12. Devils & Dust (2005)

I seem to have memories of Devils & Dust coming out in 2004, and people talking a lot about Springsteen’s politics. In hindsight, I’m convinced this must have had more to do with the controversy over “American Skin (41 Shots)” from a few years before, and from Springsteen’s participation in the 2004 Vote For Change tour. Though the title track was written in 2003 and is evidently in reaction to the war in Iraq, much of the album dates back to the time of The Ghost Of Tom Joad (“All The Way Home,” a standout here, actually goes back to the early ’90s). Fittingly, a lot of Devils & Dust seems to draw more direct inspiration from Springsteen’s ’90s Southwest wanderings than it does from his frustration with our country’s actions 10 years ago.

Brendan O’Brien was brought on board again, and in this instance seems to have helped correct everything that was wrong with The Ghost Of Tom Joad. There are still a few less-defined tracks, but where much of The Ghost Of Tom Joad was nondescript musically, Devils & Dust is mostly fleshed out and the right amount of lush — simultaneously full but organic enough to suggest the power of the desert landscape. Select members of the E Street Band add touches here and there, mostly offering Western stylings that made the music and stories within resonate in a way they didn’t on The Ghost Of Tom Joad.

While only the title track is discernibly political, the national conflicts of the day hang over Devils & Dust like a shroud, inevitably casting it as a tale of two deserts. Springsteen might be revisiting old material, but the timing can’t be an accident. As he watched our nation stumble awkwardly through one faraway desert, Springsteen returned to America’s own wasteland, perhaps as an older traveler looking for (and failing to find) the potential of the frontier that he had sought desperately in his youth. Perhaps it’s just a larger idea of wanderers lost in alien landscapes, a man finding no fulfillment with an encounter with a prostitute in “Reno” not all that different from the men at war in “Devils & Dust.” There’s a subtle interplay between the suggestion of distance between these scenes and their similarities. “We’re a long, long way from home, Bobbie/ Home’s a long, long way from us,” the narrator of “Devils & Dust” says, and he could be talking about being adrift in either desert. In a line, Springsteen seems to sum up the detachment that would result from a decade of a nation’s lurching missteps.

For some reason, Devils & Dust has been largely ignored since Springsteen’s solo tour in 2005. A few of the songs have been played here and there, but none with any real frequency, which is bizarre considering the power the E Street Band could bring to “All The Way Home” or “Maria’s Bed” — the latter a very overlooked song, one of his best latter day tracks. There’s precedent, anyway, with Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad songs getting fairly regular rotation. Whatever the reason, Devils & Dust has always seemed unfairly sidelined. It’s easily the strongest material we’ve yet to hear that has any roots in his ’90s writing, and is also one of the more satisfying records to come out during his ’00s streak. There isn’t much in Springsteen’s lauded catalogue that you could call “underrated,” but if anything would qualify, it would be Devils & Dust.