Magic: The Beat of Your Heart

With his new album Magic, Bruce Springsteen, along with the E Street band and producer Brendan O'Brien, has crafted a masterpiece that, like much of his work, encapsulates the many aspects of rock and roll. The lyrics challenge the current status quo, challenge listeners to do something about that status quo. The music engages the heart, sometimes with the same weight as the lyrics and at other times with the sheer pleasures of melody and rhythm. Serious lyrics from Springsteen aren't a new thing, and neither is engaging music, but often the two haven't gone together. On his stark acoustic albums Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Devils & Dust, the music often serves as a backdrop for the words, setting a mood but providing little else. Even on The River, which ping-pongs between serious and lighter songs, the serious songs sound serious and the lighter ones sound fun. On Magic, the serious songs often sound fun. Springsteen has said he did this by design to create an unsettling feel, but he's also created something new in his body of work.

Springsteen has spoken about the themes of the album. In brief, he's written an album about the current state of America, as he sees it, and he doesn't like what he sees, specifically the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the Bush administration's tactics in the wars themselves and in convincing the public of their credibility. He also doesn't like complacency in response. Crucially, he doesn't like these things because he believes in the idea and promise of America. Yet he never preaches. As he often has, he lets details, stories, and music speak for him, and all of those do bear out his statements about the themes.

"Gypsy Biker," "Devil's Arcade," and "Last to Die" address the war most directly. In the first, friends mourn a soldier friend's death by taking his motorcycle to the desert, pouring gasoline on it, and setting it on fire. The singer, full of sorrow and rage, sings "Now all that remains/Is my love for you, brother/Lying still and unchanged/To them that threw you away/You ain't nothin' but gone." In "Devil's Arcade," a wife or lover of a wounded soldier addresses him, remembering the early days of their love. "Who'll be the last to die for a mistake," the singer asks in "Last to Die," as a family on the home front seems to flee from the apocalyptic world around them only to run up against signs of it everywhere.

Most of the songs aren't as specific. "Radio Nowhere" sets the stage with its search for "a world with some soul." In "You'll Be Comin' Down," the singer warns a woman, a "golden child," her head "spinnin' in diamonds and clouds" of the fall to come. The R&B rave-up "Livin' In The Future," centers on a man living in or waking up from denial about a failed relationship to a woman he met on election day, and his "ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon/The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run." "Your Own Worst Enemy" again focuses on personal self-destruction but ends with a hint of double meaning: "Your flag it flew so high/It drifted into the sky."

While "Girls in their Summer Clothes" offers a little, lovely respite from this vision, even the love as religion "I'll Work For Your Love" contains the lines "Now our city of peace has crumbled/Our book of faith's been tossed." Then again, can we trust this man's devotion? The magician in the title song might say no. Amidst an eerie backdrop, he reminds his audience they can't trust him, and as the song progresses, his narrative shifts from simple slight-of-hand to escape artistry, cutting volunteers in half, and finally terrifying fortune-telling:

Now there's a fire down below
But it's comin' up here
So leave everything you know
And carry only what you fear
On the road the sun is sinkin' low
There's bodies hangin' in the trees
This is what will be, this is what will be

"Long Walk Home" starts with the personal, another broken relationship. The singer wanders through his hometown, the people he once knew "rank strangers to" him, the familiar sights "silent and alone" and "shuttered and boarded/With a sign that just said 'gone.'" In the final verse, the personal and political meet. What once was is also "gone":

My father said, "Son, we're lucky in this town"
It's a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."

It's gonna be a long walk home

However, Magic's surprises lie in the varied yet cohesive music and the way Springsteen has both embraced some of his classic sounds and combined those with new ones. To some extent, he, the band, and O'Brien accomplished new things on 2002's The Rising, but that album doesn't always sound like a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band album. Magic sounds both new and classic, but most importantly, the band feels necessary as they help create the emotional life of the songs.

"Radio Nowhere," "Last to Die," and "Long Walk Home" fall into a sort of rock category, sounding the most like past work and yet carving new territory. As I wrote before, the guitar attack of "Radio Nowhere" immediately stands out as something different. Guitars have always played an important part in his work, and most Springsteen fans could probably identify his unique lead work, but in a band with two keyboard players, the guitars often become part of the background. Not on this song. Beyond that, he mixes song styles. Like a standard rock or pop song, "Radio Nowhere" has verses and choruses, as well as an instrumental bridge, but like a folk or blues song, it all happens over one chord progression (the bridge shifting keys but maintaining the same pattern). Still, the melody in the choruses and "I just want to hear some rhythm" parts changes from the verses.

