Bruce Springsteen


(Copyright © 1999-2018 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
Greetings From Ashbury Park , 6/10
The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle , 7.5/10
Born To Run , 7/10
Darkness On The Edge Of Town , 6/10
River , 8.5/10
Nebraska, 6.5/10
Born In The USA , 7/10
Tunnel Of Love , 6.5/10
Human Touch , 4.5/10
Lucky Town , 5/10
The Ghost Of Tom Joad , 5.5/10
The Rising , 6/10
Devils & Dust (2005), 5.5/10
Magic (2007), 6/10
Working On A Dream (2009), 5/10
The Promise (2010), 5/10
Wrecking Ball (2012), 5.5/10
High Hopes (2014), 4/10
Western Stars (2019), 4.5/10
Letter to You (2020), 5/10
Links:

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Summary.
Bruce Springsteen is the epitome of "epic" in music. After Bob Dylan and before the Ramones, he was one of the few musicians capable of transforming the mood of an entire generation into a "sound". If the rules to judge the significance of an artist are that a) he be indifferent to fads and trends; b) that his lyrics dig deep into his era and resonate with the souls of millions of people; c) that each record be, de facto, a concept album; d) that each song send shivers down the spine even without a catchy melody; then Springsteen is one of the greatest of all time.
Musically, Springsteen coined the model of the singer-songwriter of the 1980s, bridging the gap between the bluesman of the 1930s, the black shouter of the 1940s, the rocker of the 1950s, the folk-singer of the 1960s, the punk of the 1970s.
In many ways, Springsteen was the true heir to Woody Guthrie (Bob Dylan never was a true populist). He sang about the dreams and the fears of ordinary white Americans. But he was also the heir to the blues, in an era in which the black nation was abandoning it for dance music.
Over the years, Springsteen grew up to become the eloquent spokesman of middle-class and blue-collar America. His declamations combine populist demagogy, patriotic passion and prophetic vision in a way that is quintessentially American. The alienated enthusiasm of his early days mutated first into a nostalgic glorification of the past and eventually into resigned grief. Dreams turned into memories, and exuberance turned into frustration. As the promised land faded away, Springsteen led the exodus from the international utopias to the virtues of ordinary people.
Springsteen conveyed all of this in energetic and intense performances that changed the whole meaning of the word "concert". His concert is a collective sacrificial ceremony that pours naked life into artistic form. Whether shouting or whispering, Springsteen "was" the voice of millions of American for which the American dream never materialized. His songs are the national anthems of that submerged nation. The stylistic fusion of The Wild The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle (1973), recalled both Van Morrison and Taj Mahal, while Born To Run (1975) introduced his torrential "wall of sound". The River (1980) summed everything up: pathos, epos and eros. Populist lyrics, granitic group sound, tender confessions, catchy refrains, hard-rock riffs, massive boogie grooves, rock'n'roll spasms, acoustic ballads: Springsteen and his band were the ultimate manufacturers of good vibrations. Sorrow and pessimism prevailed on subsequent albums (on which Springsteen frequently preferred the acoustic format), with the notable exception of Born In The USA (1984), another super-charged set of anthemic songs.


(Following is the translation of my old Italian article made by Ford Atwater)

Bruce Springsteen is one of the few rock musicians who are really worth the word “epic”. After Dylan and before the Ramones, he was one of the few musicians capable of transforming the mood of an entire generation into a “sound”.

If the rules to judge a rocker’s significance are a) that they be indifferent to fads and trends; b) that their lyrics dig deep into an era and resonate with the souls of millions of people; c) that each record be, de facto, a concept album; d) that each song send shivers down the spine even without a catchy melody; then Springsteen is plainly one of the greatest of all time.

Musically, Springsteen created the singer-songwriter model of the 80s: bridging the gap between the bluesman of the 30s, the blacksmith of the 40s, the rocker of the 50s, the folk-singer of the 60s, and the punk of the 70s.

In many ways, Springsteen was the true heir to Woody Guthrie (Bob Dylan was never a true populist). But while Guthrie was only a cultural icon for white America, Springsteen was also an heir to the apostolic style of blues, at a time when black folks were developing increasingly progressive dance music. In this way, Springsteen is indeed the universal singer of the average American (white, black, Latin or otherwise).

