what I enjoyed the most.

You've never held back from inserting political messages in your own concerts.
If you come to one of our shows, the political is usually a subtext. On the campaign trail, that reverses itself. The subtext becomes the main text, because that's how everyone is hearing it. Every line and every bit of your language is shaded towards the things people are fighting for and caring about. It's wonderful to hear your music come to life in that context. It's been an honor to have that experience. If you're lucky, you get the chance to just nudge the country in this direction, or that. It was the reason why I wrote a lot of those songs.

You come from working-class roots. You've obviously gone well beyond them. How do you stay connected to where you came from?
People always ask that question like there's some trick to it [laughs]. Really, that was something that came very natural to me from the beginning. I could look back and see that there were a lot of my heroes who came before me that got distracted or lost in the confusing life that came with their success. So, I had a deep sense of where my power source was coming from, you know. It came from memory and experience, rooted in geography, locality, a sense of place, a certain people. These are the things that are at the heart of the engine on a nightly basis. Maintaining a connection to those things, to me, was always a survival instinct. It was necessary. The things that pulled you away from that, I viewed with some suspicion. I've certainly enjoyed the life and privilege that I've had because of my success.  But there's been a fundamental focus on those things that we carried over the years with the E Street Band. I'm lucky I've had the band I've had, one that was surrounded by those things and believed in those things as well.

You say that you were suspicious of success. How so?
I was suspicious of the easy things that your talent brought you, you know. You have to be wary to survive. I think it was something that was natural to my character, so I don't take too much credit for it.

Your most recent album, Wrecking Ball, has been described as one of your angriest. Is that an accurate description?
Yeah, I suppose it is. There's a lot to be angry about, you know. The distortion and corruption of the American dream and a certain way of life, the loss of the full meaning of community. To me, those things felt under attack. My concern was that this all added up to a nation in decline. Like other people, I know folks who were affected by the financial crisis, who lost their homes, lost their retirement savings. So it was all very, very real for me. You can have these feelings of frustration and not be able to write about it. That happened to me before. But in this particular case, I was working on another record that wasn't about those things at all. Then I wrote a song that moved in that direction and the rest came very quickly. 

Aside from simply being a concerned American citizen, as an artist how do you negotiate the waters of politically motivated music?
I'd been thinking and reading a lot about what's been going on in the country in the past 30 years, back to the Carter recession, the Reagan deregulations, and you see this long historical arc that was moving the country in one direction. On Wrecking Ball you hear rebel music, gospel music. I wanted both a current and historical sweep, musically speaking. In the end, it was hard to stand by and see what was happening in the last seven or eight years. The record was a response to that.

When I had the privilege to help you with your book, Songs, back in the late '90s, I remember going to your house and being amazed at the books in your study that were about American history, politics, art, and music. You really seemed to be immersing yourself in the American experience.
Reading those books and listening to that music, to me it was always a tool, a part of seeking out your truest identity. It was all part of trying to find out who I was, where I came from, and I was always interested in writing about what I found. So, yeah, I did become quite a student, and still am.

Speaking of books, this seems to be the era of the music memoir. Everyone from Neil Young and Gregg Allman to Pete Townshend and Clive Davis has written one. I read that you, too, were working on one, and then I read that you've given up on it.
I don't ever give up on anything, really. I do something for a while and then I put it aside, you know. I'm always returning to what I have, the raw material. A while back, I recorded a country record and put it aside. I returned to it a couple of months ago and thought, "What am I going to do next?" As for the memoirs, I got some stuff I've worked on, but I don't have anything fixed. I worked on it for a while, then the music came along and the tour came along. There doesn't seem to be an urgency to return to it at the moment. It'll present itself and I'll see what happens. Like you said, there's plenty of others to read at the moment.

I know you're a big reader. What have you read lately that has stuck with you?
One of the things I've done recently was read all the Western stories of Elmore Leonard. If you're interested in character study, he's just the master of nailing someone in a few lines. He's good for songwriters because that's about all the time you have.  And what else? Let's see. [Springsteen goes to his iPad for his book list.] I've also read Christopher Hitchen's collection of essays, and Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt to get my existential buzz [laughs]. Another book I read was Matterhorn [Karl Marlantes' Vietnam War novel].That was great along with Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldam and the follow-up, 2Stoned. Very, very good books on the music industry. Then some baseball books. Finally, I have quite a fixation on the Apollo astronauts, so I read a few books on them. Basically, I'll get on a topic and read two or three books in a row, and then I'll move on to something else.

