Ent. Weekly's track by track commentary on Magic
- From: cwillman@xxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:26:44 -0700
http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2007/10/bruce-springste.html
Bruce Springsteen's 'Magic,' track by track
Oct 1, 2007, 06:00 AM | by Chris Willman
Categories: Music
If you've been absorbing the various critical and fan accounts of
Bruce Springsteen's brilliant new record, Magic (including my own,
which you can read here), you may feel torn about just what kind of
expectations you're supposed to bring when the CD arrives in stores
Tuesday. Is it a pure, giddy blast of band-oriented fun - a grand,
spirited, hard-rocking return to the E Street glory days that finally
gives the fans what they've been wanting ever since Born in the
U.S.A.? Or is it a dark, somber, even grimly political piece of work
that soberly zeroes in on disillusionment and the downfall of American
idealism?
Well, geez, can't it be both? It is, and that, really, is the magic of
Magic. But fans will see in it what they want to see in it. Friday
morning, playing a live set on Today, Springsteen introduced the new
song "Livin' in the Future" with a long rant that started on the
jocular side, before he veered off into a laundry list of wrongs -
"rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus,
the neglect of our great city of New Orleans and her people, an attack
on the Constitution, and the loss of our best young men and women in a
tragic war" - to which the deceptively celebrative-sounding song is
really alluding. "This is a song about things that shouldn't happen
here happening here," he told the crowd. You can see footage of the
performance if you go to this page at MSNBC.com. But ironically, on
that same page is a link to MSNBC's review of the album, headlined
"The Boss abandons the message albums of the past to have fun with
friends," bizarrely claiming that you won't need to worry about any
of that pesky social consciousness stuff this time around. Ironic,
right?
There's so much substance to Magic that, in addition to my A-grade
review, I thought I'd pop up on PopWatch to offer a track-by-track
preview of the album:
1. "Radio Nowhere." Everyone already knows this one, since it's been
available free online as a teaser for weeks. The main complaint fans
have had about it: It fades out too soon - but the entire album has
that economical, leave-'em-wanting-more ethos. Here, Springsteen sets
up the themes of searching and disillusionment that will characterize
the album without tieing them too strictly to topical events (yet).
The E Street Band's phalanx of guitarists has probably never indulged
in such a three-pronged attack before. And you'll notice that a key
change kicks in at the beginning of Clarence Clemons' sax break - only
to have the tune revert back when he's done. Actually, that same Big
Man key-change gambit is pulled on the next two songs, too. But
(speaking of magic) even if you know how the trick is done, it still
doesn't ruin the effect.
2. "You'll Be Comin' Down." Unless Springsteen is getting even more
allegorical on us than we imagine, this is one of the songs that isn't
about America, but just an American girl. But it's no ode, as such; in
the great tradition of artists like Dylan and Costello taking the piss
out of an in-vogue beauty who's gotten a little too big for her
britches, he warns: "You'll be fine as long as your pretty face holds
out/Then it's gonna get pretty cold out."
3. "Livin' in the Future." If any song here is destined to become a
concert favorite, it's this one, which fans who've gotten an early
listen have compared to "Tenth Avenue Freezeout" (even though there's
no horn section on this or any other Magic track). But Bruce hasn't
been making any bones about the fact that the lyrics are designed as a
distinct political critique, and one fan already posted after the
Today appearance that Bruce's "rant" had "ruined 'Livin' in the
Future' for me forever." You could still take this as a song about a
relationship gone wrong, but it seems clear that, if you get a ticket
for his coming tour, this is going to be the number where he does a
little preaching and lets his progressive freak flag fly.
4. "Your Own Worst Enemy." Self-loathing never sounded so gorgeous as
in this, the first true timeless classic of the album. The string
arrangement might have you drawing comparisons as far back as the Left
Banke's "Walk Away, Renee," though you'll hear some harmonies redolent
of the Beach Boys when it gets to the bridge, too. But don't let the
prettiness fool you: This is the perfect song, when you realize that
you've completely #@&*-ed up, to flog yourself by. What sins the
narrator has committed that convince him he's his "own worst enemy"
remain unclear, though there are hints that it may have been some kind
of personal infidelity or betrayal ("Once the family felt secure/Now
no one's very sure"). It's chillingly lonely... and just a little bit
transcendent, too, as the realization kicks in that - OMG!!!! - Bruce
is back to writing unabashed Pop Music here.
5. "Gypsy Biker." Maybe the saddest song he's ever written - and one
of the fiercest and hardest rocking. On first listen, you might not
catch that the biker of the title is, in fact, a dead soldier whose
buddies have gathered to celebrate him. A gleaming bike does show up,
which the friends take out into the desert and set on fire, as a sort
of funeral pyre. If that isn't "Born to Run" all grown up and gone to
hell, I don't know what is. When the guitar solo kicks in, it's
wrenchingly elegiac in a deep, primal way, almost like a dog howling
to mourn its late master.
