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There may be a variety of musical reasons for the current Springsteen ascendancy. The new songs are sharper, neater, more carefully formed than in the past. His voice is clearer, and it is brought further up front in the recording mix. On his rock videos, he shows enough charisma to burn out the entire Brat Pack, while fueling endless idle speculation about a future in Hollywood. In a half-decade full of switchback curves and turning points, however, the starting line may have been a moment when Springsteen opened Joe Klein's luminous 1980 biography of Woody Guthrie. Nebraska, the solo album he released in 1982, has direct roots in Guthrie tunes like Pretty Boy Floyd, just as Springsteen's current populism has models in the blue-collar activism of the 1930s.
One of the high points of the current concert tour is Springsteen's heartbroken guitar-and-harmonica version of what he calls "the best song ever written about the promise of America, This Land Is Your Land. It's a promise," he adds, "that's eroding every day for a lot of people. Countries are like people. It's easy to let the best of yourself slip away."
Huge as they are now, Springsteen's concerts remain full-throttle performances that depend on intensity, not special effects, to reach the back rows. Scramble up to the farthest seats, look down toward the field. Springsteen, on the bright, distant stage, looks as if he were singing in the engine room of the Close Encounters spaceship. But the sound is buoyant, even this high, enhanced by people all around, dancing, singing along. You can just about see Bruce below, but you can hear him everywhere, and, even at this distance, you recognize him. He is the promise that has not eroded, the best part of every single person there to hear him. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Cathy Booth/New York