The New Ghost of Tom Joad

By Josh Tyrangiel

The new Bruce Springsteen album, Devils & Dust, begins inside the head of an unhinged grunt in the Iraqi desert and ends 50 minutes later with the disembodied thoughts of an immigrant corpse floating down the Rio Grande. In between, we hear from hookers, ranchers, ghetto dwellers, boxers, train riders, orphans, a Jesus and two Marias. Some of these lives are sung in bits of Spanish, for which the monolingual can safely substitute any English words that evoke soul-aching weariness.

Devoted Springsteen fans will sense immediately where Devils & Dust is headed, largely because the Boss has left his boot prints on this territory before, most famously on 1982's Nebraska and 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad. Those albums chronicled closed lives in open spaces with the kind of ascetic social realism you might find in a particularly earnest newspaper series, but they also had Springsteen's venerable empathy to warm them up and dramatize them. Fact and feeling mingle again on Devils, but not always in the proper proportion. The boxer on The Hitter who passes his estranged ma's house one night and mumbles, "I ask of you nothin', not a kiss not a smile/ Just open the door and let me lie down for a while," and the quixotic lover of All the Way Home, whose modest flirtation at last call amounts to "Maybe your first choice he's gone," suffer from near fatal cases of beautiful loser-itis. When Springsteen shifts into reportage, his details--the way turtles eat the skin from the corpse's eyes on Matamoros Banks, a prostitute's price for sex on Reno--can seem like overcompensation for his romantic indulgences.

Springsteen has never made a bad record, and Devils has enough strong moments to avoid being his first. Long Time Comin', Maria's Bed and Leah edge toward brightness; Matamoros Banks works back from death to become a wonderfully wounded love song, and the title track gets at the moral drama of war without being overwrought. With the E Street Band on hiatus, Springsteen plays a majority of the instruments himself, and producer Brendan O'Brien highlights the intimacy by granting most songs a verse of acoustic guitar before carefully adding keyboards, fiddle, feathery drums and occasional background vocals. (For those curious about what the songs sound like without production, Devils is in the new DualDisc format: flip it over, and there's a DVD of Springsteen playing alone.)

It's unlikely that Devils & Dust will be anyone's favorite Springsteen record, but even the weaker songs reveal things about their creator. It isn't just that the man can play his guitar but that he changes his voice and pronunciation subtly on each song to sound more like the character he's singing about. The Boss cares about these people--maybe too much. But better a bleeding heart than none at all. --By Josh Tyrangiel