Springsteen’s work has developed along three directives: political (New York Serenade, Promised Land, Jungleland, State Trooper, Born in the USA), nostalgic (Glory Days, Going Down, American Graffiti, all of The River) and erotic (Rosalita, Night, Sherry Darling), always introspectively exploring the soul of the everyman, and avoiding messianic proclamations.

As the years went on, Springsteen came to stand above his peers as an eloquent spokesman of middle-class and blue-collar America. His declamations combine the populism, passion, and prophetic vision that has always driven America mad. In many ways, Springsteen is the heir of the spellbinding preachers and populist politicians that have influenced America all the way from the frontier to the modern day.

His characters are not heroes, criminals, or killers: they are ordinary people taken from the assembly line, the repair shop, or the crowds on the street. They are real people, with their dreams, their fears, and their complexes. The alienated but enthusiastic vagabonds of Born to Run have aged little by little; they have become sad and resigned, and now have to deal with the harsh reality of everyday life and the wrecks of their past dreams, of their “glory days”. And similarly his prose became more and more literate and existential, until he became a modern Woody Guthrie: as Guthrie cried the suffering of the rural population of the Dust Bowl, Springsteen bitterly observes the pain of the American industrial workers.

Springsteen epitomizes the youth who came of age in an era of counter-culture and economic prosperity, revitalized by two great hopes that died miserably on the rocks of the crises and “re-alignment” (or mere ebb and flow) of the ‘70s. His records simply recorded the slow and sad transformation of those dreams into memories. The exuberance of school days is reduced to a deep sense of frustration. Having lost the “promised land”, an almost biblical exodus from international utopias took them to the virtues of the man in the street.

The product is an energetic and intense performer, who in every issue must give everything he has in an inexhaustible ceremony of sacrifice which has an ultimate end of breaking down life to a naked and pulsating form. Just as an interpreter, his contribution to the history of rock is much more salient: everyone now has to compete with his disruptive and passionate way of maintaining the scene. The populism of Guthrie and Frank Capra gifted Springsteen with the howl of a whorehouse. If Guthrie was the intellectual who lives the tragedies of the disinherited from the outside, and sings of them in a humble and mournful voice, Springsteen is “one of them” and uses the sound of the slums. And his are the national anthems of that drowning nation, hymns that, like all hymns, while being simple four-voiced melodies, make the skin crawl if shouted at the top of the lungs, and are then worth more than entire symphonies.

Bruce Springsteen (born 1949) grew up in New Jersey, a stone’s throw from Asbury Park, and mimicked Bob Dylan’s career right from the start. But he was merely an exuberant rocker, endowed with lyrical talent and lacking in politics, an urban singer-songwriter who relied on rock and roll and the rhythm and blues of rural saloons.

Taking vocal cues from Van Morrison (concert animal par excellence, powerful vocalist, and wise arranger), from “blue-eyed” soul-rock (Gary U.S. Bonds), and from the romantic tenor of Roy Orbison, on the first album, Greetings from Asbury Park (1973), Springsteen effortlessly rattles off Dylan-esque ballads that treat street life with sincerity (Spirit in the Night), the sentimental dramas of the petit-bourgeois (For You), and the inner monologues of suburban youth (Growin’ Up).

With the second album, The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle (CBS, 1973), Springsteen sets out to find an original with a thematically unified collection of more complex songs that (lyrically) deepen the characters and the narratives dramatically, and that (musically) mix Stax-soul, Mexican serenades and country ballads, in a very diverse style of arrangements. Kitty’s Back (jump blues bands, orchestral swing, blues-jazz solos of organ and guitar) is an example of this integral fusion. An extended and varied piece, it recalls the pop-jazz of Moondance and even the pastiche of Colosseum. The Tex-Mex epic with tuba-rhythm Wild Billy’s Circus Story could have been taken directly from a Taj Mahal record.

