How is possible to be Bruce Springsteen?
Here’s a guy whose last studio albums with a band came out 10 years ago – and were startlingly banal. The last studio work with his iconic E Street band was 15 years ago, in an utterly different world and musical environment. Yet in the wake of one of the greatest tragedies in American history, obits of victim after victim say how central his music was in their lives. And days after September 11, he’s in his neighborhood minding his own business when a fan sees him and yells out, “Hey, Bruce, we need you.”
How can anyone deal with a blank sheet of paper when faced with that kind of creative pressure? It wouldn't be at all unreasonable for this guy to sit at his desk with an open notebook asking himself, “What in God’s name do they all want out of me?” To begin with, the speed of Springsteen’s output has always been more like J.D. Salinger’s than Phil Ochs’s; he writes and records about as fast as the Pieta sheds tears. No matter how great the external expectations might be, it would take an emotional stone for the internal expectations not to be larger still.
Yet his new album not only makes the Today Show, it and the themes it presents occupy three hours of network television. He makes the cover of Time (27 years after the first one), three nights on Nightline, and two nights on Letterman.
Yeah, The Rising is pretty fine. There’s a new producer on board, Brendan O’Brien, who pulls off the very neat trick of allowing the band to sound very much like itself without getting stuck in the past. Listen closely, and you’ll hear clear references to “Born to Run” and even earlier albums, but you have to pay attention to catch them. If you’ve been fortunate enough to catch this act live, the sound on “The Rising” won’t surprise you; if your last time meeting the E Street Band was on “Tunnel of Love,” you may be surprised by the sonic renovations.
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