At the GRAMMYs last year, you had the opportunity to perform onstage with Paul McCartney. What was that like for you?
When I was 15, back in Freehold, N.J., his music spoke directly to me. This was that man. This was the man that got me to pick up a guitar early in my life and go down a particular road. I think it's important to maintain your sense of being a fan, even when you've experienced success of your own. I go onstage every night as a performer, but I also go onstage as a fan, which is what I was on GRAMMY night.

What was the first real concert you attended as a kid?
It was in Asbury Park at Convention Hall. Here's the lineup: the Who, the Blues Magoos and Herman's Hermits. I remember with the Who, people in the audience were semishocked at the destruction of perfectly good instruments [laughs]. That was the first concert, outside of my mother taking me to see Chubby Checker and Anita Bryant in Atlantic City [laughs].

I've seen many of your concerts over the years, but never one in Italy — until this summer. Your show in Trieste was amazing.  In fact, it ranks as one of the best I've ever seen. How do you explain the Italians' love of your music, and your ability to so deeply connect to them?
I don't know. Every night is an opportunity. For me, it's a pathological opportunity  [laughs]. You come out onstage and you're in the presence of some like-minded people, you know. You're also in the presence of some people that had never seen the band live before. Last night in Vancouver, probably 20 percent of the audience had never seen the band with Clarence Clemons before. Amazing. So, there's this ongoing … I guess you would call it a conversation with your fans that's always renewing itself. I've been dedicated to that my whole life. Why? We can talk about that all night. There's good reasons, bad reasons, straight-up reasons, convoluted ones, sane ones, insane ones. I think the best way to look at it is this way: onstage, it's me and it's this person in the audience, right now, not later, not tomorrow, right now. Our fans are immersed in a world that we've created. It's the one place where people go to forget about their troubles. They let themselves go and trust someone. They come into the arena or concert hall and they feel safe and they reveal by their actions their hopes, their dreams, their fears, what's hurt them, what's given them joy. You get an opportunity to witness that on a nightly basis. I have an opportunity — and an honor — to witness that on a nightly basis. And I don't take that lightly.  

(Robert Santelli is the Executive Director of the GRAMMY Museum. His books include Greetings From E Street: The Story Of Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band.)

Seventeen years ago, Brian Fallon and the rest of the Gaslight Anthem — guitarist Alex Rosamilia, bassist Alex Levine, and drummer Benny Horowitz — were just trying to hold onto the dream. 

New Jersey’s communal culture of DIY punk brought them years of friendship and freedom from square jobs, but entering their late 20s, Fallon and co. had played in countless bands that flamed out or left them unfulfilled. Formed in 2006, the Gaslight Anthem was their final shot. "That’s why we called our first record Sink or Swim," Fallon tells GRAMMY.com. 

They swam. That 2007 debut signaled a sea change: In the early 2000s, punk bands were not repping Bruce Springsteen. They were absolutely not namechecking Tom Petty. Here was a punk band from the same streets as the Misfits, Bouncing Souls, and My Chemical Romance, writing great songs draped in the Americana of their parents’ generation. By the time the Boss himself joined Gaslight onstage at Glastonbury Festival 2009, their sophomore album The ‘59 Sound had made them one of the world’s most acclaimed new rock bands. 

The Gaslight Anthem mined its tried and true sound for two more albums,but half a decade of non-stop touring and creative pressure was starting to take its toll. 2014’s Get Hurt, a moodier record inspired by Fallon’s recent divorce, received mixed reviews. A year later, the band was on ice. They reformed in 2018 to perform 10-year anniversary shows for The ‘59 Sound but disappeared soon after. Fallon released singer/songwriter-oriented solo albums into the 2020s and kept in touch with his old bandmates, but it wasn’t the same. 

On Oct. 27, the Gaslight Anthem releases History Books, its first album in nine years. It’s an earthy, battle-tested rock record from a veteran band that sounds hungry again, their first self-released album after an amicable split with Island Records. The title track features a duet with Bruce Springsteen, the pair’s first studio collaboration after years of friendship. 

GRAMMY.com caught up with Fallon to discuss  what years of (humble) rock stardom brought him: a hard-earned appreciation for Gaslight Anthem’s past and a new understanding of the demons rattling in his brain.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What made you want to get the band back together? 