The second side, then, is practically a suite, themes of youthful fauna that is urban, poor and romantic: Incident on 57th Street, the fateful tale of a petty thief, has the gait of Desolation Row and a hypnotic procession from Blonde on Blonde; Rosalita, a novel of love and betrayal, is an exuberant and visceral Van Morrison from his totally uncritical soul period; and New York Serenade, which opens on an airy jazz piano solo and is fleshed out by flamenco chimes and a downpour of strings, is a painful piece of soul chambered in a darkly apocalyptic atmosphere. These long narrative songs depict the dark-toned metropolis with a metric and choral structure in Van Morrison’s creative vein, sustained by an impressive vocal range, from the fiercest roar to a stifled gasp, and avante-garde arrangements. The quintet that accompanies it consists of black, white, and Mexican men. What sets it apart from Morrison’s folk-jazz ensembles are the Chicane inflections, which give the whole work a more latently Latin connotation.

Springsteen is no longer the troubadour à la Dylan, but rather the romantic version of Lou Reed, who is also able to immerse himself body and soul in the noises and images of poor neighborhoods and absorb them in the raw energy of his sound. His compositions are no longer folk ballads, but rather those “little symphonies for the kids” that Spector had theorized.

Born to Run (CBS, 1975), as the result of a colossal promotional campaign, of a painstaking production work (a Spectorian “wall of sound” spice for Blonde on Blonde) combined with a prime hard rock-soul accompaniment became a bestseller, at the same time sharpening the virtues/defects of the singer-songwriter, such as melodrama, emphasis, viscerality “at full volume in one breath” that serve to mask the paucity of many compositions but which also produce the most powerful vibrations. The experimentalism of the previous work is abandoned to return to the classical song form, and the Van Morrison chamber soul is strengthened by powerful rock and roll syncopation. Springsteen the visceral rocker is not in reality Springsteen the soul poet, and the two figures do not yet blend adequately.

Night, a powerful and lyrical serenade in cresdendo, the powerful rock and roll syncopation of She’s the One, the hard-fought urban tale of Backstreets, Born to Run, a solemn and heroic anthem, the dramatic finale of Jungleland, a snarling, epic and passionate song of life marked by jubilant piano instrumentation, which is paired with the initial Thunder Road, the overture to the milieu of the lower classes, combine to form a strongly thematic work, compact, rocky and rabid, a nostalgic fresco regurgitating characters from suburbia, almost an autobiographical rock opera, written by Tommy from New England. Bombastic and warlike, Springsteen’s style has left behind the ascetic tradition of folk singers and has adopted an attitude halfway between the most heartfelt and tragic operatic tenor, and the tone of the defiant rocker, more bold and rebellious. To create the awesomeness, however, is the fresh arrangement again, especially the passionate and festive saxophone of Clarence Clemons and the twinkling “Christmassy” piano of Roy Bittan. 

In the three years of silence that followed (due to legal quarrels), the scene was flooded by bootlegs that showcased his live performances, quickly becoming legendary. Some of these albums are better than the official ones issued so far, thanks to the furious attacks, vocally and by guitar, of the leader (a worthy heir to both Hendrix and Burdon) and the phenomenal support of his E-Street Band, which now counts the rhythm guitar of Steven Van Zandt among their numbers. Several of his classics come to light thanks to covers done by others: The Fever (Southside Johnny), Sandy (Hollies), Fire (Pointer Sisters), Because The Night (Patti Smith).

Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) delivers the official version of one of his most enthralling rhythm’n’blues songs, Badlands (doubled over by the inferior Prove It All Night), with one of his best impressions of Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde, The Promised Land, and the roaring philosophical elegy Adam Raised a Cain, and makes a decisive transformation by exchanging the Spectorian embellishments of Born to Run for the hard, biting sound anticipated by bootlegs, featuring violent bursts of Clarence Clemons’ saxophone matched with gusty, tempestuous keyboards (piano and organ), in addition to the guitars of Steven Van Zandt and Springsteen himself.

Though inferior to the two precedents (some tracks seem like rejects, others are uncharacteristically subdued), this is the record that marks the transition to Springsteen’s greatest period: the lyrics penetrate the everyday life of ordinary folks and transform it into universal poetry, sanctifying harsh social reality in an atmosphere of quasi-religious intensity. Springsteen, who up until now had only been the umpteenth romantic bard of the road, of great dreams and great hopes, becomes the consciousness of small-town America. This is also the record in which Springsteen begins to confront the past, which will inspire some of his most intense dramas: by relying on the power of nostalgia and regret, he adds another layer of pathos to his people’s fresco.

