A Touch of Magic
Springsteen tackles the Bush era
Those who know me even casually know of my hardcore obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen.
Occasionally, I’ll find myself at a party talking to a girl and realize that I’ve been ranting about my Springsteen passion for upwards of five minutes in response to a question like, “Where did you get that beer?” To balance the equation, I’ll ask her what kind of music she likes, and she’ll inevitably name some “hip” band I’ve never heard of like My Morning Jacket.
Then of course I have to restrain myself from a childish response like: “Oh, I didn’t realize we were all just naming bands after inanimate objects now. Bands should be named after cool things like streets! Or would rock ‘n roll history have been just as good with an act like Bruce Springsteen and My Broken VCR, or Bruce Springsteen and A Pen That Ran Out Of Ink or Bruce Springsteen and The Results of Ted’s Colonoscopy. Yeah, how cool would that have been, stupid hipper-than-me girl?”
Obviously, my relationship with Bruce is complicated.
The man came into my life at a clichéd yet highly opportune moment, as an eighteen-year-old high school senior living in a small, shitcan Ohio town with little clue about his future and embarking on that first committed, volatile relationship with a member of the opposite sex, the kind that leaves young, immature hearts soaring and crashing depending on the day of the week.
Yeah, so maybe now I look back and the only thing that impresses me about myself is just how unoriginal I was. Certainly, I was not the first kid to fight heartbreak and dish out a little of his own. Or the first to wonder what life felt like beyond the boundaries of the only town he’d known since he was a child. Or the first to want to blow-off responsibility, to scrap the plan and go screaming off down the highway (which, incidentally, actually happened to me a few years later). The shit of it was, even though Bruce forced me to realize I was far from original, he also made me feel like all of these things were things worth feeling, occasionally with all of your heart. If that makes sense.
And he stayed with me past that first little burst of wild emotion. He followed me through pretty much every major event of my life. In fact, he arrived during some of the worst times—two awful, grueling years after a tragedy that left me more devastated than I could ever admit to the people around me—and he kept on through some of the best: Those exuberant college days characterized by every color and stripe of wild, winking joy.
And as I came of age with Bruce, so too did I come of age with Bush. This is how I felt that bond with a Jersey wharf rat turned rock star become solid. On the day of my 21st birthday, I stood in the bleeders, as we call them, of Gund Arena in Cleveland and listened to him lament the past four botched years of the American experiment before launching into a howling rendition of “Youngstown.”
Three years after that day—three years of fury spent watching the steady unraveling of everything I thought I knew about this country—three years to the day, Bruce Springsteen released his fifteenth studio album Magic.
At first, I wasn’t such a fan of the album’s title. I thought it was too obvious, a calculated word to call up the glimmer and glory of the E Street Band, with whom he had reunited for the first time since 2002’s The Rising. Then when I got the album, I actually listened to the title track.
The song “Magic,” like the album for which it is named, does not call to mind Jersey shore rock, highway-burning cars, or girls in their summer clothes. If I heard him lament the state of our country four years ago in those bleeder seats, in Magic you can hear him positively mourn.
To be clear, Magic is not a great Springsteen album. Uneven and sprinkled with two or three duds, I can’t defend it as one of his seminal works. While interviewing Nick Hornby (author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, and yes I did just name-drop him because I’m big-time like that now), we began by bullshitting about the new album. Nick (Hell yeah, I didn't even ask if I could call him "Nick"!) declared his distaste for the production, describing some of the songs as being coated with gel. I understand what he means, and I have a strong suspicion the blame lies with producer Brendan O’Brien who brought that same kind of shellac to several songs on The Rising. Whenever I think of what Springsteen should sound like with the E Street Band, I think of a song called “Drive All Night” where it sounds like the lot of them sat down together in a bar after rehearsing for only twenty minutes and winged it. O’Brien brings a gloss to parts of the album that simply does not belong.
That having been said, Magic also includes some of the best songs Springsteen has written in the second half of his career, from the title track, where a sinister carnival barker showcases his bag of tricks and you can almost feel that haunting tune drifting through those “bodies in the trees,” to the hidden track “Terry’s Song”, a folksy tribute to Springsteen’s friend Terry Magovern, who passed away just before the album’s release.
Additionally, “Livin’ In The Future” is one of the best E Street songs written since my birth, featuring a “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” sound, Clarence Clemmons’ roaring sax, and Springsteenian lyrics rife with a dark jubilance and imagery that somehow walks a perfect tightrope between the political and the sexual.
The crowning achievement of the album, however, has to be “Long Walk Home”, a hard, unforgiving rock song that somehow manages to tell three different stories and carry about eight different subtexts, from the death of small town America to the values and truths lost in the maelstrom of the W. Bush era. Listening to it, you can feel despair, hope, and despair again in a space of about four minutes.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think it’s an accident that I fell into Bruce Springsteen’s music all those years ago. He is as pure and true a chronicler of the American story as most of us will likely ever know, the natural descendant of Woody Guthrie and Walt Whitman. Yet it’s not just that you can hear countless stories in his songs; it’s that if you listen closely enough, you can hear your own.
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