This nominal Pete Seeger tribute is easily the best album Bruce Springsteen has made in a quarter century or more. Hey, no one's more surprised by this than me, but there it is.
The record's good enough to convince a skeptic. This album is absolutely superior on every level to anything he's done since the '70s. The most important aspect of this is the songwriting. Bluntly, Springsteen hasn't written much worth hearing in many years. The tunes and hooks were grossly homogenized by Born in the USA, and lost strength entirely after Tunnel of Love, his last really worthwhile album.
He's cast himself here as an interpreter of song rather than a composer. Nominally, these songs are cast as songs associated with Pete Seeger. But mostly I know these songs as folk songs from grade school music textbooks, stuff from before the advent of recording technology. It occurs to me that this suggests a world of great songs that have had limited recording history.
If you know these songs from grade school, as performed by your local versions of Bobbi and Marty Kulp, the SNL music teachers, then you haven't quite got the good out of the song. I half remember being slightly struck by the "Erie Canal" song lo those many decades ago in school, but I've never heard anything like this Bruce Springsteen performance. He takes these songs to a whole different level. He's not just doing simple run-throughs of some old folk songs, but interpreting major standards. It's a whole different level of ambition.
For starters, this is as good a playing band sound as Springsteen ever had in life. So let's note this credit listing: The musicians on the record are Springsteen (guitar, harmonica, B3 organ and percussion), Sam Bardfeld (violin), Art Baron (tuba), Frank Bruno (guitar), Jeremy Chatzy (upright bass), Mark Clifford (banjo), Larry Eagle (drums and percussion), Charles Giordano (B3 organ, piano and accordion), Ed Manion (saxophone), Mark Pender (trumpet), Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg (trombone) and Soozie Tyrell (violin). Lisa Lowell, Patti Scialfa, Springsteen, Pender, Tyrell, and Rosenberg contribute backing vocals.
He's concocted a sonic stew worthy of savoring. Reaching into pre-rock stylings, he sounds a little bit like a lot of things, but not really close to any of them. In flashes, I'm getting vibes of the Band, Mellencamp's Lonesome Jubilee, New Orleans, and Salvation Army bands.
Article comments
1 - Glen Boyd
Good review Al. We may just get you to the Kool-Aid bowl yet.
2 - Al Barger
Thanks, Glen. Couple of albums this good, and even I will be calling him the Boss.
3 - Kevin Z
Fine review. I enjoyed it. This is a little off the topic, but I just had to say that I feel Bruce really captured the essence of Sept. 11th. on the Rising and that it is a pretty damn good album.
4 - Jeff
I like it but its the one CD I can not "copy" to my Sony Minidisc player which is very frustrating.
5 - Al Barger
Jeff, I've heard about this being copy controlled, though it doesn't say anything like that at the Amazon listing. I should have mentioned that in the review.
I'd recommend taking the commercial CD back to the store, and downloading from Limewire, where it is readily available. Then you can do whatever you want with it.
Go ahead, liberate a copy in the name of the proletariat. Viva la revolucion! Guantanamera!!!
6 - guiseppe
this album is really overrated. bruce and crew are bombastic on this recording.
7 - guiseppe
the performance doesn't do these great songs justice.
8 - Rodney Welch
Al, you're right about Jesse James, and Springsteen in a recent concert seemed to tacitly acknowledge as much.
9 - Rodney Welch
According to the New York Times, Springsteen prefaced his performance of the song by citing the familiar maxim from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. It seemed to me his way of saying it's just a song and not fact.
10 - Rodney Welch
Jesse James was a Confederate terrorist, and no man was ever more justly killed.
11 - Rodney Welch
T.J. Stiles wrote a fine, judicious book about him a few years ago: Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.
12 - Rodney Welch
I would tell you where my earlier review of the Stiles book is located, but Blogcritics keeps giving me the "Banned Word" mojo -- which is also why I broke this post into four parts.