The classical season of Springsteen originates from the synthesis between the genuine sound of Born to Run and the philosophical yearning of Darkness. In 1980 he made up for his almost-legendarily parsimonious discography with the twofold River (CBS, 1980). It is an album that, musically, now lives solely on the frightening spirit of the singer and on the ruckus of his band of goons, and, thematically, repeats for the thousandth time the makeup of the savage rebel, the lonely hero, the life of the street, in absence of any real lyrical force.

Springsteen, however, is still able to mix engaging lyrics, longing emotion, and electrifying sound, and many songs, built upon an avalanche of words and verse, are classics of his blended art. The entire spectrum is now meaningless, demonstrating how the style of Springsteen runs parallel to the perpetual motion of rock music. At one end there are the scarce ascetic ballads from a vagabond in the classical tradition, made more agonizing by his howling crooning: The River, bitter parable of so many young people prematurely awakened to life, Point Blank, Dylanesque ballad of lament, Independence Day, dripping with estranged nostalgia, and Stolen Car, suspended in a ghostly atmosphere. The most emotive are the elegies sung with that desperate heat that crosses criminal ferocity with the “damned” bravado of a rocker: Two Hearts, an epic plea for love, Jackson Cage, a cry for liberty from a lifelong prisoner, and above all Out In the Street, another frenzied piece of soul that comes cadenced with shaking fury and screamed like bloody murder.

At the opposite end there are the songs of smooth self-confidence, Sherry Darling, a lively serenade that is is the quintessential “Spector sound” (with a Kooper-style piano, clapping, backing vocals and an impassioned saxophone), or Hungry Heart, a rhythm and blues nocturne (and his first real hit), or I Wanna Marry You, a tender and nostalgic ballad of sentimentality, up to the bewitched triptych of Crush on You, a ferocious number from the lycanthropic howler at breakneck pace, You Can Look, the rock and roll paroxysm of his career, and Cadillac Ranch, a truculent and pressing country boogie, bacchanals of primitive energy that celebrate the adolescent “fun” of roughhousing good boys in the country. And it is here that the Spectorian sound reaches its apotheosis, breaking the banks with unbelievable passion. The more traditional rock, Rocker and Ramrod (another arrangement masterpiece, a slowed-down rockabilly with a pronounced organ and red-hot boogie saxophone playing) celebrate his narcissistic macho. The references to civilization from the fifties is more marked than it seems, and the music itself is an homage to the past, from folk to the sixties. River is a revivalist record, it is full of conservative and nostalgic thought.

The three compositions that close out the record, The Price You Pay, Drive All Night and Wreck on the Highway, are really the most pessimistic: they are three historical finales, immersed in a sense of profound emptiness, exposing the end point of all heroes in the Springsteen mythology, similar to how the ending of “Monsieur Verdoux” (execution by guillotine) reveals where the end of the long and straight road is for the good-hearted lad in any comedy of Chaplin’s.

In contrast to the previous records, in which Springsteen was bard the who sang the lives of exemplary individuals in his personal Holy Writ, in River the lyrics are all in first person, and the protagonist is always him, who is being philosophical and fatalistic in conversation with his girl. Thanks to this technique his observations have become more profound, succeeding at reaching into the lives of the characters, as they are bound by their inner monologues.

The keyboards, always in the foreground (church organs and Farfisa organs of the Jersey shore, music box pianolas and grand pianos playing chamber music), are equal to the voice in importance in setting the tone for the songs, and Roy Bittan joins Nicky Hopkins and Al Kooper as one of the greatest pianists in the rock canon.

Whatever the theme (romance, despair, dreams, prosecution), the music of the E-Street Band is always compelling and emotionally close to the spirit of “good times”, though it is never simple “fun”: this is the secret of the historical compromise reached by Springsteen over the years. And so, in these heartfelt poems, the most vibrant voice of blue-eyed rock can carve its notes of daily drama and urban tragedy without detracting from the pleasure of listening.