6. "Girls in Their Summer Clothes." Suddenly, Springsteen's no longer
mourning a deceased soldier but his own lost youth, in the closest
thing to an escapist song on the album. Fresh from a breakup, the
narrator heads out to do some girl-watching, and if he might be overly
optimistic about the chances of one of those sweet young things
stopping to heal him, the sense of longing and tactile descriptions of
a lively street scene are still intensely romantic. The Phil Spector/
Pet Sounds influences return in a big way for the second time on the
album, and you may hear a hint of the Who's "The Kids are Alright" in
the verse's melody line, too. If they'd reissued Born to Run with this
as a bonus track, claiming it was a long-lost outtake that had always
been meant to follow the title song in the running order, you'd have
probably swallowed it.
7. "I'll Work for Your Love." The one truly upbeat lyric here, and the
most peculiar. Springsteen serenades a barmaid named Theresa, with
devotion that crosses the line into pure worship - so much so that the
verses are filled with hilariously over-the-top religious imagery.
("I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross...
The pages of Revelation lie open in your empty eyes of blue... tears
they fill the rosary, at your feet my temple of bones.") Some fans
have read into this that the song might actually be about St. Theresa,
but don't take the Catholic imagery too far, kids - this is the
album's one moment of pure, unbridled, joyful lust. And it's Magic's
fourth instant classic in a row.
8. "Magic." You could almost divide the album into two parts, with
tracks 1-7 being in a classic E Street vein and 8-12 (counting the
unlisted bonus track) more closely resembling one of his solo albums.
Certainly things shift more overtly toward the political at this
point, though you'd be right to point out that the earlier "Livin' in
the Future" and "Gypsy Biker" lyrically belong in this camp, as well.
The title track is really its only slow one, as Springsteen takes on
the character of an apparently sinister sleight-of-hand man who may or
may not have deep connections with the current administration. It's
not one of the album's great songs, but it is invaluable in bridging
the two types of magic on the album - the enchantment of being out on
the street ("Girls in Their Summer Clothes" has a reference to "Magic
Avenue"), versus the so-called "black arts" of politics and war.
9. "Last to Die." The chorus borrows a famous line from Vietnam-era
John Kerry: "Who'll be the last to die for a mistake?" As the most
polemical song on the album, it's in danger of stating its intent a
bit too literally, compared with the artful double entendres found
elsewhere in Magic's social commentary. Yet the personal imagery
strewn through the song brings it back to earth and saves it: A couple
seem to be on a road trip with their kids, experiencing news reports
of the war along the way to "Truth or Consequences" (presumably both
the New Mexico town and a more metaphorical place). And it's possible
to imagine that the references to untended dead bodies refer to
skeletons in their own closet as well as, literally, the Iraq
situation.
10. "Long Walk Home." There's a kind of magic realism at work here, as
Springsteen walks through familiar hometown streets, full of signposts
that should be comforting, and yet finds that the people are "all rank
strangers to me." That's a brilliant reference to the Stanley
Brothers' gospel song "Rank Strangers" (covered by Dylan on a 1988
album), where the narrator, newly beholden to God, returns to a home
base that no longer means anything to him. Only in this case, it's
presumably divisions over the War on Terror that have the narrator
feeling estranged from the people he once loved. This is the one song
on the album that Springsteen had previously premiered live, on his
Seeger Sessions tour, and there (as you'll see if you dig up the
bootleg video on YouTube), it went on for a couple more angrier
verses. But it ends perfectly now, with the character remembering some
once-comforting words from his father - "You know that flag flying
over the courthouse/Means certain things are set in stone/Who we are,
what we'll do and what we won't" - and just leaving the indictment
that might follow that unspoken and implicit.
11. "Devil's Arcade." Interpretations of this lyric - the one true
story-song on the album - vary. But it seems to be sung by a woman to
a soldier recovering (or not) from grave wounds suffered in a bombing
in Iraq: She remembers their first fumbling sexual experiences and
looks forward to a sensual, sunny breakfast when, once again, he'll be
able to experience Morning in America. We don't know whether her hope
in his recovery is misplaced or not.
12. "Terry's Song." The previous song makes such a stunning climax
that you'd logically want it to end there, but as a celebrative
funeral song, this unlisted bonus acoustic track certainly does make
for an appropriate segue out of the hospital-set "Devil's Arcade."
"When they made you, brother, they broke the mold," Bruce sings, in a
number bound to be played at countless funerals in the coming decades.
And just when you thought the mold had been broken on albums as great
as Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen is back, combining that
early spirit with a level of writing that can only come from real
maturation, ready to show us that he can not only prove it all night
but prove it all life.
.
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