I don’t think it was anything other than being inspired to write. I wouldn’t say that being inside for two years didn’t have a hand in that. At some point, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, I had this band and we played big shows. It’s fun. A lot of people like it. It sounds like a good idea… I gotta do this. I have something else to say.

When the band was inactive, how much did the four of you stay in touch?

We don’t call each other every day, but we stayed current on the things going on in everybody’s life.

The whole thing is more about being friends. We’ve been through things no one else has seen. We’ve slept on floors in another country in a youth center with bugs crawling on you when you’re sleeping. And the only people that understand that are those other three. 

It’s been almost a decade since Gaslight Anthem released its last album, Get Hurt. Now that there’s some space to look back on it, why do you think the band went its separate ways after that album? 

We all felt that strain. In 2015, you couldn’t really say, as a musician, "Hey, I need to not be on tour because I’m going crazy. I need to sort my mental health out." People would just be like, "We’re going onto the next band. Bye. Your career is over." 

So when we pulled the plug, everyone was like, "Why are you doing this?" Well, so we don’t die. So we don’t hate ourselves, that’s why. We knew it wasn’t the band. We knew it wasn’t each other. I think we just needed to stop the landslide.

Do you think this had to do with being in the major label ecosystem? You came up releasing albums on punk rock labels, so I’m interested how you think it all compares.

I would love to sit here and tell you that the pressure is only in the major label world and that it’s the evil major label corporate overlords who do this to bands, but it is absolutely not. It comes from the smallest indie label of some dude in his basement, all the way up. My experience on majors was maybe even a little more sensitive. If you’re running a small label and you have excitement built up, you’re like, "Whoa! This is working on a big level!" You’re so excited that you’re like, "You gotta do this! You gotta do that!"

I’m not saying any of the labels we were on were like, "You gotta do this!," but there was definitely, "Well, if you don’t play this radio show, they’re not gonna play your record." 

Now, people are a little more in tune to what’s going on, but [10 to 15 years ago] for sure, it was like, this is your only opportunity ever! Well, no, it’s not the only opportunity ever. There’s other opportunities. 

Did it feel like people knew what to do with you at Island Records?

We had a real big champion at the time in the president, David Massey. He was the person who signed us. Bon Jovi and U2 had been on Island for a while and contemporary to us, was the Killers. Every time the Killers did something good, it gave us a little more freedom because they were the other rock band on the label. We liked [the Killers] and they liked us. They covered one of our songs ["American Slang"] at one of their shows in New York [in 2017]. It was like having a big brother on the label, paving a path. 

When we got back together, we weren't really on Island, but they could have made us make a record [for Island]. We don’t own anything. I don’t own [the masters for] Sink or Swim. I don’t own ‘59 Sound. Nothing. So we wanted to own it, now. We wanted to do our own label, with [independent distribution company] Thirty Tigers, where it’s much more of, "You’re the label, you make the decisions." 

How did "History Books" with Bruce come together?

I’m not one to shoot my shot, so to speak. Which has not been great for my career, I guess. But if somebody wants to do something for you, let them do it, you know? I never asked Bruce for anything. 

We were talking and I was saying, "Yeah, we’re putting the band back together and working on some songs." He just said, "Why don’t you write a duet for us?" I was like, "What? Alright!" You have to understand that, for me, sitting here and saying, "Why don’t you whip up a duet for me and Bruce Springsteen?" – that to me is like saying, "Why don’t I write a book for Ernest Hemingway? Why don’t I write Jimi Hendrix a guitar solo?" 

So I went away and I would say to myself, Alright, the next one is for Bruce. I’ll write the next song for Bruce. I just kept writing the songs to get them out, without the pressure. And at the end of it all, I just said, "Which song would Bruce sound good singing on?" Everybody just said "History Books." Cool! And then we sent it to him. 

What did he say when you sent him the song? 

He said, "Cool, I’ll get it done." He was in Dublin on tour and he just did it. 

After knowing him all these years, why do you think now was the time he proposed writing a song together?

With the band back and writing new material, it was just the right time. I don’t think there was a time before this where it would have been good for us to have done. 

Now, we’ve gone down a path enough to where we can embrace Bruce, New Jersey, our influences. We’re able to comfortably have that be our home.

When you’re around Bruce, do you get nervous? 

