Bruce Springsteen - Stolen Car

The most startling thing about the song Stolen Car is the sheer bleakness of the place Bruce Springsteen is coming from. Springsteen is a story-teller, capable of drawing on his own experiences and emotional depths to create compelling fictional characters and events. But the power of Stolen Car is so great that you’re forced to ask, if Springsteen never lived through the desperation and loss described in this song, how did he make it seem so real? Where in his mind did it all come from?

The way Springsteen described his songwriting developing in the second half of the seventies is half legend and half history. It’s history because, as he often tells us, he did move away from the romantic triumphalism of his earlier work. Perhaps realising that the convoluted street stories and their idealised characters were fun for a while but not sustainable, and seeing that when the young dreamer hops in his car with his girl and gets out of that one-horse town, what follows isn’t always that much better, Springsteen started to write about real people, leading normal lives, engaging in everyday struggles. The song often given as early and important evidence of this shift is Factory, from the depressing Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), in which he combined concise, powerful lyrics with a stately, respectful accompaniment that was ideally suited to the metronomic nature of his character’s life’s routine:

Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
The work, the working, just the working life

But this is far from being the whole story. For all its blue collar regularity and poor person’s economics, the Darkness album contains plenty of the hopeful, daring self-improver exemplified by Born to Run, Thunder Road and the rest. Following a wonderfully clear (if simplified) exposition of a normal person’s priorities, when faced with the double-whammy of poverty and oppression, the narrator of Darkness’s opening fanfare, Badlands, makes clear the hope that remains in his heart, and his desire to make it real:

Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And the king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight
I wanna find out what I got

So Springsteen shouldn’t kid us that the struggles of his characters from the late seventies onwards were the struggles of that idealised everyman. The point about the man in Factory, the central certainty which lends him both his tragedy and his dignity, is that he doesn’t want to go out tonight to find out what he’s got – or at any rate, he doesn’t want to do it enough actually to make him do it. To do so would be to sacrifice whatever it is that he has built up, gradually, day by day – some measure of security, maybe a family, some sense of local stability, where any fragility comes from events beyond his control. In short, this man can’t afford to take risks.

That sounds pretty depressing, and so it is little surprise that Springsteen’s songs from that point on didn’t simply follow that pattern. From Darkness up to the present time, most of his songs contain a rich blend of reality, hope, action and both pent-up and released emotion. But not all of them. A world away from the ambition of Badlands, and a hundred times more depressing than any thought Factory can evoke, lies the grim world of Stolen Car.

The song Stolen Car is to be found buried in the second half of the album The River (1980). This album is Springsteen’s White Album in one (and only one) sense: it is sometimes asked, why didn’t he make it a really good single album, rather than a pretty good double? Conventional wisdom has it that either he couldn’t decide which songs to leave off (despite having left off several songs of substantially better quality than some that made the cut), or that the concept of the album required a particular length and order. The truth of either of these justifications suggests to me that he needed better advice at the time, but I like to think that there was another reason. The songs recorded for that album generally seem either to set the scene, or to describe the better life or world that the narrator or characters strove for. Very few of the songs do both.

Right from the outset, you know that Stolen Car is really moving around in the deepest wells of despair and hopelessness. Set significantly quieter than the songs around it, the song starts with a persistent (though lacking the urgency to be described as “insistent”) guitar which oscillates between two chords for the entirety of the song. On first listen, the tension created by this tightly coiled rhythm part threatens that at any moment it could unwind into that third chord of rock and roll convention – but it never does. To do so would bow not just to normality, a sense of the average, but to accede to the lightening of the mood which the fifth chord brings, after a few bars of the first and fourth. That isn’t Springsteen’s intention, and the two chords provide a sullen backing all the way.

Colour, such as it is, comes from Roy Bittan’s tinkling piano – used to great effect across the album, in a way that he never quite managed subsequently. The hesitating, descending nuances of Bittan’s playing on Stolen Car bring together the love inherent in the tale to come with the lack of any real hope of salvation: in short, they provide Springsteen with instrumental poignancy.

