DISPATCHES: Singing of the darkness of the American soul

DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet Bruce Springsteen’s new album is a search for redemption and a reconnection with the nation’s soul.

   Check your expectations at the door.
   That’s the first thing you need to do when you listen to Bruce Springsteen’s newest album, "Devils & Dust." While it has echoes of earlier Springsteen albums — most notably "Nebraska," his 1982 rebuke of Ronald Reagan’s America, and "The Ghost of Tom Joad," his prayer for those left behind during the go-go ’90s — it really is nothing like any of his earlier work.
   "Devils & Dust" — due out Tuesday from Columbia Records — is a country record, a folk record, a bit of a rock record. It is thick with atmosphere, awash in violence and a shadowy mythology redolent of the Old West — or the Old West that exists in John Ford and Howard Hawks films — old noir films and detective novels. It is political record without any overt mention of politics, a collection of 12 songs that explore the edge of hope and loss and failure set to an acoustic guitar, dobro and strings.

   This may not make a lot of traditional Springsteen fans happy, those fans clamoring for a reprise of 2002’s flawed gem, "The Rising," a return to the working-class fire of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" or the fiery, end-of-youth masterpiece "Born to Run."
   But this is the disc that had to be recorded now, the album that the times called for, an album for the age of George W. Bush and the war on terror. "Devils & Dust" is, at its core, a political allegory, a musical exploration of a theme explored by Langston Hughes in his poem "Let America Be America Again," a poem that mourns the nation’s unfulfilled potential. It is a theme fleshed out through a song cycle in which the promise of love is subverted or unrequited, in which life beats the speakers down — ultimately ending with "Matamoros Banks," a strange and beautiful poem from the grave of an illegal immigrant who dies crossing the Rio Grande.
   "Devils & Dust," like his best work, is a reimagining of America in the new millennium, a reconnection with the darkness deep in the country’s soul, a darkness evident in the rush to war in Iraq and the thirst for revenge, in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, in the meanness of a presidential administration that has no allegiance to the most vulnerable of our citizens. This is, of course, what the best art has always done, create something whole and new and boiling with energy from the moment in which the artist lives, from the lives around him.
   The album, as David Fricke writes in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone (available on line), "is … as immediate and troubling as this morning’s paper. These people are our neighbors, and these worries are Springsteen’s, too."
   Bruce pulls no punches on this disc, biting off angry lines and spitting out a rare expletive on the brooding "Long Time Comin’," seeking redemption through a prostitute on the graphic but tender "Reno" or recounting the slow fall of a broken boxer on the brooding "The Hitter."
   "Devils & Dust" is an album of false hopes and busted connections, of lies and deceit and the need to somehow find that last little bit of strength that keeps us going but can’t.
   "I’ve got God on my side," he sings in the mesmerizing title cut that opens the disc. It is a song that easily could be about Abu Ghraib. "I’m just trying to survive / But if what you do to survive / Kills the thing you love / Fear’s a powerful thing / It can turn your heart black you can trust / It’ll take your God filled soul / And fill it with devils and dust."
   There is an anger bubbling to the surface, a self-loathing — he wrote he song in 2003, after the start of the Iraq War, a war he opposed and criticized from the stage while on tour. The narrator knows he has crossed some unspoken line in some hazy desert war. He wants to do right, to "take a righteous stand / Find the love that God wills / The faith that He commands." But faith is no longer enough to cleanse the stain from his heart and the mission — the president’s grand, God-inspired crusade, one based on a lie — has left him dead inside.
   There is little variation in the verses and the instrumentation is uncluttered — just Bruce’s guitar, producer Brendan O’Brien’s bass, Steve Jordan’s drums, some strings, some horns and Springsteen’s gut-wrenching harmonica break.
   And while the song has the feel of "Blood Brothers," an E Street Band song from 1995’s "Greatest Hits" disc (and some of the late-1990s outtakes included on the "Tracks" box-set), it is far darker, burrows much deeper somehow, tunneling into the darkest part of the soul.
   The songs that follow turn the disc into a search for redemption through the minefield of broken dreams and frayed relations, chance encounters and temporary salvation that lies, ultimately, just out of reach.
   "I know what it’s like to have failed, baby," he sings on the disc’s hardest rocker, "All the Way Home," "With the whole world lookin’ on / I know what it’s like to have soared / And come crashin’ like a drunk on a barroom floor."
   "Devils & Dust" does not break new ground. In many ways, it is rather conventional — a mostly acoustic collection that hearkens back to Bruce’s origins as a singer-songwriter — but it is this conventionality, in its acceptance of older American forms of music, where the disc hits its mark. The dobro, pedal steel and strings that flesh out the sometimes spare arrangements, the surprisingly nimble finger-picking, the falsetto yawps of the sweet "All I’m Thinkin’ About" — all of it creates an emotional momentum characteristic of the best country and folk music and results in one of the most fully realized and satisfying collections of songs in Springsteen’s long career.
   And it while it remains to be seen whether the disc storms up the charts the way "The Rising" did, it is clear — to me, at least — that Springsteen remains a vital and relevant voice at a time when so many artists do little more than explore their own vanity.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].