Imagine you’re seven years old, you’re reading your comic books, and then all of a sudden Batman jumps out of the comic book in your room and goes, "Hey, you wanna go fight crime tonight?" It’s insane to be in the presence of a person that’s that famous, and that influential to you. It’s not a thing a normal person can comprehend. And I can not comprehend this. 

Reading the lyrics to this album, I thought you were referencing your mental health a lot. Can you share what's been going on during the several years of your life?

It feels like everybody in America’s got things on their mind, especially the last couple years. I got to a point where the days felt like they were harder than they should have been. It’s like pushing a rock up a hill when you’re doing that every day, and you get tired. You’re dealing with stuff in your mind that you can’t quite… there’s not an event that causes you to feel a certain way. There’s no cause, so you can’t predict it. And that becomes extremely frustrating.

You turn to other things, or you get help and say, I don’t think I can do this on my own. I need someone else alongside me." That’s the point I got to. I got a therapist. There’s not a special rockstar line that people call, or if there is, I don’t have that number. I just went to the doctor and said, "I don’t feel right." 

Did these feelings get  buried during Gaslight Anthem’s more active years, only to come out during the pandemic when things got quieter?

I think it was coming anyway. Whether there was time to deal with it or not. The band slowing down before the pandemic was part of that, needing some time and space. That was why the band stopped, because it was like a steamroller. It’s like you have another mental illness, which is the anxiety of the pressure of feeling like you have to be excited. And that’s where the tidal wave starts… You feel guilty ‘cause you’re like, "I should be grateful. I’m in a band." And you are grateful, but you’re also struggling, and it’s freaking hard! 

[Mental health] comes up a lot in the song "Positive Charge"… I wrote it about that struggle. But this isn’t the mental health record. I’ve been writing long enough where I can steer the boat so it’s not a diary entry anymore. 

Back in 2021, you played a fundraiser in New Jersey alongside Jon Bon Jovi and Johnny Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls. What was that like? 

We were doing a benefit for the reelection of the Governor of New Jersey [Democrat Phil Murphy]. Jon Bon Jovi reached out to my manager and wanted me to play. Whoopi Goldberg was hosting. Insane stuff. 

Jon Bon Jovi wanted to meet for dinner beforehand. At the same time, I was really thinking about the band. On the way in the car, I said to my wife, "I think I wanna get the band back together." I had not spoken of this prior, so this blew her mind. 

We sit down at the table, and it’s Jon Bon Jovi and John Rzeznik. I didn’t expect them to be familiar with my band, because they’re giant songwriters. They were just genuinely interested in what we had done, talking about the songs they liked. When we left, my wife was like, "That’s a sign. If there’s a sign, that’s a sign."

I’ve met famous people who are completely off the planet. They’re just not interested in having a normal conversation. They just revel in the absurdity of their fame. I could relate to [Bon Jovi and Rzeznik] because the one common denominator is we all came from nothing. And now we’re in bands that achieved some amount of success. 

On New Album 'Jonny,' The Drums' Jonny Pierce Is Finished "Setting Myself Up To Lose"

Updated Friday Oct. 13, 2023 to include info about Kendrick Lamar's most recent GRAMMY wins, as of the 2023 GRAMMYs.

A GRAMMY veteran these days, Kendrick Lamar has won 17 GRAMMYs and has received 47 GRAMMY nominations overall. A sizable chunk of his trophies came from the 58th annual GRAMMY Awards in 2016, when he walked away with five — including his first-ever win in the Best Rap Album category.

This installment of GRAMMY Rewind turns back the clock to 2016, revisiting Lamar's acceptance speech upon winning Best Rap Album for To Pimp A Butterfly. Though Lamar was alone on stage, he made it clear that he wouldn't be at the top of his game without the help of a broad support system. 

"First off, all glory to God, that's for sure," he said, kicking off a speech that went on to thank his parents, who he described as his "those who gave me the responsibility of knowing, of accepting the good with the bad."

Looking for more GRAMMYs news? The 2024 GRAMMY nominations are here!

He also extended his love and gratitude to his fiancée, Whitney Alford, and shouted out his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. Lamar specifically praised Top Dawg's CEO, Anthony Tiffith, for finding and developing raw talent that might not otherwise get the chance to pursue their musical dreams.

"We'd never forget that: Taking these kids out of the projects, out of Compton, and putting them right here on this stage, to be the best that they can be," Lamar — a Compton native himself — continued, leading into an impassioned conclusion spotlighting some of the cornerstone rap albums that came before To Pimp a Butterfly.