Next up comes the E Street Band’s ultimate instrument: Springsteen’s voice, this time drenched in echo and not letting the band slow him down as he tells his story. He starts by touching on hope – but hope as described as a thing of a past, making it clear that the hope has gone. In fact by the terminal angst in his voice, you get the sense that in his view, hope had existed where none had the right to:

I met a little girl and I settled down
In a little house on the edge of town
We got married and swore we’d never part
And little by little we drifted from each other’s hearts

This seems to be a verse, but there’s no chorus or refrain, just yet. Springsteen’s voice picks up the tempo fractionally, as if he is afraid to pause in the telling and not have the strength to continue. He gets a bit louder too. But the genius of this song’s structure is that the narrator skips a bit of his own history. He doesn’t tell us what happened, at least for the moment. He skips straight to his own bleak assessment of why it went wrong. More accurately, he tells us what his initial assessment was, then dismisses it in favour of something bigger, more portentous, and left undefined:

At first I thought it was just restlessness
That would fade as time went by as our love grew deep
In the end it was something more I guess
That tore us apart and made us weep

What happened, and why it happened, are so far left unexplained. One thing, and one thing only, is for sure: whatever happened was terrible.

What this doom-laden story lacks is a context, a sense of physical surroundings, and that is exactly what the chorus now provides. Springsteen switches to the present tense, and sings:

I’m driving a stolen car
Down on Eldrich Avenue

The literal intention seems to be that this is a description of what his narrator is doing now, as he looks back at the past. But the overwhelming feeling is that this is no mere drive down memory lane - driving stolen cars is also his past, and possibly what brought him and his lover/wife to their sad end. This suggestion is enhanced by the accompaniment to the chorus, as the lone voice of the verses is joined by church-like background vocals, singing simple “aahs”, moving gradually downwards, giving the motoring lyrics a funereal quality. Against the wave of finality they create, the narrator’s subsequent attempt at defiance comes across more as admission of the futility of his vague rebelliousness:

Each night I wait to get caught
But I never do

Whether he waits out of a desire to get caught, or simply the expectation that that is what must happen, is not clear. What is certainly clear is the message of muted thunder of the drums which enter around this point, sending a character to their musical death of ever an instrument could do so.

Accepting those drums as the inevitable partner to the rest of his story, and even adding a plucked bass to add weight to it, Springsteen gets on with telling the tale. He doesn’t bother to go back and fill in the gaps – instead, he remains in the present, in retrospective mode, but switches perspective – or shares it:

I asked if she remembered the letters I wrote
When our love was young and bold
She said last night she read those letters
And they made her feel one hundred years old

Whatever happened to the love between the two of them, it doesn’t seem like either of them died. Actually, Springsteen makes seem natural what is in reality an unusual narrative device: rather than using a sole voice to describe what happened between two people in the past, he uses both people’s voices to describe what happened to something – a feeling, an emotion – which seems too huge to personalise. In particular, the last two lines of that verse seem to say everything and nothing. Everything, because the despair with which he sings them, and the respect commanded by the use of the ancient age suggested at, suggest something so immense as to be transcend adequate description (what did she mean?). Nothing, because what she actually says is to commonplace as to be verging on funny – we all look back at the evidence (or just memories) of our young, bold love, and say they make us feel old. But then, the genius of Springsteen is to convince us that what has happened to these two tragic characters is more, much more, than that commonplace process of ageing, and gathering wisdom as we go, that the rest of us are forced to endure. Helped by Bittan’s piano, which reflects the growing elegance of the tale by spreading his chords out, adding depth to the music, he sews that seed of doubt in our minds – is he singing about me, or is he creating a back-story between the lines that surpasses anything I have ever experienced, in terms of its tragedy and implications?

