Bruce Springsteen

You can't damn a man for following his nature, and The Rising is nothing but gut instinct--the populist reporting not only from the scene of the crime, but following up by visiting with survivors and victims' families. That Springsteen would be the first singer-songwriter to emerge with a disc full of September 11 responses--some mournful, some celebratory, most somewhere in between but all reverential--is hardly surprising; it's more likely inevitable, as so many killed last September in Manhattan were the very Jersey boys and girls with whom he grew up and about whom he wrote till he turned the pen on himself in the late 1980s. The Rising, his first full disc with the E-Street Band since Born in the U.S.A., is almost something of a sequel to those early albums with Clarence, Nils, Little Steven, Roy, Danny, Patti and Max--a toast to those loved and lost but not forgotten, a funeral andwake at a boardwalk bar open way past last call. The irony is that this disc's worst song, "Mary's Bar," sounds too muchlike a remake, a calculated visit to old haunts now populated only by ghosts.

Springsteen, for now through playing "Jersey Joe" Guthrie, hasn't sounded so enraged or engaged in decades; it's as though the attacks woke him from the heavy-lidded slumber to which his voice, powerful till it got hold of all that dust-bowl "poetry," had succumbed. He's shouting again, railing and, yeah, rising to the occasion; if Springsteen can't rebuild the towers, he figures the least he can do is raise spirits and give depth and context to anger and despair. So he's singing about faith and strength, about rain (read: debris) falling from cloudless skies, about revenge and bitter fruits, about empty skies (no more towers) and empty beds (no more loved ones), about funeral processions and a band playing at a bar till night turns to morning, about the emptiness of the word "hero" and the potency of the word "enemy"--and about, more than anything, how a country can become a neighborhood bound by pain and resurrection. Springsteen, backed in places by an orchestra of saintly strings and a choir of Pakistani angels, hasn't sounded so vibrant--and so necessary--in decades.