River marks the definitive consecration of Springsteen as a folk hero. But two years later Springsteen doubles back and records Nebraska, in the most ascetic style of folk (guitar and harmonica), an homage to his background and an opportunity to redress his vocal chords. His cold street ballads are sung mutedly (Highway Patrolman) with hints of Guthrie, of dust and sweat, of American Graffiti and of the beat generation. Nostalgic rhetoric propagates stories of history, drama, desolation and jail (Nebraska) which deviate from the grit and enthusiasm that have marked all previous endeavors of the hero. The unifying theme is the struggle to survive in the age of Reaganomics. The most compelling ballads are those (Johnny 99, State Trooper, and the masterpiece, Open All Night) punctuated by an accentuated rhythm that puts on a neurotic and hallucinatory air to the moral scenery of the stories of failure. Nebraska is a sullen and haunting record, which presents the point of view of the working class, powerless victims of moral indignities.

For the sake of schizophrenia, 1984 was the year of commercial boom: the album Born in the USA (CBS, 1984) won him first place in both the 45 rpm and 33 rpm charts (18 million copies sold within six years). The album extols both the virtues and the defects of Springsteen’s conservative rock. Among youthful reminiscents (the rebellious days of high school) and social obligations (unemployment, conscription to Vietnam) the newest chapter of the Springsteen mythos unfolds again with fresh human warmth, pressing electric sound and desperate fury, which Nebraska’s act of penitence had obscured, but with a regained great melancholy.

The anthem Born in the USA (originally composed for Nebraska in a moving blues version) is an archive of everything bad that has happened to America in the last decade: its martial chimes appear to call out to the collective nation of the disowned. All of the tremendous force from the impact of the Springsteenian epic seems to be put solely at the service of overwhelming pessimism, so much so that the fastest and most rhythmic songs (like the rockabilly Working on the Highway) are the most negative. The pugnacious requiems of Downbound Train, No Surrender, and the captivating Going Down (with an obsessive refrain that makes sense of the plunge) touch the nadirs of the proletarian epic. Glory Days, the most epic, and at the same time morose, of his nostalgic reinterpretations of the years of his youth, and the desolate My Hometown recede into his most authentic vein of regret. The hits, Dancing in the Dark, Cover Me, and I’m on Fire, conversely do not confirm Springsteen’s ability to conceal melodic shortcomings with an intense emotional charge. Pink Cadillac is still the classic of his genius in blending the rhythm and tone of the three sonic archetypes: rock’n’roll, rhythm’n’blues and honky-tonk.

Born in the USA represents the apex of the poetics that has sprung from the collective memory of America, and which underscores a sense of guilt for all of the mistakes that Americans have never dared to reflect upon. Springsteen embodies the other America, opposed to the official one, an America that does not exalt itself for its grandeur and does not indulge itself in the intolerant fanaticism of bigots. In fact Springsteen proposes himself as the last “founding father” of the nation. The bits of wisdom gathered in so many painful stories compose a morality of humility and resignation before the harsh reality of existence. His humble and broken people is simply one of many caravans headed for the frontier, taking many of those lives and leaving the others to struggle in the sun and the desert.

The quintuple Live of 1986, was immediately thrown to the top of the sales charts, and consecrating his myth, now without equal, and demonstrates once more how great he is as an interpreter (for example, War, the old single from Edwin Starr).

Tunnel of Love (1987), a collection of love songs (which actually tells the story of his separation from his wife), limits the rhetorical and paternalistic emphasis and instead gives way to twilit and autumnal atmospheres. Springsteen tries to form a mould of the gut of the modern era, not that of decadent Bohemians, and not that of the marginalized bluesman, nor that of the street rebel, but that of the young petite-bourgeois and their parallel struggles of illusions and disappointments in life. It is a corollary to Nebraska, as another profoundly personal and fundamentally mythological album that has its greatest moment in Brilliant Disguise (a typical “baion” song in the tradition of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller). Musically, the regressionism that had led him to Spector’s “wall of sound” now reaches the pop of Brill Building, with reminiscences in the phrasing of Gene Pitney and the arrangements of Burt Bacharach (even when performed at the synthesizer, as in Tunnel of Love). The introspective Springsteen is less striking than the social one, but not less profound (Spare Parts, One Step Up). Ever changing his style and theme, Springsteen is unique in the way that he manages to retain his identity. It takes two seconds to realize that this is the same Springsteen of the early years. The middle-aged singer-songwriter manages to seamlessly blend the most intimate experiences of his private life with the most universal aspects of everyday life. He is one of the few rockers who has rejected the fundamental motto of rock and roll (“live fast, die young”) and has instead turned rock into an art of personal growth.


