making-of documentaries to this album’s) now seems to settle for cliché all too easily. In part that’s because he has too much life behind him not to be dwelling on eternal verities. But an album that starts with the key line “One minute you’re here/ The next you’re gone” and closes with a gloss on Lead Belly’s standard “Goodnight, Irene” refrain “” is reprising a lot of ultra-familiar sentiments.
The worst case here is “House of a Thousand Guitars,” which attempts to invoke a hopeful image of music as a holy meeting place where differences can be set aside and the predations of the powerful escaped. But that central phrase doesn’t soar, partly because it doesn’t flow phonetically enough to carry the freight, and also because in 2020 a thousand frankly sounds like too many guitars.
Still, there were good reasons he put it on in the first place. Hailing from a working-class family and town, he quickly came to want to use his creative-oddball powers to represent voices that rarely can be heard for themselves. Along with his genius for showmanship, his ability to empathize and find narratives for ordinary experience—despite, from the first, his refusal to live a mundane life himself—is why he’s Bruce Springsteen and a thousand other guitar guys are not.
Part of my initial reaction to getting more memoir material was feeling vaguely let down that Springsteen was offering more self-reflection amid collective crisis. But, the fact is that a bundle of topical anti-Trump songs from him would be “the most boring album in the world.” It’s always been a flub for part of his audience, the music press, and at times Springsteen himself, to regard him as a singer of protest songs.
So not making the predictable political album was, I think, the other clever decision Springsteen made withHowever , he did reach back to an unrecorded song from the pre-Trump years to offer “one that stood in for the album I didn’t make.” That is “Rainmaker,” a song about demagoguery but more vitally about what makes people crave a demagogue, about those neighbors it’s hard to keep faith in.
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