There’s more, of course. Defying expectation (especially set against the standard structure of the album’s more prosaic songs), Springsteen introduces not one, but two new choruses – retaining the musical shape of the first one, keeping the ethereal choral backing, but using every line of music to add flesh to the story (although not at the expense of the song’s mystery):

I’m driving a stolen car
On a pitch-black night
And I’m telling myself
Gonna be alright

Again, there’s that uncertainty regarding whether this is a memory, or a description of what the narrator is doing as he plunges the darkest depths of memory. He seems temporarily optimistic, although he presents no reason for this momentary hope, but he immediately dismisses it with his very next word, and reinforces his hopelessness with the last lyrics of the song:

But I ride by night
And I travel in fear
That into this darkness
I will disappear

Finally, you feel able to make a judgement about the tense of the choruses: as the vocals vanish suddenly from whence they have come, echoing the sentiment they last expressed, you feel sure that the stolen cars, night riding and fear of the choruses are a part of the narrator’s sense of now, not part of the story he is telling in the verses. This knowledge takes away that growing sense of context and physical space that the choruses had gradually given the verses, leaving them ever more elusive and unexplained. More importantly, it tells you that whatever happened in the past, in those verses, never went away, never eased, and has led Springsteen to consider, even predict, his own demise, even as he remembers.

So it is inevitable that after these final words, the persistent hollow drums (different from the persistent guitars only in that one wanted to make sure a story was told, while the other wants to ensure the story ends, in our heads, with the one irrevocable conclusion we all know) are joined by an organ solo, as beautiful in its conception as it is devastating in its delivery. Emerging at first through what sounds like a dense thicket of guitar, bass, piano and drums, Danny Federici’s solo, as church-like as those earlier vocals, meanders thoughtfully around Springsteen’s earlier melody, before emerging to take centre-stage by rejecting the rhythm set by the other instruments, and commanding them to follow in its wake, as the music fades to a quiet sense of nothing.

If you have never heard Stolen Car before, or if you have heard it without ever really listening to it, put it on, and after it has finished, press stop. Whatever follows this exquisite song of yearning hopelessness and unspoken tragedy is bound to be mundane, and it is bound to ruin what came before. Sit in silence for a few minutes, and let all that has been sung, and all that has been left to your own imagination, sink in. Like I said before, this is no ordinary story of every day life. This song is one of a kind.

One bad gig, several good ones, and the passing of a musical magician

A couple of months back I went to a really rubbish gig. I’m not blaming the band entirely – it was a Monday night, I’d had one of those days at work, and I was standing at the Borderline on my own on an unseasonably hot day. I don’t suppose I was up for it. But nonetheless, the music wasn’t that good either.

Sirens of the Ditch, the first solo album by Jason Isbell since he left the Drive By Truckers, is a very good piece of work. He has that southern rock feel off-pat, but he combines it with some top quality singing and a songwriting style which demonstrates how leaving a multi-talented band to branch out on your own, to find a more individual sense of your art, can be a worthwhile risk. And at the Borderline, some of those elements were there – he sang well and his songs were for the most part good (although his tribute to the Band’s deceased legends, Danko/Manuel, seemed hideously inappropriate; delivering personal tributes is all very well, but there has to be some link to the object, otherwise the gesture is an empty one – like opening a copy of the Dandy and reading that it’s a tribute to Franz Kafka). But he really needs to get a new band – or at least a new guitar player. While Isbell himself played some very good solos, including some brave slide work, the other guitarist played the most hackneyed, un-nuanced, screamy guitar parts…it was as if he had just left home and was making the most of finally being allowed to turn his amp up and rock out, man. He was out of place.

The other problem was that it was far too much like being in a poor pastiche of a Southern-style hoe-down. I don’t mean to stereotype the Deep South in any way. But Isbell and his entourage seemed intent on doing just that, as he swigged from a bottle of Jack Daniels before passing it round to band members, some of whom visibly didn’t want it but felt obliged to take a manly swig. Guys, it costs a tenner in Asda, it’s not that cool. Worse, every time Isbell took a swig, various members of the audience indulged in really fake woops and hollers – I don’t know if these were genuine Southerners, impressed by Isbell showing the foreigners what life in Alabama is really like, or if they were Londoners engaging in a bit of escapism and make-belief after a day stuck in an office. Either way, it pissed me off.

Maybe I had just become a grumpy old man, and the fact that I didn’t enjoy myself was absolutely nothing to do with this gig? Not to be put off, I embarked upon a series of shows which I had higher hopes for – and they didn’t let me down. This spring I have witnessed some of the best live performances I have ever seen.

