August 27, 2002
Springsteen, Young and Emergence
One of my monthly fixes from Amazon showed up at the office today and I was so impressed with the payload, that I just had to share. First off, Bruce Springsteen's latest is absolutely wonderful. I couldn't resist ordering this one - (and given that Bruce's Toronto show is sold out at $115 CAD per seat, I guess that watching VHS footage from the '80's is as close as I'm going to get to seeing the E Street Band live...<sigh>) - but after three or four listenings tonight, I'm really glad that I did.
Bruce does what Bruce does best on this album - tells some great stories about the country that he lives in. As with some of his more popular efforts (like the inimitable "Born in the USA" or the landmark "River") he manages once again to pick up on the true emotional undertones of his fellow Americans and manages to wrap some great songs around them. I'm not sure that he is as nimble (adept?), lyrically, at doing this as he once was, but I'm quibbling now - this is a *great* album that nicely surprised me - surprised me in the fact that he can still pull it off after such a long run without the epic work that we became used to between 1973 and 1984. Classic Bruce, in my books at least, is Bruce that can pull off a heartfelt description of the dark side of being "grown". "The Rising" pulls that off...
More on the rest of the payload later...I have to figure out a way to get this disc out of my CD player first...(Real tough choice here, Young, Springsteen...Young? Hmm...;) In the meantime, here's a great quote from "Emergence" (which I hope to provide a small review about shortly)...
"You can't really, truly understand Brewster Kahle until you've had him show you the server farm in Alexa Internet's basement." Now given the fact that this was a random quote that jumped out at me when I folded the book open for the first time indicates that this is my kind of book ;)