Constancy, thy name is Springsteen. I mean, for real -- at this point, the man is more than just the sum of his over two dozen records. He’s an icon; one of those rare threads that can effectively bind half a century’s worth of dismal and disparate musical/socio-economic American history with the unlikely image of a red ballcap stuffed into some blue Levi’s, summing up the Ginsburgian “howl” of the anguished American youth ably for paleontologists of future centuries with only the gruff bristle of his croon and the absurd off-beat THWAK of that fat fucking snare drum.
The downside? Well, unfortunately, the next stop on the fame train after “icon” is “caricature.” And fresh off of, oh, I'd say 35 years of singing what are essentially variations on the same fist-pumping, sax-soaked, red-white-and-blue-a-thons, the news that the illimitable Bruce Springsteen is back with his latest album -- presumably about cars and baseball and drifters and lonely housewives and punch clocks and sweet God above and middle class such and such -- is, you know, a bit hard to take seriously. But what’s an aging symbol of sexy-ass American stadium rock to do? It’s a catch-22 situation, really. After all, at some point, there comes a need for a new rhetoric if you’re going to stay current, and yet, somehow singing a song about a pink Toyota Prius just doesn’t sound that cool either.
But either way, look out, 2009, cuz here he comes, for better or worse. Springsteen's 24th album, Working on a Dream (presumably pronounced “Workin’ on a Dream,” mind you) has been set for a January 27 release via Columbia Records. Naturally, it was recorded with the E Street Band and is the fourth collaboration between Springsteen and Brendan O'Brien, who produced and mixed the album at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, GA with additional recording in New York City, Los Angeles, and, yes, New Jersey.
Said the Lord Springsteen of the experience:
Towards the end of recording [the last album], excited by the return to pop production sounds, I continued writing. When my friend producer Brendan O'Brien heard the new songs, he said, ‘Let's keep going.’ Over the course of the next year, that's just what we did, recording with the E Street Band during the breaks on last year's tour. I hope Working on a Dream has caught the energy of the band fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we've ever done. All the songs were written quickly, we usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end.
The album features 12 new Springsteen tunes plus 2 bonus tracks (which, back in the dark ages would have been called “a 14-track album”). But I don’t see anything along the lines of “Pink Toyota Prius” listed down there, do you?
Workin’ Titles:
Bonus tracks:
The Wrestler
A Night with the Jersey Devil