DEVILS, DUST, DIAMONDS - BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND WIND BACK WEDNESDAY
- Bernard Zuel
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
It was 20 years ago this week that Bruce Springsteen released what it turns out now (at least for now) was his one masterpiece of this century, Devils & Dust.
Yes, before it, The Rising in 2002 was an impressive restorative album – not just returning him to the bosom of The E Street Band and the centre of American culture but repairing some of the national psychic damage that followed the September 11 bombings. And yes, after it, Western Stars in 2019, reworked unheard old songs in old ways that brought great pleasure. You should have them in your collection (and can read reviews of them below).
But neither of them, nor the lesser works that have arrived since 2000, get to the core of the man, his writing and why so many still search for him to explain with matching songs of quality in the same way as this mostly solo, mostly subdued, mostly brilliant record.
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BRUCE SPRINGSTEENDevils & Dust (Sony)
THIS ALBUM BEGINS WITH a man who has his “finger on the trigger/but I don’t know who to trust” wondering as he waits in the “dirty wind blowing devils and dust … what if what you do to survive/kills the things you love/fear’s a powerful thing”.
The album ends with a man dreaming of his wife as he is about to cross the Rio Grande, a man who we already know from the first lines of the song (which tells the story in reverse) will be found when “for two days the river keeps you down/Then you rise to the light without a sound … the turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars”.
Between those songs, usually backed by little more than bass, guitar and occasional splashes of backing vocals and colouring instruments, Bruce Springsteen explores the nature of faith and fear, hope and death. Not in the abstract but in the messy, unclear and not always resolved reality of lives seen in transition, their stories told in quietly poetic tones – as rich in religious imagery as they are packed with natural detail - which nonetheless feel free of flourish.
There’s the man in Reno who when visiting a prostitute clings to the memory of his ex-girlfriend as some comforting talisman, saying “She took off her stockings, I held them to my face/She had your ankles, I felt filled with grace” and the brutal but unapologetic street boxer in The Hitter knocking at his mother’s door and asking only to be allowed to “lied down for a while/And I’ll be on my way”.
But there’s also the young black man, whose mother now has a local drug dealer as her lover, planning an escape to a Midwest plain of “endless nothin’ in between” in Black Cowboys and Christ consoling Mary in Jesus Was An Only Son.
Bleak? No, not really. Unlike the bare bones folk balladry of The Ghost Of Tom Joad and Nebraska, the two Springsteen albums most likely to be compared with this one, Devils & Dust has shards of hope. The father in Long Time Comin’ sees a chance to build anew as he lies next to his pregnant wife; in Leah a man offers his shoulders, his strength and his heart; and in the train rhythm blues of All I’m Think’ About (sung in a husky falsetto) there’s nothing but joyous expectation.
Low key and intimate, rooted in folk and blues, Devils & Dust is a masterful album of storytelling and of heart and bone.
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