A couple of weeks after the Borderline pantomime, a friend and I entered a very strange venue, the Soho Revue Bar, to witness what was a lot like a coming out party for Lizz Wright. With poles running from floor to ceiling giving a hint as to the venue’s less savoury former use, and a dark red and blue burlesque feeling running around the cushioned seats and eerily lit bar, there was an odd anticipatory atmosphere before Wright hit the stage, earlier than scheduled. I have referred in passing to her latest album, The Orchard, elsewhere on this website, and for the most part the gig was a run-through of that album – though with the shuffle option selected.

Wright is a humble and unassuming performer – what first seemed to be her clasping herself in a classic pose of self-pity and internal angst was actually her indicating to her back-stage guy that she was cold and wanted more clothes. Perhaps inevitably, what he gave her was a loose, flowing wrap which your mum wouldn’t deem adequate to warm up a mouse, but it was in keeping with her musical style. Standing still in the middle of the stage, Wright used her deep, soulful vocals from her toes upwards, swaying only a bit as her music brought song after song to a culmination, a sense of life few performers can match based only on sheer tone.

She did dip back into her previous records, most notably with her cover of Neil Young’s Old Man. Singing it as if she had written it, indeed as if the old man in question was someone she had known her whole life (and in the subjective world of interpreting a song to suit your own needs and predilections, who is to say she hadn’t?), she brought the talented band and the eager audience up a level, closer to where she had been since the start, and after that things really got going. Elegant, stately, passionate – I would have gone to see her night after night if I could have done.

Another singer-songwriter I have been obsessively listening to this year, and another who adds jazzy inflections to a style of music that is otherwise quite different, is Jill Barber. In an underground cellar of a place, I witnessed a simple but striking performance: just Barber and her guitar, combining new songs and a few from For All Time, interspersed with endearing stories which put the songs in a nice context. My thoughts on Jill Barber have been recorded elsewhere, but the main point from a persona perspective is that I had just got off a long, delayed train journey, I was very hot and bothered, but Jill Barber did what Jason Isbell couldn’t – her songs blew my troubles away. That evening I was also reminded how well your friends tend to know you. When Barber asked for requests and I immediately shouted out a song name (I thought other people would too, but they didn’t…), she not only played the song, but asked my name and thanked me after playing it. When afterwards I commented on how embarrassing it had been, the friend I was with just said “You loved it”.

Well, love it I may have done, but not half as much as I loved Alison Krauss, Robert Plant and what they created between them at Wembley Arena a few weeks later. Taking their under-stated masterpiece, Raising Sand, on tour, their live set offers so much more – menacing but acoustic-based Led Zeppelin covers, soft country/bluegrass laments, spicy Cajun blues-rock, and simply gorgeous harmonies.

Robert Plant really showed his subtle side at Wembley, blending well with Alison Krauss and not dominating proceedings. In fact, for all of Plants world-weary and experienced touches, it was Krauss who really shone. She is a revelation - such a beautiful voice. The best moment for me was her version of Down to the River and Pray, famous now for its appearance on the Oh Brother, Where Art thou? Soundtrack. The song was performed a cappella, with Krauss in the spotlight singing the first section on her own, with Plant, Buddy Miller and the Stuart Duncan giving it three part harmony backing vocals, around a second mic. Incredible stuff. And who could fail to be entranced by Alison Krauss? There was an odd incongruousness, seeing this ‘country chick’ with green dress (billowing in the air conditioning like a warped version of Mary in Thunder Road) and cowboy boots in the middle of a massive dingy London garage, otherwise known as Wembley Arena. But when she sang, it all made sense.

There were solid versions of most of the songs from the album, with Killing the Blues being a personal highlight for me (actually it wasn’t one of the better songs on the night, and my main feeling when they started it was less elation and more a strange sense of relief that I wasn’t going to miss out). As for the Zeppelin covers – such as When the Levee Breaks, and the Battle of Evermore, the blend between reinvention and respect for rock classics was just right. Evermore featured faithful mandolin playing and lively, edge-of-seat harmonies. The long intro to When the Levee Breaks was an aggressive duet between the violins of Krauss and Duncan, followed by long, drawn-out vocals from Plant and Krauss.

