Bruce Springsteen / Neil Young
Devils & Dust / Prairie Wind
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Bruce Springsteen
Devils & Dust / Prairie Wind
Sony, 2005
RiYL: Late-career singer/songwriters |
These are the disappointing albums.
Not awful. Not bad. Not good.
These are the albums you play a few times and don’t really enjoy, play a few more times hoping to find something to like, and then never play again to protest the disenchantment.
For Neil Young, this disappointing business is business as usual. Prairie Wind is uninspired just like nearly all the albums he’s put out in the past 15 years. It includes one or two good songs, one or two okay songs, and six to eight bad songs. More importantly, it instantly calls to mind a better album he made earlier in his career.
So why the disappointment?
After 2003’s concept-album/performance art project Greendale, it seemed like Neil Young still had a few surprises left in him. Greendale was not great, okay, but it was stupidly ambitious and pretty good, and that’s just the sort of Neil I like. Prairie Wind is stupidly un-ambitious and not particularly good in anyway. He’s just rolling out the same plain-spoken acoustic routine he unveiled on 1992’s delightful Harvest Moon and regurgitated on 2000’s still-born Silver & Gold. And while this album and its ilk are still better than Neil’s stupidly ambitious and terribly awful albums (see: Everybody’s Rockin’), it’s still a let down.
For Bruce Springsteen, this sort of disappointment is less common. He’s been here once before in 1992, when he followed a five-year dry spell with the worst album of his career. But that album (Human Touch) was released the same day as another, far better album (Lucky Town). And just three short years later fans were treated to an equally strong and totally different set of songs, Ghost of Tom Joad. Upon its release, Joad restored faith to even the most embittered E Street Band fans, who finally saw that Bruce could still make good music alone.
Devils and Dust is the exact opposite of Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s a somewhat vain, self-aware retread of its solo acoustic antecedents, one that makes die hard fans wish he would drop the Okie accent and get the band back in the studio. Granted, it’s not nearly as bad as Human Touch or even Prairie Wind, in that it has more than just one or two good songs. But it doesn’t give listeners much to celebrate or even ponder, other than, “Wow maybe I’ll get to see Bruce do that cool version of ‘Promised Land’ live again.”
It’s disappointing to listen to these albums as they make us wonder whether either artist can ever be vital again. This is especially true of Prairie Wind and Mr. Young. At its best, the album is leftovers of good leftovers. The strumming of “This Old Guitar” exactly matches that of “Harvest Moon,” which makes the song acceptable in an incredibly boring way. But most of the songs here don’t even match this level. Many sound like retarded versions of old material that’s been reheated in the microwave too many times.
Take a listen to “No Wonder.” It’s a strange sort of a post-9/11ballad that manages to name check Willie Nelson and Chris Rock in the same line, which is odd, but try following the verses:
Back when I was young, the birds blocked out the sun
Before the great migration south
We only shot a few
They last the winter through
Mother cooked them good and served them up
I picture Neil singing this from a front porch in North Ontario where big birds fly across the sky, throwing shadows on him below. The birds are of course a thin metaphor for the deteriorating state of nature – that is, until Neil shoots and eats them. I particularly like the tense change and how he calls mom, “mother.” Shouldn’t it be “mama?”
Anyway, here’s the rest:
Somewhere a senator sits in a leather chair
Behind a big wooden desk
The caribou we killed mean nothing to him
He took his money just like all the rest
Instead of Marlon Brando or a Danger Bird or something wonderfully out of the ordinary, we get the faceless evil senator. Sitting all evil-like. In a leather chair. Behind a wooden desk. Not worrying about the Caribou Neil killed. Wait a second, I am lost. Why did Neil kill the caribou? Did mother cook them up good too? Could these lyrics be anymore vague or meaningless?
Devils & Dust has the opposite problem. The lyrics are predictably detailed and nuanced – but they are using the same details and nuances and random Spanish words of a dozen other Bruce numbers. The title song, for example, sounds like an outtake from 2002’s The Rising, overflowing with politically charged, God-fearing “big questions” like, “What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?” It almost seems provocative, except it’s not, especially when it’s followed by a song that sounds like an outtake from Human Touch.
Besides the two tunes actually performed on the Ghost of Tom Joad tour (“The Hitter,” “Long Time Comin’”), there are five more here that sound like carbon-copies of songs from that album. The out-of-body vibe of the darkish “Reno” calls to mind Joad’s “Highway 29.” The lost childhood theme of Joad’s “Balboa Park” is reborn in “Black Cowboys.” The appaloosas of “Dry Lightining” are replaced with” Silver Palomino.” Even the lovely “Matamoras Banks” doesn’t come close to matching either Joad’s “Across the Border” and “The Line” – the two songs it so neatly combines.
Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have both been playing this sort of acoustic, singer/songwriter-type music for more than 30 years, so it’s not a crime if they repeat themselves from time to time. On the other hand, it surprises me when other writers blatantly ignore the fact that none of this is worth listening to more than a couple times – especially if you already own the artists’ older albums. UK writers always have a flare for the dramatic, but I think Guardian pushes the limits by calling Prairie Wind, “one of Shakey’s best.” Outrageous. Rolling Stone gave Devils & Dust 4 ½ stars, which seems incredibly polite. (It seems less kind when one considers that the magazine granted Mick Jagger’s last album 5 stars. Yikes!).
Neil, Bruce. Mick. These guys are rock stars, not saints. If we don’t identify and mock their mailed-in, re-processed late-career shtick now, then who will believe us if they actually return to form? Perhaps I’m missing the point, maybe this is as good as it gets for either at this late stage in their career. Still, I prefer to remain balanced and optimistic. Here’s to next year.
BEN FRENCH | Ben founded NATN in the winter of 1998-1999 with fellow IU alums Troy Carpenter and Jonathan Cohen. During the day time, he's working for Nielsen Business Media, publisher of Billboard. Ben's favorite acts include Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys.