Free Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema Page B

singer-songwriter’s eye for story.
    Nebraska, the 1982 album which followed up the blockbuster success of The River, was something completely different. The stark, mournful, at times nihilistic collection was actually recorded by Springsteen at his New Jersey home in early 1982 using only an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a primitive mixing board hooked up to a cassette deck. The songs were demos, rough versions intended for the band, and they weren’t considered for public release until the recording sessions failed to exceed their raw power.
    Although widely regarded as Nebraska ’s folkie successor, The Ghost of Tom Joad, released in 1995, was intended for public consumption from the outset. For that reason, possibly, it lacks the naked intimacy of Nebraska, and feels overly self-conscious. It’s also not a solo acoustic album; many of the tracks feature what you might call a folk-rock version of The E Street Band. 1
    The Ghost of Tom Joad is a solid album, and the title track has become a Springsteen classic, 2 but to me it feels like a case of too much reportage, not enough insight. Springsteen had done a lot of reading about life in the border country, the difficult lives of illegal immigrants, their role in the drug culture, their fate, and he channeled his research into his lyrics, creating complex stories that, in the main, failed to connect.
    Ten years later, Springsteen released his third “folk” album, Devils & Dust. Another small-ensemble album—this time with a string section as well as a folk group comprising mainly E Street mainstays—the album met with limited success before virtually disappearing. That’s not really surprising: the album was all over the map stylistically, cobbled together from songs as much as fifteen years old. 3 It also lacked solid thematic unity. “Devils & Dust” is a political song, rooted in the American war in the Gulf, while “Reno” is a sad, frank song about an encounter with a prostitute. “ Leah ” and “ Long Time Comin’ ” are among Springsteen’s finest adult love songs, but “Matamoros Banks” is very much in the social-observation mode common on The Ghost of Tom Joad.
    For all that, Devils & Dust is a strong album, addressing a number of Springsteen’s career- and lifelong concerns in highly distilled ways. The title song, for example, expresses his political leanings while never losing sight of the real individuals caught in the crossfire of ideologies. “Long Time Comin’” is rooted in the reality of a long-term relationship and a promise to learn from the mistakes of the past. 4 “ The Hitter ” is a folk-music short story, rich in pathos and hard-won wisdom, about a boxer whose great talent is taking a fall. “Matamoros Banks” scratched Springsteen’s socially conscious itch with its account of desperate Mexican immigrants drowning as they attempt to cross the titular river. 5
    And then there’s “ Jesus Was an Only Son .”
    The strands of faith and family that had run so deeply through Springsteen’s work reached an apotheosis with “Jesus Was an Only Son,” an account not only of Jesus’s final hours, but also of the relationship between Christ and his mother. The song works on both levels, using imagery that is both domestic and canonical. A mother praying for her child is a powerful enough image, but it takes on a different hue when that child is Jesus. It’s an intense, breathtakingly beautiful song.
    Not that you would know it from the album proper. On Devils & Dust, “Jesus Was an Only Son” is a bit of a dud. It’s listenable, but the musical setting is banal, and Springsteen’s delivery is largely dispassionate, undermining the words and their significance. And this isn’t just an instance where the live version of a song is better (more energetic, more intense) or different (with a