(Original text by Piero Scaruffi)

After disposing of the venerable E Street Band, Springsteen broke a five-year drought of new material with the twin albums Human Touch (Columbia, 1992) and Lucky Town (1992). The former is a collection of old-fashioned pop ballads that sound more like stylistic experiments (Soul Driver) than full-fledged songs. The rock and roll numbers (Roll Of The Dice, All Or Nothin', Real Man) suffer from the departure of the E Street Band. The one notable exception is the spectral gospel of 57 Channels, with swampy, tribal drums and sinister electronic ambience, one of his masterpieces.

Lucky Town displays his depressed, pessimistic mood. It is not a coincidence that it is also his most "bluesy" album ever (The Big Muddy, Souls of the Departed).

With The Ghost Of Tom Joad (Columbia, dedicated to the protagonist of John Steinbeck's epic novel, and therefore, indirectly, to the North America that Woody Guthrie sang, Springsteen turns again to the desperate endeavors of ordinary Americans. The problem is that this time around he doesn't have any good song for them, except for the title-track.

Following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Springsteen began writing a new collection of songs, which eventually became The Rising (Columbia, 2002). The album aimed to be a faithful reproduction of the mood of middle-class Americans in the wake of that tragedy, but instead seemed to forgo the sense of loss and focus on rebuilding the American spirit. It sounds more like a national anthem than a requiem. Lonesome Day, a bit over-produced with symphonic orchestra and gospel choir, sets the epic tone (although it sounds more Mellencamp than Springsteen). The trivial melody of Waitin' On A Sunny Day (that echoes Born to Run), and its loud rhythm and blues pace, or the party rave-up of Mary's Place (so replete with instruments and voices in the classic River sound), or the heavy guitar sound and pounding rhythm of Countin' on a Miracle and Further On hardly belong to a mournful time. Let's Be Friends is totally gospel, The Fuse is almost trip-hop The production is not only too intrusive, but also very old-fashioned, dejavu, involuntarily self-mocking.
Too much sound ruins even the best reportages: the rousing blues of Into the Fire ("The sky was falling and streaked with blood/ I heard you calling me/ then you disappeared into the dust") and the solemn prayer of My City of Ruins.
In his attempt to reach out to other cultures, Springsteen is no Peter Gabriel. The world-music of Worlds Apart sounds cliche` and not very sincere.
The winners are on the opposite front: the desolate lament of Nothing Man, the apocalyptic vision of Empty Sky, the romantic farewell of the dying in Paradise. Springsteen needs little more than his voice to connect with the soul of America.
The lyrics read like a summary of tv news, talk shows and interviews with survivors of the World Trade Center. The Rising is more a social artifact than a musical one.

The simple, relaxed late-night ballads of Devils & Dust (Sony, 2005), third of the acoustic trilogy with Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad, marked a significant change in tone. Springsteen sounds more resigned than compassionate, more contemplative than angry. His powerful machine of sounds and words is reluctant to charge. Having lost his historical role as the soul of the American working class, Springsteen sounds a bit erratic. At times, he speaks (for the first time) as a spiritual person tormented by the thoughts of redemption and salvation, making the most of the historically incorrect Jesus Was an Only Son (Jesus did have brothers). At times, he toys with the theme of "homecoming" without quite confronting it from the nostalgic or romantic angle. Clearly, the heroic phase is over. The new phase is still a strange limbo of brooding emotions where history and heart still have to find a common ground. Mary's Place, Reno and Matamoros Banks are perhaps the best manifestations of this transitional art.