"Hip-hop. Ice Cube. This is for hip-hop," he said. "This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic, this is for Nas. We will live forever. Believe that."

To Pimp a Butterfly singles "Alright" and "These Walls" earned Lamar three more GRAMMYs that night, the former winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song and the latter taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (the song features Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat). He also won Best Music Video for the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood." 

Lamar has since won Best Rap Album two more times, taking home the golden gramophone in 2018 for his blockbuster LP DAMN., and in 2023 for his bold fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Watch Lamar's full acceptance speech above, and check back at GRAMMY.com every Friday for more GRAMMY Rewind episodes. 

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Sharing mental health issues with close family or specialized medical professionals can be challenging enough. Add in the pressures of fame and being in the public eye, and any struggles are exponentially more difficult to cope with.

In recent years, though, mental health has become a much more widely discussed topic in celebrity culture. Several artists have used their music and their platform to open up about their own struggles with depression, anxiety and the like, from Bruce Springsteen to Selena Gomez.

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month this May, GRAMMY.com highlights the inspirational impact of music superstars who speak out about what they're going through, and how they manage their challenges. These 10 performers are making change through their courage and candor.

Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran takes fans behind the curtain of his personal life and struggles with mental health in Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All. The four-episode docuseries, which is now streaming on Disney+, details the pain of losing his best friend Jamal Edwards and his wife Cherry Seaborn receiving a cancer diagnosis while she was pregnant with their daughter Jupiter.

"What I think is really great about the documentary is the themes that it explores, everyone goes through," Sheeran said at the New York City premiere on May 2, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "Everyone goes through grief. Everyone goes through ups and downs of their mental health."

Sheeran dives deeper into his struggles — and is more vulnerable than ever before — on his latest album Subtract, which arrived on May 5. "Running from the light/ Engulfed in darkness/ Sharing my eyes/ Wondering why I'm stuck on the borderline," he sings on album cut "Borderline," which touches on battling suicide thoughts.

Lewis Capaldi

Like Sheeran, Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi also gave fans an incredibly upfront look at his mental health challenges in a documentary, How I'm Feeling Now. The new Netflix release details his experience with anxiety and Tourette's syndrome, taking viewers to physical therapy with Capaldi and discussing how his medication both helps and hurts the quality of his life.

Capaldi's second album, Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent (due May 19) will further explore his anxieties and vulnerability. While he has admitted it wasn't easy to be so raw in his music and on screen, Capaldi wants to make a difference in other people's lives. "If people notice things that are concurrent with what's going on in their life, then it's all been worth it," he told Variety.

Billie Eilish

While Billie Eilish's music has been raw and real from the start, her music has become increasingly more vulnerable throughout the years. Whether in her music or in interviews, the star has opened up about dealing with body dysmorphia, depression and thoughts of self-harm — hoping to inspire fans to speak up when they are hurting, and to know that it gets better.

"It doesn't make you weak to ask for help," she asserts in a 2019 video for Ad Council's Seize The Awkward campaign, which features stars discussing mental health.

"Kids use my songs as a hug," she told Rolling Stone earlier that year. "Songs about being depressed or suicidal or completely just against-yourself — some adults think that's bad, but I feel that seeing that someone else feels just as horrible as you do is a comfort. It's a good feeling."

Selena Gomez

As one of the most-followed stars on social media, Selena Gomez has often used her formidable presence to discuss her mental health and connect with others. In 2022, the singer launched a startup called Wondermind, which is focused on "mental fitness" and helping users maintain strong mental health.

Just a few months later, Gomez further chronicled her own mental health journey in an Apple TV+ documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, which shows extremes she's suffered with her depression and bipolar disorder. She has said she was initially hesitant to share the film, but ultimately reflected on how many others could be helped if she did.

"Because I have the platform I have, it's kind of like I'm sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose," she explained in a 2022 cover story with Rolling Stone. "I don't want that to sound dramatic, but I almost wasn't going to put this out. God's honest truth, a few weeks ago, I wasn't sure I could do it."

Shawn Mendes

In 2019, Shawn Mendes first publicly addressed his struggles with anxiety in the dynamic — and GRAMMY-nominated — hit "In My Blood." Three years later, the singer postponed his 2022 tour in order to focus on his mental health, opening up an important conversation to his legion of fans.

