Stewart Francke, 1958-2025 - singer/songwriter, journalist, author, longtime "protagonist for life"

May 10, 2025

I was very saddened to learn of yesterday's passing of Stewart Francke, who was a fierce friend and inspiration to so many of us in the Springsteen-fans community, myself included. Stewart was a great singer-songwriter, journalist, author, and public speaker. Over decades, he wrote, sang, and spoke eloquently and insightfully about his native Michigan, the joys and pitfalls of seeking love and building community, and his long-term health struggles against leukemia. Music-writer and Springsteen-biographer Dave Marsh called Stewart's 2000 album What We Talk Of... When We Talk "the most important blue-eyed soul record in a musical generation." And in 2006, Bruce Springsteen himself declared, "Stewart Francke makes beautiful music."

In 2011, at a time when the U.S. military still was entrenched strongly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Springsteen provided additional vocals on Francke's song "Summer Soldier (Holler If Ya Hear Me)", first released on his Heartless World album. “This is a tremendously cool thing for Bruce to do,” Francke stated in a press-release for Heartless World, “and of course a real honor. It was always his voice I heard on the call and response part of this track, but figured it would remain just a wish. He found something in it compelling enough to join me, and I’m still a bit knocked out about it all... I hope the song works on a couple levels. It’s a very complicated situation—wars are made up of thousands of singularly human, personal tragedies and loyalties as well as enormous consequences for the countries involved. My job is to tell a story from the most human standpoint and say we can condemn the wars but support our troops.” Below you can hear "Summer Soldier (Holler If Ya Hear Me)" performed by Stewart Francke with Bruce Springsteen:

Heartless World also closed with a moving cover of Death Cab For Cutie's "I'll Follow You Into The Dark," featuring a guitar solo by Shane Fontayne of Springsteen's 1992-93 touring band:

Speaking of Springsteen's 1992-93 tour, coincidentally a stock photo used in the 1992-93 tour program also got used for the cover of Francke's 2013 album Love Implied:

That album featured a track entitled "Drive North," which might have inspired the choice of the album cover's photo. I also can't help but wonder if "Drive North" in turn might have been at least partly inspired by a story that Stewart told me in an unpublished 2011 Backstreets.com interview I conducted with him via email-exchanges. When discussing his own Springsteen fandom, and particularly his first encounter with Darkness on the Edge of Town, Stewart wrote, "I’ll never forget first putting my 8-track (yes, that’s all I had) in my ’74 slime-green Impala with bench seats and hearing the piano and glock riff of 'Badlands' come ripping out of my fer-shit speakers; it was something so different when compared to what else was going on at the time. I also recall thinking the drums sounded boxy and shitty, but now if you were to alter one decibel or Hz on the floor tom I’d have you drawn and quartered. I was driving up a northern Michigan old two-lanes to see a girl who was spending some time with her family at a lake house. The drive was long enough for four full listens. The thing that I recall best is there was no adjustment, no accommodation of my emotional potential. I got it from word one, and he was talking straight to ME—'Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland.' I mean, that was my fucking life. And as I drove, I got that there had been 'concept' albums from Come Fly With Me to Sgt. Pepper's..., but no one had ever made a record about it ALL—the concept of taking in all of life, of wanting it all, of wanting love that won’t let you down but already being down, of looking for faith at the same time you’re trying to define what it is—wanting sex, friendship, camaraderie, night, day, work that matters, citing work that kills, changing the whole way we live and work and travel and love."

During another part of our email exchanges, Stewart wrote, "When I had leukemia and a bone-marrow transplant in 1998, I was in and out of the hospital for long periods of time—three months at one point. My nighttime record that took me away and helped me forget my surroundings was Bruce’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Just something about it... Joad was a self-contained, hard-as-nails parallel world with matching emotions—not unlike where I found myself. As his voice and lyrics washed over me and my tears each night, it was clear from his songs that the world of light and truth, the oft-fabled promised land, is possibly just beyond that ravine or just over that treeline. This was real hope when hope was as scarce as rain in the Mojave for me. Just as his best early songs propelled an audience toward adolescent action (like when I saw him in ’78,) Joad again moved us toward an enormous conclusion: Who tends the promised land, if it actually is more than fable? Who relies on whom? His songs made me think of healing, and what I may do when I heal. I remember hearing this night after night like it was a prayer: 'For what are we, without hope in our hearts/That someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?' from 'Across The Border.'

"I had nothing but time to consider that question, and my answer became clear: we're dead, we’re nothin’. I insisted on treating those words of his not as an answerable question, but as an admonition. I believe in the clarity and movement behind those words. I insist on believing them because from where I was, so close to death, I desperately needed to hang on and try and trust in an unseen faith. I mean, are these things real or not? Does a struggle matter or not? Can you change your station in life in America or not? Or is it all just bullshit?"

In the spirit of the best of Springsteen fandom, Stewart Francke lived it every day and kept pushin' 'til it was understood. May he rest in peace, and long may his beautiful music and messages be heard.

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Also well worth watching... "Stewart Francke Talks About Being a Cancer Survivor," a special video prepared for the 2021 Land of Hope and Dreams celebration:, in which at one point Francke, with both humility and humor, described himself not as any kind of fighter who could "kick cancer's ass" ("Cancer kicked my ass...all over the field, man!") but instead as "a protagonist for life." What an appropriate epitaph for this great man.

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Click here to read our friend Doug Bradley's essay "Holler if You’ve Heard Stewart Francke."

-Special thanks to Chris Phillips at Backstreets.com