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The success of Springsteen's reporting can be measured by the music. The Rising opens with Lonesome Day, one of the few songs told in Springsteen's own voice. "House is on fire, viper's in the grass," he sings. "A little revenge, and this too shall pass." Like most of The Rising, Lonesome Day gets you moving in spite of its topic. The fire-fighter songs, Into the Fire and the first single, The Rising, put the listener in the physical space of the crumbling towers, but they never get at the emotions behind the fire fighters' courage. The songs are rousing and redemptive--and a little shallow. But almost every other song on the album has an aha! moment when Springsteen touches his subject's secret heart. On Empty Sky, his protagonist looks at the space where the towers used to be and seethes, "I want a kiss from your lips/I want an eye for an eye."
Loss is everywhere on The Rising, but the album's best track, You're Missing, penetrates the unique horror of having a loved one turned to ash. Lyrically the song is a catalog of absence: a coffee cup on the counter, a newspaper on a doorstep. But the song rises to greatness because Springsteen not only recognizes dramatic details but also knows what they mean. "Loss is about what you miss," he says. "You miss a person's physical being--their skin, their hair, the way they smell, the way they make you feel. You miss their body. When my father died, my children wanted to touch him, to touch his body. And the kids got something out of it. The people in this situation, you know, they aren't going to get that." That's why You're Missing is one song that does not end hopefully: "God's drifting in heaven, devil's in the mailbox/Got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops."
Springsteen's liberal, humanist side comes out in the last two songs he wrote for The Rising. Worlds Apart is a new take on the classic story of lovers separated by a cultural divide, the lovers in this case being an American and a Middle Eastern Muslim. Springsteen sings, "We'll let love build a bridge, over mountains draped in stars/ I'll meet you on the ridge, between these worlds apart." Paradise opens from the perspective of a suicide bomber ("In the crowded marketplace, I drift from face to face") before transitioning to the mind of a woman who lost her husband in the Pentagon ("I brush your cheek with my fingertips/ I taste the void upon your lips)." The first verse was inspired by the newspapers, the second by a phone conversation Springsteen had with a Washington widow. The song ends with the realization that the afterlife is no solace to the living.
What's missing on The Rising is politics. Springsteen says he has never considered himself a political person, but after Ronald Reagan tried to hijack Born in the U.S.A. for his 1984 re-election campaign, the singer developed a spare but effective political voice that he generally raises on behalf of liberal causes and the occasional liberal candidate. In 1991 he played a fund raiser for the Christic Institute, a radical think tank that has repeatedly accused the U.S. government of illegal covert action in Latin America. On the subject of America's current foreign policy, he is with the mass of public opinion. "I think the invasion in Afghanistan was handled very, very smoothly," he says.