"The process was very difficult," he said in a February interview with Wall Street Journal. "A lot of doing therapy, a lot of trying to understand how I was feeling and what was making me feel that way. And then doing the work to help myself and heal. And also leaning on people in my life to help a little bit. 

"It's been a lot of work, but I think the last year and a half has been the most eye-opening and growing and beautiful and just healing process of my life," he continued. "And it just really made me see how culture is really starting to get to a place where mental health is really becoming a priority."

Bruce Springsteen

Even an artist as successful and celebrated as Bruce Springsteen has faced depression. In his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, the 20-time GRAMMY winner cites a difficult relationship with his father and a history of mental illness in the family, sharing that he has sought treatment throughout his life.

"I was crushed between 60 and 62, good for a year, and out again from 63 to 64," he wrote in the book. In that time, he released his 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, which featured a raw track called "This Depression." "Baby, I've been down, but never this down I've been lost, but never this lost," he sings on the opening verse.

As his wife, Patti Scialfa, told Vanity Fair in 2016, "He approached the book the way he would approach writing a song…A lot of his work comes from him trying to overcome that part of himself."

Janet Jackson

The physical and emotional abuse suffered by the famous Jackson family is well-documented in books, documentaries and TV dramatizations. But it's only been in recent years that Janet Jackson has talked about her own depression, which she has referred to as "intense." Her son Aissa has helped her heal from mental health challenges that have followed her all of her life.

"In my 40s, like millions of women in the world, I still heard voices inside my head berating me, voices questioning my value," she wrote in a 2020 ESSENCE cover story. "Happiness was elusive. A reunion with old friends might make me happy. A call from a colleague might make me happy. But because sometimes I saw my failed relationships as my fault, I easily fell into despair."

Elle King

After seeing global success with her debut single, "Ex's & Oh's," Elle King experienced the woes of sudden fame as well as a crumbling marriage. Her second album, 2018's Shake the Spirit, documented her struggles with self-doubt, medicinal drinking and PTSD.

"There's two ways out," she told PEOPLE in 2018, describing her marriage as "destructive," physically abusive and leading her to addiction. "You can take the bad way out or you can get help. I got help because I knew that I have felt good in my life and I knew I could get there again."

Brendon Urie

Certain public situations can trigger crippling anxiety attacks for Brendon Urie, who has been open about mental health concerns throughout his career. He can perform in front of thousands of fans, but he's revealed that being in the grocery store or stuck in an elevator for too long with other people are among some of his most uncomfortable scenarios in his life.

"You would never tell on the surface, but inside it's so painful I can't even describe," the former Panic! At The Disco frontman — who disbanded the group earlier this year to focus on his family — said in a 2016 interview with Kerrang.

Big Sean

Rapper Big Sean and his mother released a series of educational videos during Mental Health Awareness Month in 2021 — two years after the Detroit-born star started talking about his own long-held depression and anxiety publicly.

"I was just keeping it real because I was tired of not keeping it real," he said in an interview with ESSENCE in 2021. "I was tired of pretending I was a machine and everything was cool and being politically correct or whatever. I just was like, I'm a just say how I feel."

Like many of his peers, he hopes that his honesty will help others. "Whatever they can apply to their life and better themselves and maybe it just even starts a whole journey in a different direction as far as upgrading and taking care of themselves and bossing up themselves," he added. "Whatever they're trying to do, I hope it helps them get to that place."

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Over the span of fifteen years, Bruce Springsteen received four nominations and two wins for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. He missed the ceremony for his first win in 1985 for "Dancing in the Dark," but he made up for it in 1995, thanks to "Streets of Philadelphia."

In this episode of GRAMMY Rewind, revisit Springsteen's second win for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, 10 years after his first victory.

"Not sure this is a rock vocal, but you stick around long enough, and they give these things to you, I guess," Springsteen quipped.

"Gee, I actually won this a few years ago. They gave it out in the afternoon, and I missed it," Springsteen continued with a smile. "They sent it to my mom, and she presented it to me over the kitchen table."

That wasn't the only trophy Springsteen accepted that night, either: "Streets of Philadelphia" nearly made a clean sweep at the 1995 GRAMMYs, winning four of the five categories it was nominated in. The song also won golden gramophones for Best Rock Song, Best Song Written For Visual Media and the coveted Song Of The Year.

Press play on the video above to watch Bruce Springsteen's complete acceptance speech for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 37th GRAMMY Awards, and check back to GRAMMY.com for more episodes of GRAMMY Rewind.

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