Three years in Amman and two kids later, B and I have left the blog dormant but not the music (or frankly, the drinking). There is a little more Elizabeth Mitchell and Play School than in the past, but plenty of new music - Chance the Rapper, Solange, Car Seat Headrest. Mostly there has been a lot of folk and bluegrass; in a moment of madness, B bought some Willie Watson bandanas at his Melbourne gig last week.
But let's get back to Bruce. I've decided that Darkness is Bruce's greatest album. I've quite possibly said the same thing about Nebraska and Born to Run. But Darkness is actually it.
The 1978 album continues the themes Bruce had so successfully portrayed on Born to Run. Young men (and sometimes, women) struggling against their circumstances, searching for belonging and wanting something more. It opens with Badlands. "Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king. And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything." This lyric is deliciously clever.
Adam Raised a Cain's desperate, repetitive chant always gets me. In the holy land, they too work with nothing to show but pain. Just like Springsteen's characters.
Seeing Bruce on his most recent Australian tour, today's politics was inescapable. Donald Trump is US President - the desperate characters on Darkness could very well be his constituency. The "men walk through these gates with death in their eyes, and you just better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight, it's just the working, just the working life". Trump sold these men from Factory a fanciful dream.
But while the lyrics are timeless, it's the music that keeps me in love. It's sweeping and majestic, but somehow restrained. Bruce and the E Street Band recorded together in flight, Darkness is perfect rock and roll.