It is also worth mentioning the strange cult of T-Bone Burnett. The man is clearly a great producer – the sound he created on Raising Sand is captivatingly unique (actually, until this album, my favourite example of his work was the Wallflowers’ second album, Bringing Down the Horse, rather than the Rolling Thunder guitar and the Oh Brother soundtrack for which he is more famous). The man obviously has a lot of style, and knows his music history. But the camera operators, for the big screens, kept focusing on him as he strummed his rhythm guitar, while ignoring Buddy Miller's endless stream of licks, solos and fills. Also Burnett’s’ two-song set was in your face, kind of cool, but a bit out of place. Buddy Miller and Stuart Duncan were definitely the unsung heroes of this show.

Musically speaking, Plant/Krauss show hasn’t been topped this year, for me anyway. But when you bring together the music, the performance, the atmosphere and the sheer exhilaration that only live music can provide, Bruce Springsteen is the best live performer by, oh I would say about a hundred thousand miles.

My ninth Springsteen show was definitely more of a party than a concert. People I know who sat in the stands (for this took place at a football ground, the strange huge squat stadium that Arsenal’s Emirates) tell me that it was a very good show. Certainly the setlist was pretty interesting, for a Springsteen show, with rarities like Point Blank getting an airing. For my old friend, my new friend and me, it was more an excuse to sing, shout, dance, drink some beer, and relish the general wonder of a Bruce Springsteen show. Right from the outset, he was off the stage and into the crowd, and we lapped it up – one of Springsteen’s talents is that however indifferent you are to one of his songs, in a concert he will make you love it and appreciate it in new ways; for those few minutes at least. So it was with 10th Avenue Freeze-out for me, which normally I dismiss as being a nice slice of horn and pop, but forgettable amidst the rockers, lefty ballads and epic tales of life turned every which way.

Amidst the reveling, it wasn’t until the very end of the show that the tragic and poignant background to this tour hit home. As organist Charles Giordano took his applause, we were reminded that he was only present because of the illness and recent death of Danny Federici, an original member of the E Street Band. Since the early 1970s, Danny had been adding his shimmering and swirling organ to Springsteen’s songs – lending them the notes between the notes, the solos which reminded us exactly which boardwalk Springsteen and his band had come from, and the fills which made sure that the music sounded organic and fresh, never hackneyed and plonky (especially as rhythm piano and straight-beat drums became ever more prominent on Springsteen’s records).

Back in 2003, I had a great time attending Springsteen shows in London, Dublin and New Jersey, but for the most part the enjoyment was in the occasion – getting to the second row in Dublin, seeing him in his home state in the US. Musically, the better shows I have seen have been the indoor ones – Wembley Arena with the E Street Band, solo at the Albert Hall, and the Seeger Sessions Band hootenannies in 2006. But Danny Federici’s solos always shone through the most musically mundane of shows – while Springsteen, van Zandt and co focused on entertainment. Federici sat back and let his fingers do the talking. I remember his solo lifting You’re Missing to another level, highlighting the actual subject of the song. I remember his playing on My City of Ruins making me think of everything I have ever known to have gone bad, and instilling me with a sense of hope at the same time.

Danny, maybe others will see your like again; I don’t know. For me, you were a true magician, one of those one-off musicians whose inventiveness and soul made me think and made me dream. Perhaps most of all, I know that as long as I remember that music like yours is possible, I will never abandon going to gigs, however hot and dingy and unpleasant it might sometimes seem, because I know that unexpected pleasures and emotional highs may always be in store. Given this spring’s experiences, for this I can only offer you thanks. Rest in peace.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

Bruce Springsteen has just released an album of folk covers. Here are my thoughts on it.

It has been a long time since a Bruce Springsteen record has provoked such extremes of reaction from his fans, even before its release. His last album, Devils & Dust, wasn’t universally loved, but it was at least widely anticipated. Prior to that, The Rising’s combination of 9/11 reference and three-guitar rock attack ensured there was something good – though far from brilliant – for everyone. But We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions seems to have been the catalyst for an explosion of anger from a large number of fans who despair at the lack of original songwriting from Springsteen.

