Springsteen Is Magic

This year Bruce Springsteen will elevate the Super Bowl Halftime Show to heights it has never attained, so I thought I would do a post on Magic, one of my favorite albums of the last few years. It’s extremely rare for an older musician to match the albums of his heyday, and many will argue that Springsteen’s Magic is nowhere close to classics like Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town. I beg to differ. I think Magic might be Springsteen’s best overall collection of songs, and while I still prefer Darkness and The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle, I place Magic solidly behind those two.

Magic is the one great protest album of Bush’s America, but don’t let that stop you from buying it. While many of the songs are scathing indictments of a president who auctioned his country’s soul to the highest bidder, Magic is first and foremost a top-notch rock-and-roll album – a precious rarity in this cowardly new musical world. The astonishingly propulsive “Radio Nowhere” kicks off the album with a characteristic plea for human contact. While earlier albums found Springsteen longing for a physical human touch, “Radio Nowhere” is a haunting scream for simple communication (Is there anyone out there?) in an empty world where the only words “bounce off satellites.” “You’ll Be Coming Down” is a deceptively simple rocker, but listen closely and you’ll notice that Springsteen stretches each lyric a few bars beyond the expected while subtly changing the chord progression throughout. Those ostensibly small details add a richness and resonance to Springsteen’s songwriting that I didn’t notice as a 20-year-old, but that make this 42-year-old’s ears hum with delight.

“Your Own Worst Enemy” and “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” are two of Springsteen’s most melodic songs, elevated by beautiful orchestral backing. “Gypsy Biker” is a ferociously nihilistic account of a soldier coming home from Iraq. The catch? He’s coming home in a body bag. While his mother has taken the sheets off his bed and the speculators have “made their money from the blood" he spilled, his best friend sits doing lines of cocaine as he waits for his final return. It’s as haunting a song as Sprinsteen has ever written. “Last to Die” and “Long Walk Home” are overt but powerful protest songs about war and country, and the unlisted finale, “Terry’s Song,” is the greatest Bob Dylan song that he never wrote. But the real coup is the title song, which reduces George W. Bush to a charlatan magician, a modern-day wizard of gore:

I got a shiny saw blade
All I need's a volunteer
I'll cut you in half
While you're smilin' ear to ear
And the freedom that you sought
Driftin' like a ghost amongst the trees
This is what will be
This is what will be

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the production on Magic being to “muddy.” Have any of those people listened to the CDs of Darkness on the Edge of Town or Born to Run? With a few exceptions, Springsteen favors a wall-of-sound approach, and Magic is no different. The album sounds real and raw. In terms of sheer power, it blows away just about anything out there right now. This is a legitimately great album.