"Last to Die" definitely has the feel of early Springsteen cinematic epics, as well another storm of guitars. Its violin hook (played by Soozie Tyrell) sets the stage, acting like a movie score during a chase even before the lyrics suggest their family on the run. Right away, the audience feels the desperation and fear the lyrics reveal. "Long Walk Home" has a driving, folky-yet-modern rhythm akin to Springsteen's "Blood Brothers" with shades of U2. Yet of the the three songs, this one feels the most like an E Street Band song. It starts with guitar and voice, but after the first chorus, the whole band enters and keeps rolling until the fade out: Danny Federici's Organ fills and and Roy Bittan's piano lines weave in and out of the guitars at just the right times; Clarence Clemons wails away on a sax solo; Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent keep the beat steady; Springsteen spits out a guitar solo, playing single notes high up the fretboard along with a droning open string to provide maximum chaos.

The two most stunning songs on the album might be the two unabashed pop songs "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes." Pop elements have certainly played a part in Springsteen's work, especially Born to Run, but nothing has sounded this melodic. He's often favored simple blues, folk, and R&B structures and emphasizing the words over melody. These two songs reach back at least as far as The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Phil Spector's early sixties singles.

"Your Own Worst Enemy" definitely bears the Brian Wilson influence. The opening piano chords, the sleigh bells, something that sounds like a harpsichord, and the string arrangement all signal that. In the opening choruses, he keeps the harmonies simple, using a signature style from the Born To Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River days. He doubles his own voice, singing the lead vocal in a straightforward, unadorned way, while singing the harmony in a sort of operatic moan. After the second chorus, which adds new elements to the first, a bridge appears, and after that bridge a second bridge appears (around the 1:32 mark). This one has vocals but no lyrics, and it's possibly the loveliest thirty seconds he's recorded. At first, a few voices sing simple "ahhs," but in the second part, voices "ooh" back and forth in a beautiful but slightly creepy way. The song ends with Springsteen singing the word "sky" in a full, clean voice, holding the word as the note rises. This gives way to a hint of those bridge harmonies and finally bells tolling distant and alone.

Springsteen has called "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" an attempt to create "the perfect pop universe." Like "Your Own Worst Enemy," strings help signal the style, as well as multiple acoustic guitars strumming the same pattern and electric guitars picking arpeggios. Like "Long Walk Home," the band kicks in full after the first chorus, rooted in the power of Weinberg's drums. In the bridge, the guitars and keyboards hit all the downbeats as Springsteen continues to sing of this perfect night in a perfect town (the friendly restaurants in stark contrast to "Long Walk Home's" boarded up diner). In the final verse, even more guitars create a further sense of rising, and in the second half of the verse, the strings play a counter melody to the vocal. Oh, and that vocal? My friend Dann said it best as I played the song on him: "He's downright crooning."

Both "Gypsy Biker" and "Devil's Arcade" could have been spare acoustic songs or even simply adorned like some of the songs on Devils & Dust. Instead, here more than anywhere else on the album, the band plays a crucial role in creating the emotions of the songs. "Gypsy Biker" certainly starts out like a fast folk song, with just acoustic guitars and harmonica, a few electric guitar licks and some organ underneath. It also has a folk song structure, verses ending on a repeated line rather than moving to a chorus. When the band comes in on the second verse, everything changes. From that point, the song builds and never stops, the singer's anger made real in Weinberg's taut drums, the dueling guitars of the solo. Again, Springsteen moans behind his lead vocal. As the last verse ends, it seems like the song can't get any louder or angrier, but it does, the guitars spewing notes at each other again, Weinberg firing off snare fills in a way he hasn't since "Born in the U.S.A." Only a fade out can stop this one.

"Devil's Arcade" ends the album proper (the hidden track "Terry's Song" follows it) with a mournful, more subdued, and possibly hopeful tone. Organ notes emerge from silence, an electric guitar strikes chords in the distance, a violin plays the melody, and then an acoustic guitar and vocals enter. As with other songs, more instruments join in the second verse but this time in a more subtle way, adding a hint of urgency, building toward a stately electric guitar break, the guitar sticking to the melody. The band then drops to the softness of the opening verse, only to rise again with each line, as the wounded soldier seems to awaken from a coma, words and music in complete concord:

The glorious kingdom of the sun on your face
Rising from a long night as dark as the grave
On a thin chain of next moments
And something like faith
On a morning to order, a breakfast to make
A bed draped in sunshine, a body that waits
For the touch of your fingers
The end of a day
The beat of your heart, the beat of your heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of your heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of her heart
The beat of your heart, the slow burning away
Of the bitter fires of the devil's arcade

The guitar plays the melody again, loosening into a solo, and then all the instruments drop away except the drums. They mimic a heartbeat and end with an ambiguous cymbal crash. The words and the music seem to answer "Radio Nowhere's" "Is there anybody alive out there?" After an album full of failed relationships and loss, Lovers finally feel each others' rhythm in "a thin chain of next moments" and the beat of each other's hearts.