DREAM ON Bruce Springsteen
Jan 23, 2009
The Boss delivers a stirring exploration of love in the face of time and space itself.
BY ERIC SCHUMACHER-RASMUSSEN
Working on a Dream is the most confounding album Bruce Springsteen's ever released-a lush, orchestrated, collection of pop and rock songs whose profound statements swirl beneath the music rather than float on its surface. Musically, it's a logical extension of the road he's been traveling since he started working with producer Brendan O'Brien on 2002's The Rising and continued on with 2007's Magic. But where The Rising was explicitly tied to 9/11 and Magic explored the state of the union even in its non-overtly political songs (am I the only one who kept hearing "You'll Be Coming Down" as Bush left Washington?), Working on a Dream's concerns are more eternal-it's not so much a meditation on "love in the time of Bush," as Springsteen himself called "What Love Can Do," as it is an exploration of love in the face of time and space itself, a "big string of shining stars, rusting in red out of arms," as he sings on "This Life."
And while it carries echoes of all of his past work-from the glockenspiel in the title cut harkening back to "Born to Run" to the bonus track "The Wrestler," which, save for its synth intro, would have sounded at home on The Ghost of Tom Joad-it's also unlike anything he's ever done. Minus the opener, the eight-minute "Outlaw Pete," it's the kind of record Steve Van Zandt has said he always wanted his boss to make, full of concise pop melodies, rich harmonies, and hooks straight out of the mid-1960s. Sonically, its debts are most deeply owed to the Beach Boys, Turtles, Byrds, and, on the reckless and raucous "My Lucky Day," the Rolling Stones.
That this album is more about music than lyrics is made clear from the album's opening notes, the locomotive chugging of cellos that kick off epic "Outlaw Pete." The song begins as a comic tall tale-by the time he was six months old, Pete had spent three months in jail for robbing banks in his "diapers and little bare baby feet"-and ends as a reckoning of our inability to escape the sins of the past. What it is mostly, though, is an Ennio Morricone film score writ small, Roy Bittan's barrelhouse piano and Springsteen's reverb-heavy guitar working in concert with strings to create a sonic spaghetti western. The real payoff comes in the song's denouement, bells ringing and Springsteen's harmonica playing virtually the same notes as Charles Bronson did in Once Upon a Time in the West before the full band and strings come crashing back in.
It's pretentious and overblown, to be sure, but then again, so was "Jungleland," and "Outlaw Pete" works nearly as well. (That blowhards like Bob Lefsetz are trying to drum up controversy by claiming the song's melody is a ripoff of Kiss's "I Was Made for Loving You" misses the point of the song, which isn't about melody but orchestration, and of Kiss, which was never about music anyway.) Still, it's a weighty song with which to open an album, and "My Lucky Day" blows away pretention with the most straightforward rock on the album and one of the most unabashedly optimistic songs Springsteen's ever written. The dirty guitars, Soozie Tyrell's sweet fiddle line, and Steve Van Zandt's ragged harmony vocal are the antithesis of "Outlaw Pete"'s studied perfection.
As orchestrated and ornamented as most of Working on a Dream is, it's driven by a band playing live. Springsteen recorded the core tracks live with Bittan, bassist Garry Tallent and drummer Max Weinberg before adding overdubs to flesh out the productions, and it shows. That's one of the things that makes the album sound so deceptively simple on first listen; rarely have such layered arrangements sounded so effortless. From "My Lucky Day" forward, it's a wild, not-so-innocent ride through examinations of eternal love (the meditative "Kingdom of Days" and "This Life"), transient life ("The Wrestler"; blues shouter "Good Eye"; and a heartbreaking acoustic tribute to late E Street organist Danny Federici, "The Last Carnival," which ends in a soaring, wordless chorale), and, lest we get too lofty, the supermarket.
"Queen of the Supermarket" is one of the sweetest, strangest songs Springsteen's ever recorded, a stroll through a world where "aisles and aisle of dreams await you" and "the cool promise of ecstasy fills the air." Never has grocery shopping sounded so alluring, with a lilting melody and strings carrying us to the counter where the object of the narrator's fantasy awaits. But something else lies beneath the bright lights and materialist fantasy; the singer catches a smile from the cashier at song's end that "blows this whole fuckin' place apart," and the profanity shocks us out of our reverie, reminding us that all of it-the market, the fantasy, the checkout girl's job-is a dead-end. The guitars and harmonies dissolve into legato strings and the beeps of a UPC scanner that sounds more like an EKG monitor, another version of "wounded, but not even dead."
And while Springsteen reckons with death literally on "The Last Carnival"-the first time he sings "we'll be ridin' the train without you tonight" in concert, you can bet there won't be a dry eye in the house-and on "This Life," whose chorus refers not just to this life but "then the next," he only sounds fearsome when he faces up to the death of the spirit and of faith in "Life Itself," asking "Why do the things that we treasure most slip away and die/ ‘til to the music we grow deaf and to God's beauty blind?" He doesn't have the answer, and only finds the antidote, as always, not in the abstract but the human, clinging desperately to his love as he sings "I can't make it without you." Again, though, it's the music that makes a more powerful statement than the lyrics. A sinister, Byrds-y 12-string sizzles throughout and is joined on the bridge by a backwards guitar solo reminiscent of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows."
He also steals the title of that song for another of the album's tracks, one that also shares the Beatles' tune's imploration to live in the present, as death is always around the corner. A bouncy country shuffle, "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the birthday tune "Surprise, Surprise" offer the breeziest moments on what initially appears to be a pretty breezy collection.
But like Born in the U.S.A. almost 25 years ago, Working on a Dream is an immediately accessible collection of pop songs whose depth is belied by their simple charms.
[Photo Credit: Danny Clinch]
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