At the same time, there are those who, upon reading the press release, could hardly believe their luck. Here, at last, was the album which could prove what they’d been saying for years – that Springsteen was the natural heir to America’s folk tradition, handed down from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and now onto their man. All Springsteen had to do was choose his songs well, sing them as maybe only he could, and through his research and performance, display his knowledge of that folk tradition. Then his place as a true inheritor of the country’s cultural roots would be assured.

I am in the latter camp. I am a huge fan of Springsteen’s songwriting – but I have never thought that was all he had to offer. Randy Newman can write songs. Joni Mitchell can write songs. What Springsteen has always offered on top of the songs is his charisma, his feeling, and his joy. In The Seeger Sessions, those characteristics become uncoupled from his own songs, but they don’t founder without their artistic base - if anything, they are given a happy freedom and a fresh sense of belonging, and they flourish.

Sure – in the wrong hands these songs could be campfire singalongs, fit for nothing more than a jamboree with a bunch of acoustic guitars accompanying assorted campers playing out a rustic version of a scene from Easy Rider. But their original exponents – whether writing or performing – knew what they were doing with the songs, and so does Bruce Springsteen.

The impression given in Springsteen’s own liner notes is of him sitting around inexpertly doodling around a bunch of old songs, backed by a wily crowd of veterans who pat him on the back and let him have his hour of folk authenticity. The reality is probably somewhat less goofy. That he added lyrics to some songs and claims most of the arrangements as his own are testaments to the fact that he shaped the content of this record very carefully. And although he protests that he didn’t have an ideology in mind when making the record, this doesn’t detract from the political message he selects. Rather than poignant, utopian anthems like Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Springsteen chooses Mrs. McGrath – a much more pointed song, about a returning soldier who has had both of his legs blown off by a cannonball. Never mind the flowers – what did they do to my body? This is Springsteen’s political reality, and it still rings true.

Musically, Springsteen sounds equally in control. From the very beginning of the first track, Old Dan Tucker, two things are obvious. The first is that he is having the time of his life – witness the raggedy count-in, try to picture him singing the songs you hear with anything other than a smile on his face (it is difficult), and listen to the way he shouts out instructions for solos and instrumental passages. The other thing is that Springsteen owns these songs. No doubt these are experienced folk musicians, and they create a sound that is both knowledgeable and dense (no surprise – the band is awash with guitars, fiddles, accordions, and everything else you’d hope a hootenanny band would contain). But Springsteen’s voice rises above the band. Now, making him sound louder than the band is easy enough, but actually what we have here is something deeper – his confidence is unquenchable and his charisma drives his voice forward; and the voice, in turn, shapes the sound of the band – not the other way round.

Clearly, for Springsteen, this album is about having fun while making good and meaningful music. Nothing else matters – he displays his knowledge of the folk tradition, but that is the man – it is hard to imagine him going into any project without knowing his brief. But even if by accident, in recording this album he has done a good deal to place himself alongside Bob Dylan as an important American folk artist. The Basement Tapes came first, and they may have contained plenty of original songwriting, but The Seeger Sessions is a different animal. Springsteen’s political folk songwriting came long ago – in Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, both of which used folk music to make new and damning points about aspects of America. With The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen demonstrates how those earlier records were themselves part of a long tradition of folk culture, and he places himself somewhere between his own personal songwriting on the one hand, and America’s cultural history on the other.

And it sounds great.

The albums of 2005

Ok, for my first proper post, here are two album reviews - my thoughts on what I think have been the best two records released in 2005.

Modern Folk

A review of Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

Let’s be honest. The opening minute or so of this album is pretty pretentious. It’s one of those spoken introductions which I guess are supposed to sound off-the-cuff and ad-libbed. We hear Conor Oberst take a scripted sip from a glass of water, and then tell a story about a woman sitting on an aeroplane with a silent man…the plane crashes…the man speaks to the woman…and he sounds like a parent speaking to a small child – “We love you very, very, very, very, very much”. And then the fun begins. Because for all the planned implied nostalgia of the opening, this is a really good album – acoustic, loud and varied. This is a folk record for the modern day.

