Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust
Assessing Bruce Springsteen’s Devils & Dust in an online posting, a fan said he thought it was OK but liked Bruce better before he got that twang in his voice. Putting aside the question of whether a voice can, in fact, twang, you might find yourself wondering how the pride of Asbury Park has evolved into such a backwoods philosopher on these solo ramblings through Americana.
You might say these are songs about characters from rural America and that the artist is getting into character. Fair enough: No one questions Billy Bob Thornton when he is called upon to talk northern. But I can’t shake the Farmer John persona Springsteen projected on Charlie Rose a while back. His voice sounded like it was wearing overalls. In burying his eastern seaboard self in country culture, has Springsteen become a more highfalutin’ version of Jerry Jeff Walker?
None of this is to suggest Springsteen at his best, in whatever guise, can’t attain an expressive power that’s beyond the reach of most singer-songwriters. Pop mythologists don’t get any better. It is to say his rural patois can be distracting or off-putting, leading you to think he’s trying it on the same way he has tried on the literary sensibilities tossed his way by his personal guru, Jon Landau.
A non-E Street effort that is being too easily lumped with the starker, more tightly wound Nebraska and the narcotically road-weary Ghost Of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust continues Springsteen’s postgraduate immersion in the landscape of Steinbeck and Guthrie and maybe, now, Cormac McCarthy. He’s all over the map, from Reno, where he’s a lost soul to whom a hooker offers anal sex (tongues are wagging over this rare expression of carnality from the Boss), to New Orleans, where he’s a disaffected boxing champ who compromises his future by taking a fall, to “down in Carolina,” where, with an oddly compelling falsetto, he bubbles over his very own brown-eyed girl.
Springsteen saves his richest vocal portrayals for the great southwest, where a west Texas boy mourns his mother (the CD jacket kindly provides the folks back east with a mini-glossary: prickly pear means cactus, riata means rope, etc.), a black Oklahoma kid runs off after his single mom hooks up with a hustler and gets “lost in the days,” and Mexicans risk their lives crossing the border into the United States.
The central theme, again and again, is of overcoming loss — moral, spiritual, romantic, maternal. On the title track, there’s also the matter of overcoming fear. Springsteen enters into the mind of a young soldier in Iraq who, unlike Dylan, may truly think he has God on his side, but he derives little comfort from that with his finger pressed on a trigger: “What if what you do to survive/Kills the things you love.”
Devils & Dust can be surprisingly surface-bound, and the cloying synthesizer washes Springsteen hasn’t been able to resist — either in the nearly one-man-band style of most of these songs, or, as demonstrated on the sonically souped-up The Rising, with the E Street crew — dilute the music again. But producer Brendan O’Brien, back from The Rising, makes graceful use of steel guitar, violin and fetching female backup vocals. And in the geographic and vocal shifts, Springsteen conveys a restlessness of spirit that gives the songs coherence. It’s a brooding album, but one, against all odds, that’s streaked with hope.