Word: springsteen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Springsteen freezes when the subject of the phone calls comes up. He doesn't want publicity for ordinary kindness, and he doesn't want to be seen as exploiting people whose suffering is well known. But for Springsteen, the experience of hearing Berger talk about how her husband hustled dozens of people out of the south tower before it collapsed around him or of listening to Farrelly recall some of her husband's copious daily love notes was obviously critical to the creation of The Rising...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...