There's a warning on the back of Bruce Springsteen's new "Devils & Dust": "This song contains some adult imagery." The Boss ain't kidding about that. The track in question, "Reno," has lyrics decidedly more suggestive than "Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines."
In a shadowy corner of The Biggest Little City in the World, a man beds a prostitute. She has a filthy mouth; he has pure visions of another woman, Maria, the one who got away. As the song ends, the hooker calls herself "the best you ever had." "Not even close," the sad man thinks but does not say.
"Reno" will rip your heart out for sure, and the ballad sets the tone for an album chock-full of world-weary drifters, many of whom are lost far west of the Mississippi.
A complex examination of life's bittersweet edges, "Devils & Dust" has drawn comparisons to Springsteen's leaner, bleaker albums, "Nebraska" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad," but that's not entirely accurate. There are just as many percussively shuffling songs as slow ones, and even the real bummers are given subtle uplift courtesy of a string section, some horn players and violinist-backup singer Soozie Tyrell. (The E Street Band has been given the day off.) In "Reno," for instance, the brass and woodwinds swell louder as the protagonist gets further lost in visions of Maria.
Of course, "subtle uplift" is not to be confused with, say, "Rosalita." Springsteen's new batch of poetry is more narrative-driven than Jersey-metaphorical; there isn't a lot of street-corner wordplay that'll find its way into high school yearbook blurbs. And unlike the full-throated holler of such epic rockers as "Born to Run," Bruce is doing his Dylan thing here, his voice craggy and pained and folk-song appropriate, as if he recorded most of these tunes at 2 a.m. from the bottom of a bottle. Nevertheless, with a few meandering exceptions -- "Black Cowboys," about an inner-city kid longing to go west, gets tedious -- the blue-collar bard has managed to make an album that is both personal and accessible, good news for fans who feel guilty that "Tom Joad" was listened to once and never again.
In the aftermath of the Springsteen-led Vote for Change tour last year, some expected the artist's next album to be political. The Boss, however, has probably had his fill of above-the-fold current events, just like the rest of us. Yes, the opening title track -- again an acoustic-based cut augmented by an underlining orchestration of hope -- is about an American grunt in Iraq. "I got my finger on the trigger / But I don't know who to trust." But the song could be about any soldier in any war, and it strikes at the heart of the uncertainty in us all.
"The Hitter" illuminates roughly the same theme. An epic story song, it's about a to-hell-and-back pugilist who's both bested champs and taken dives. "I stuffed my bag with their good money / And I never looked back," he says. When Springsteen catches up with the boxer, he is broke, bruised and pleading with his disapproving mother to let him in for a rest. "Understand, in the end, Ma, every man plays the game / If you know me one different, then speak out his name." Like the soldier in "Devils & Dust," the antihero of "The Hitter" fights to survive, and survives on the off chance that he'll someday find the meaning of it all.
A good chunk of the disc is made up of slightly bent love songs, forever a Springsteen specialty. He uncorks a doozy of a pickup line on "All the Way Home" -- "Love leaves nothing but shadow and vapor / We go on, as is our sad nature" -- and the song rocks along on a swaggering barroom beat (and album producer Brendan O'Brien's sitar work) as two love-torched people decide whether to bare their scarred hearts one more time. On the dusty stomp of "Long Time Comin'," a deadbeat dad tries to convince his girl Rosie (Rosalita?!) that he's going to turn things around. "I reach 'neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly / And feel another one kickin' inside / I ain't gonna [bleep] it up this time." And even though the poor dude doing the talking on "Matamoros Bank" is dead at the bottom of a river ("Turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars"), the quiet song's denouement could even be considered a happy ending.
To show that he's not totally without a mischievous side, the Boss includes a curious country rumbler, "Maria's Bed." Could this be the same Maria mentioned in "Reno"? Is this from the perspective of our whoring cowboy in days to come or days gone by? That, I imagine, is Springsteen's whole point on "Devils & Dust." It's not about whether we think Maria, the one who got away, is alive and well and back with her man. It's that we hope she is. After all, happily-ever-afters don't come cheap.
Bruce Springsteen is scheduled to perform May 14 at the Patriot Center at George Mason University.
