Songs of Love and Hate

I popped Springsteen's The Rising in the car's CD player the other week. It seems to me a quite extraordinary piece of work, dealing with powerful themes with poise & assurance, despite the intense emotions involved. It's the balance he achieves in songs and between songs that seems to me responsible for the sense of depth of understanding conveyed. I've been particularly struck by how general he's made those songs which, I assume, are in response to one very obviously specific event. Mary's Place could be about any loss of any loved partner and the hopelessness and inevitability of revisiting the past, a past evoked, for someone of my age, with almost surgical precision in both music and lyrics. Daring to celebrate that past in a kind of rock 'n' roll exorcism is something only Springsteen could get away with because only he could make it so authentic. (That's a bit over the top but Bruce regularly pushes me in that direction. Sometimes I'm glad that the guitar solos are so shaky because at least that shows he's only human.)