Bruce Springsteen
Devils & Dust
Columbia

By Carlo Wolff

My thoughts run in threes on this album, Devils & Dust: folk, rock, pop; Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.

There's a doctoral dissertation to be written on the culture of Columbia Records, primary home to Cash (he started on Sun and defected to Mercury, but his key stuff was on Columbia, at least until Rick Rubin landed him for the American Recordings), Dylan (a Big Eye stalwart save for an early-'70s defection to David Geffen's Asylum for a few records) and, ever since Greetings From Asbury Park in 1973, Springsteen. All are idiosyncratic, speak for the common man (albeit in different tongues), and are, in their heart, folksingers. They're also quintessentially American, compassionate, and even spiritual.

Each imagines himself into the core of this country, and each speaks for America at its best. Theirs are lonely voices, particularly these days. Cash's, sadder yet, is now still.

The nearest antecedent to Springsteen's first album in three years is the similarly intimate, similarly anomalous 1987 disk Tunnel of Love. This is not the Springsteen of the grand gesture, who performs with the E Street Band. Nor is it the Springsteen of Nebraska, his chilling, gothic 1982 work, or of the even less audible, equally moving Ghost of Tom Joad, his 1995 sleeper.

This is more diverse than these, and, perhaps, subtler. It's surely one of his most controlled and effective albums, even though he lets loose emotionally on several tunes. As a storyteller, he's extraordinarily precise and imaginative here.

My wife, a diehard Springsteen fan as I'm a diehard Dylan fan (it's generational), turned me onto "Maria's Bed," the beautiful hornpipe at the center of this. It was the first tune I heard from it, and it's enchanting and joyous. Then I popped the CD into my car player and began to absorb it. It's a complicated, textured album indeed. There's the stark, cold "The Hitter," a tune about a corrupt boxer who tries to hold onto his integrity. There's "Black Cowboys," a bleak, vividly imagined picture of ghetto life. There's "Leah," a rollicking tune of domestic aspiration, and there's a clutch of tunes about the tamed, commercial West we know now and the lost Wild West that inspires us.