Workin' on a Dream

Springsteen's newest album dropped today. I have to listen to it a few more dozen times before I feel prepared to render a verdict of whether we can put it in the canon or whether we treat it like Human Touch and pretend it never happened.

There are several good songs, including the inexplicably un-nominated-for-an-Oscar "The Wrestler." "My Lucky Day" is terrific, and "A Night With the Jersey Devil" is going to be played during Halloween for hundreds of thousands of years.

The best one, however, has to be "Outlaw Pete," a sprawling western folk song in the best tradition of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, set to an epic arrangement in the tradition of Springsteen's operatics of yore like "Backstreets" or "Jungleland." Here you can find both the lyrics and a link to a streaming audio version. If you aren't going to splurge for the album, this song is well worth the dollar on iTunes. It's going to be amazing when played live.



Philip Roth is the best author of our times (with apologies to Mr. Updike, who will receive a post shortly). A vast majority of his books are masterpieces, and a couple are merely fantastic. Still, in his immense talent, Roth occasionally put out a clunker. Roth's worst book is something called The Breast -- a "parody" of Kafka's Metamorphosis -- in which an old Jewish man wakes up one day to find himself transformed into a giant female breast. It is actually -- incredibly, really -- worse than it sounds.

Why this digression? Well, folks, Bruce went and put a song on this album that is destined to be for him what The Breast is for Roth. Marc's hatred and disdain for this song, since he illegally downloaded it two weeks ago, has reached almost religious proportions. And everyone agrees. With good reason

"Queen of the Supermarket" is a great song for people who don't speak English. As one critic put it, "At the 3:00 mark, it accidentally turns into a Meat Loaf song." Now, Meatloaf is terrific. But I see what the critic is driving at. The lyrics are terrible. So bad. I can't help but suspect that Bruce lost a bet and was forced to include this song in the album-- his version of a shaved head or a tattoo of the other team.

Congratulations, "Mary, Queen of Arkansas." You are no longer the worst Bruce Springsteen song. May you be the last song to lose its spot on that throne.