The first song, At the Bottom of Everything, introduces the listener to several of this album’s trademarks and recurring themes. Bright Eyes have created a remarkably economical use of music. Whether in the ballads or the loud and angry numbers, there are never many instruments on display at one time, and the sound quality has a metallic, verging on tinny, edge to it. There is no fuzz or feedback, and the harmonies have oceans between them – the singers are literally octaves apart, and the fused wall of sound that close harmony bands generate is a world away. Oberst is economical with his sentiments too, as the opening track demonstrates. After all its build-up, with bats, belfries, guns and deep water, it ends with the most throwaway and Zen-like of declamations: I’m happy just because I found out I’m really no one.

At the Bottom of Everything also contains some incredibly rapid mandolin arpeggio picking – avoiding easy-way-out repeated notes, this is Nebraska’s guitar picking speeded up a hundred-fold. Generally the album’s instrumentation is constantly interesting – and if this sounds like faint praise, listen to the way the brass instruments come in at the expense of the conventional band rather than to supplement it. This is an acoustic album with a difference.

And then there is Oberst’s voice. He has been accused of shouting instead of singing during his live performances, and there is an element of this on this album. There is certainly little finesse to the way he gets his words out, and although on some occasions he does show his gentle side, there is just so much emotion that you get the feeling he has to semi-speak some of his lines, because these are merely words which he has to get across to you; the fact that they’re part of a song is secondary. (For those of you who are by now fearing a vocal horror show – don’t panic. Emmylou Harris is a prominent and sublime guest on the album. Her performance on We Are Nowhere and It’s Now is reminiscent less of her recent duets with alt-country pin-up boys and more of her latter-day solo albums, and this record is all the better for it.)

So what is his voice – however imperfect – actually saying? What is the message that is so important that he has to express it in such a raw and unharnessed manner? Again we need to be honest – this album is not about getting across a new message, some revolutionary comment. But that’s okay; because what it does is communicate some classic political and cultural themes in an original manner. The gorgeous, gorgeous ballad (a duet with Emmylou Harris) Landlocked Blues delivers new ways of singing old laments:

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

And the album’s starting point, a reflection on the narrator’s younger days, is re-employed to make poetical comment on the degeneracy of society:

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say “enough is enough, If you walk away, I’ll walk away”
And he shot me dead

Bright Eyes’ fame was done no harm at all by their status as support act to Bruce Springsteen and REM during last year’s anti-Bush Vote for Change tour. But it would be a brave soul who denied that the tour was a home from home for the band. The album’s closing number, Road to Joy, again displays a refreshing originality in the way it lambasts the current US administration. It may take a couple of listens to reassure you that the song, at the point it really gets going, is an ironic take on what seems to be the attitude of Bush and company:

So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing
It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win
And no one’s sure how all of this got started
But we’re gonna make them goddam certain how its gonna end
Oh ya we will, oh ya we will!

After that, there is little more to say, and Conor Oberst is consistent to the end – a swift moment of self-depreciation as he makes fun of his own voice, another brief and concentrated burst of rage, and then a sudden (not violent, just abrupt) conclusion. That’s all, folks. No time for time-wasting – he got all that out of his system in the first minute of the album. The rest of it is purely and concisely crafted, and the result is the real deal.


Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust

Right around the time that most of America’s other major songwriters were making albums with a scaled-down sound, with a proud and organic acoustic sound reflective of the resurgence of folk and country music all the way down the food chain, Bruce Springsteen made The Rising (2002). Produced by Brendan O’Brien, famous for making records with a succession of hard-rocking bands, the album did not disappoint in that respect. The Rising is to be commended for trying to combine anti war sentiments with empathy for the victims of 9/11. But through a combination of the choice of title track, the songs chosen to open concerts on the tie-in tour (The Rising and Lonesome Day), and the fact that this was the first album recorded by the entire E Street Band in almost twenty years, The Rising is best remembered for its tub-thumping songs rather than its more thoughtfully-written and interesting-sounding songs. The sound on the album’s ‘big’ songs comes at you like a wash – nothing quite as well-defined as the wall of sound which Born to Run (1975) used to such great effect; more a big wet wave swooping at you with all the solid determination of a floundering fish.