Compared with the previous albums, Magic (2007) is a relatively relaxed and homely affair. It is also meticulously arranged, giving he music more relevance than the lyrics. Springsteen employs the E Street Band (backup vocalist Patti Scialfa, guitarists Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren, saxophonist Clarence Clemons, pianist Roy Bittan, drummer Max Weinberg) to sing and play simple songs that do not attempt to construct an epic concept or a doleful tragedy. They are just the songs that he had ready. Some of them dangerously lean towards the pop-muzak sentimental end of the spectrum, such as Devil's Arcade and Your Own Worst Enemy, songs that are hijacked by baroque harpsichords, violins and timpani. Others, luckily, echo the Born To Run wall of sound: the anthemic Radio Nowhere with pounding drums and stentorian hard-rock riff (but reminiscent of Tommy Tutone's 867-5309), the vibrant jangling folk-rock lament Gypsy Biker (with echoes of Bob Dylan and Tom Petty), the solemn and fatalistic aria I'll Work For You Love (possibly the best melody), the nostalgic, Phil Spector-ian singalong Girls in Their Summer Clothes, and the slow syncopated rhythm'n'blues shout Livin' in the Future. The melancholy bard of small-town America intones the triptych of Magic (an anemic elegy sung in the voice of an old man against velvety orchestral touches), Last To Die (a powerful hymn over melodramatic guitar chords) and the pulsating heroic Long Walk Home, the ideological pillar of the album. The album marked a return to the angry passionate populist bard of Born In The USA.

Continuing the pattern of the last two albums, Working On A Dream (Columbia, 2009), featuring the E Street Band again, is another spirited run through the canon of Springsteen's classic style. The album opens in a mood of renewal with the Western-tinged eight-minute epic Outlaw Pete, ssomething that Stan Ridgway could have done. His passionate and forceful rhythm'n'blues numbers (My Lucky Day) and his solemn elegies (Queen of the Supermarket, actually a sarcastic parody a` la Frank Zappa) that sounds like Jim Steinman orchestrating a hit of country music, Kingdom Of Days) are sprinkled parsimoniously around the album. Whether intended or not, the bulk of the album is instead a nostalgic tribute to the music of Springsteen's childhood: Surprise Surprise is a jangling Byrds-ian (with the most memorable melody of the album), Working On A Dream harks back to the vocal harmonies of the 1950s, This Life contains echoes of easy-listening melodies of the 1960s, Tomorrow Never Knows is a breeze folkish singalong, and Good Eye is a bar-band blues stomp. All in all, it's probably the most confused and ambiguous of his collections, with some truly awful material.

The Promise (2010) collects leftovers from the sessions of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, including his own version of Because The Night. Some of the songs beat most of what Springsteen did in the 2000s (Outside Looking In, Wrong Side Of The Street), others belong to the genre of the lukewarm ballad that has always been a mixed blessing (Racing in the Street, Ain't Good Enough For You).

Only Springsteen, the unstoppable and unbribable bard of the everyman, could acutely link the Great Recession of the late 2000s with the Great Depression of the 1930s, as he did on Wrecking Ball (Columbia, 2012). His populist tones, adapted to the epos of The Rising, bestowed a transcendent meaning on We Take Care of Our Own, Jack of All Trades, Wrecking Ball and the seven-minute Land of Hope and Dreams (originally written in 1999). The depression folk-singer nonetheless acknowledge the age of loops and samples (notably in Rocky Ground). The drawback was that the music flowed slow and ponderous. The Irish-tinged Shackled And Drawn, and the country singalong We Are Alive (a dead ringer for the perennial anthem Ring of Fire) are a case of too little too late.

High Hopes (2014) collects leftovers, the live staple American Skin, a reworking of his own The Ghost Of Tom Joad and three covers (including Just Like Fire by Australian punks the Saints and Dream Baby Dream by Suicide).

Western Stars (2019) is a mediocre album of (mostly) orchestral country ballads, save the stripped-down lament of Hitchhiker, The crooner/narrator of There Goes My Miracle, Tucson Train and Western Stars has none of the energy, rage and passion of Bruce Springsteen.

Letter to You (2020) completed the descent into nostalgic mode, coming after his memoir of 2016 and after the Broadway show of 2017, and at the same time as Thom Zimny's documentary "Letter to You" (2020). Backed by the E Street Band (which, besides being older, lost Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, both deceased), Springsteen recycles old (unreleased) songs like Janey Needs a Shooter (with gospel organ and blues harmonica), and crafts stereotypical blue-collar ballads like Ghosts (with the riff of Tom Petty's Free Fallin') and I'll See You in My Dreams (which sounds like Dylan), before ending with the noble Last Man Standing.

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