A documentary road trip built on a single, deceptively simple question has landed its biggest interview yet, and the answer led straight to New Jersey. Sea to Shining Sea, the Newport Folk Festival’s coast to coast interview series, has released a newly filmed conversation with Bruce Springsteen, recorded on location at the recently opened Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University in West Long Branch.

The project, executive produced by Newport Folk Festival’s Jay Sweet and co-hosted by singer-songwriter Devon Gilfillian, sent a small crew across the country in an RV to ask musicians, both famous and entirely unknown, what song or artist comes to mind when they think of America. The format deliberately echoes the historic song collecting road trips of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, folk pioneers who traveled the country decades earlier cataloging the music of working communities rather than chasing famous names. Sea to Shining Sea has followed a similar instinct, giving as much weight to musicians playing in community third spaces after their day jobs as it does to festival headliners.

The Name That Kept Coming Up

When Sweet and Gilfillian sat down with Springsteen at the newly opened Center for American Music, they shared something they had not yet told him, that his name had come up more often than any other artist’s when people across the country were asked the project’s central question. Springsteen’s response leaned into the same instinct that has defined his own career long before this interview, naming a chain of influences rather than crowning himself. Asked to name the music that felt most essentially American to him, he pointed first to Bob Dylan, repeating a description he has used for years, calling Dylan the father of his musical country for stripping away illusion and showing the unvarnished truth of the world Springsteen grew up in.

From there, Springsteen widened the lens considerably, tracing his own musical education back through Elvis Presley’s physical, kinetic stage presence, James Brown’s command of showmanship, Woody Guthrie’s plainspoken storytelling, and, more recently, Public Enemy’s confrontational urgency, describing all of it as part of the same continuous American songline he has spent his career trying to extend. The range itself made a point the interview seemed built to draw out, that no single artist, including Springsteen himself, exists as an isolated genius so much as one link in a much longer chain of American musical inheritance.

Filmed in the Building Built to Hold That Story

The choice of location was not incidental. The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, which opened at Monmouth University following the school’s earlier establishment of the Bruce Springsteen Archives, exists specifically to preserve and study exactly the kind of musical lineage Springsteen spent the interview describing, housing his personal collection of writings, photographs, and career memorabilia alongside a broader mission of studying American musical heritage more widely. Filming the Sea to Shining Sea segment there placed Springsteen’s own reflections on his influences inside the same institution built to safeguard and interpret his legacy, giving the interview a layered, almost self-referential quality that few of the project’s other stops could replicate.

For a series built around asking what makes music distinctly American, ending up in a research center in West Long Branch, built around an artist most famous for turning working class New Jersey life into some of the most enduring rock music of the last half century, reads less like a coincidence than an inevitability. The Sea to Shining Sea project continues to release additional interviews from its cross country journey, featuring artists ranging from Joan Baez to Tyler Childers to Chuck D, but the Springsteen segment stands as the clearest distillation yet of the question the entire trip was built to answer, less about naming a single American sound than about tracing the long, overlapping chain of voices that built it.