Springsteen’s latest offering, Devils & Dust, is a different breed of album. Different stylistically, as the artist displays a delayed reaction to the ‘Americana’ boom and makes his own intimate, small-band album; different in terms of quality, because the album is a masterpiece.

Eight years ago, in his mid-fifties, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind (1997) – a much-vaunted return to form, in which the songwriter explored personal themes to a garage-band type backing. Springsteen is around the same age now that Dylan was when he made that album, and in a sense Devils & Dust is his Time Out of Mind. The songs are deeply personal – whether fictional or otherwise – and the directly political and economic messages of Springsteen’s 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, are rejected in favour of a more nuanced, personal, socio-political approach.

The title track, which opens the album, is an anti-war song of sorts: “I got my finger on the trigger / But I don’t know who to trust”. But as it winds towards its conclusion, and the band gradually grows, the subject matter surprisingly becomes more introspective, and the chorus asks more questions than it answers:

Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love

The next few songs follow similar personal lines, in the style of Springsteen’s best songwriting. All the Way Home is a re-hash of a song he wrote many years ago, but O’Brien’s production brings the song in line with the mood of the rest of the album. Springsteen swallows and mumbles his words as only he can, and it is left to O’Brien to command the song’s image with a McCartney-esque melodic bass line. Following this, Reno tells the story of a man who seeks solace from his problems with a prostitute – and doesn’t find anything like what he was after. Long Time Comin’ is an instrumental vehicle for the album’s small core band – Marty Rifkin excels on steel guitar. In actual fact, though, it is Springsteen's own guitar which defines the album’s sound for the most part. His acoustic playing always comes across as more thoughtful and mature than his electric playing (which sounds impressive but is actually not terribly imaginative). And on this album, it is his well-placed (at times sparse) acoustic playing which creates the album’s mood – intimate and reflective without being nostalgic or mawkish.

The middle part of Devils & Dust is what defines it as one Springsteen’s finest albums, artistically speaking. Black Cowboys is a tale of some forgotten heroes of Oklahoma, told through the eyes of a young boy. As you listen to the quiet, acoustic rumblings of the number, you are practically there in that dry place when

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes. Here in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, it fell hard and dark to the ground.

Some song lyrics are described as poetry, but usually this doesn’t really work – even the greatest song lyrics can sound somewhat silly without musical backing. But what Springsteen has created here is great prose – words which tell a short story in pure narrative form. It is no small achievement to shape such a story into a song. The CD slip-cover recognises this new style of songwriting, as the lyrics to this (and some other) songs are printed in paragraph form rather than line by line. Pretentious? A little. But some of these songs come close to being more story than song.

Springsteen’s tendency to mumble has been referred to, but the reader should not go away with the impression that that is the main vocal style of this album. The variety on display is actually very rich, to the extent that Springsteen complements three of the album’s lighter songs with a falsetto vocal. On Maria’s Bed and All I’m Thinkin’ About in particular, his high-pitched voice sounds surprisingly well-formed, and it seems to drive the band into playing with an impish delight, touching their strings and skins rather than striking and beating them.

Finally, Springsteen does recall the politics of the immigrant that underpinned The Ghost of Tom Joad. Matamoros Banks, with which Devils & Dust draws to a close, is a sister track to Across the Border – a poignant tale of love, loss and the search for a better life in the United States. The irony of such a dream cannot be lost on the artist, opening the album as he does with the line “I got my finger on the trigger”. But the humanity of both songs rings through - along with thanks to some higher being, Matamoros Banks’ narrator sings

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin’ wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again

The similarity with the picture painted in such all-American Springsteen songs as No Surrender cannot be lost on the listener, and perhaps this is what lies at the heart of the message of Devil & Dust – although there is a lot wrong with the world, and with the United States, the remedies and palliatives which Springsteen offers have remained consistent – love, hope and good dreams. With this album, he has kept that message alive by communicating it in a fresh manner, using a new music, and it really works.