![]() (The term 'Springsteenian' sounds way too epic for what is going on here.) To this end, many of the songs on Devils & Dust are vivid, carefully sketched fragments, glimpses into the damaged lives of characters that, were Springsteen an actual short-story writer, might be called Carveresque. ![]() 'What I have done on this record, and on other records,' elaborates Springsteen on the DVD, 'is to write very specific narrative stories about people whose souls are in danger or at risk from where they are in the world, or what the world is bringing to them. ![]() Instead, we are given a set of intimate and often fragmentary glimpses of ordinary lives in trouble. Yet, apart from the title track, an impressionistic war song told from the point of view of a disillusioned young recruit, it possesses none of that album's pointed social awareness. 'I wrote a lot of this album after those shows, when I'd go back to my hotel room,' Springsteen told Rolling Stone magazine recently. Some of the songs on Devils & Dust were written as far back as 1995, during the acoustic tour he undertook in support of The Ghost of Tom Joad album. In one way, though, Springsteen still has his finger on the pulse of the times and this is a dark and brooding set of songs for the age of anxiety we now live in. 'I was signed as a guy and an acoustic guitar,' Springsteen reminds us on the accompanying interview-based DVD, though the young and tousled New Jersey troubadour who charmed his way into a record contract back then is a long way from the troubled, middle-aged man of today. Only two songs, 'Long Time Coming' and 'All the Way Home' have the commercial clout to even pass as possible singles, though neither bears any resemblance to those big Springsteen chart anthems of the Eighties. Recorded without the E Street Band, who reunited after a long absence to play on his last album, The Rising, in 2002, it is a resolutely scaled down affair, featuring the most minimal instrumental embellishment. There is something of the starkness of Nebraska about Devils & Dust, Springsteen's new album, which, though given a dense, sometimes almost intrusive tonal wash by producer Brendan O'Brien, comes across in the main as a bunch of slightly dressed-up acoustic ballads. 'Isn't it odd that he's trying so hard to adopt the visions of one?' This was written a few months before the release of Nebraska, which remains the quietest, darkest, bleakest Springsteen album to date. 'Springsteen isn't an old man yet,' he concluded. Like many American fans who had invested so much faith in the wide-screen romance of Springsteen's more epic songs and in the barnstorming traditionalism of his marathon shows, Nelson appeared almost betrayed by the sound of his hero's quieter, darker side. 'Must even the brightest days be touched by autumnal tones and winter light?' 'Will we never hear the spring and summer of 'Thunder Road' and 'Born to Run' again?' asked Rolling Stone's Paul Nelson in a melodramatic review of 1980's The River. In their place were songs about poverty and crime, migration and exile, hopelessness and broken dreams, not altogether new topics for Springsteen, but couched now in a language and imagery that seemed a world away from all those youthful, unabashedly romantic odes to undimmed optimism.Īs far back as 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, critics had detected a deep seam of pessimism in Springsteen's work. Now, he seemed to be saying, those kind of songs no longer sufficed. On albums such as The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, the young Springsteen had returned time and time again to the seemingly inexhaustible subject of cars and girls. This, after all, was a man who had hymned the American highway as a route to freedom and deliverance more than any other rock performer since Chuck Berry.
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