14. Magic (2007)

I hadn’t gone back to Magic for a while until I started working on this list, but now that I have, I’ve realized two things. First, I like it more than I remembered. The second thing is that more and more I’m coming to view The Rising, Devils & Dust, Magic, and Wrecking Ball as one continuing project, which is making it difficult to rank one against the other.

As I touched on in the intro, since Bruce returned with the E Street Band at the turn of this century, he’s become very much an oddity in the pop landscape. He was no longer just another recording artist; he was an operating legend. His classic era is spoken of with awe. The thing is, it wasn’t like he was still operational in the same way as older artists like Paul McCartney or the Stones, people who could still make a killing touring but rarely, if ever, made a record that mattered anymore. Instead, each new Bruce album still managed to evoke fervent reactions, deeply considered essays. He managed to do something that you’d assume would be impossible: emerging out of a (relative) 10-year exile as he exits middle age, getting the old band back together, and taking it well beyond the victory-lap celebration of the past and into a period of frenzied productivity in which he was still a relevant recording artist. Some fans may quibble with the new stuff, and of course there are always going to be those who will just straight-up dislike anything post ’84 or ’87. Conversely, there will always be those who overpraise the new stuff just because it’s Springsteen. I’m going to try to walk a path between the two: I’ve already made my case for Working On A Dream and The Seeger Sessions being minor works, but I think some of these other ’00s records are really, really good, and perhaps underrated in the grand scheme of Springsteen’s career.

Perhaps more importantly, outside of all this music world business, Springsteen came back and was a cultural icon. People now expected him to issue his statement on Our Country Today, and all that. And, well, he came back in a decade ripe with opportunities for commentary. Magic was, up until that point, the most pointedly political of the latter day Springsteen works. “Gypsy Biker,” “Livin’ In the Future,” “Last To Die,” “Long Walk Home,” and the title track all addressed the political atmosphere of the mid-aughts in some fashion or another. Collapsed into a few tracks were loads of critique, primarily of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also of our government’s behavior post-9/11. In a larger sense, there seems to be a dread and a detachment hanging over the whole affair. Whether the searching-through-the-desolation of “Radio Nowhere” or the complicated hometown relationship sketched out in “Long Walk Home,” Springsteen seemed to be trying to make sense of a country that no longer seemed familiar to him. For an artist known for social commentary, and now almost mandated to have his finger on the pulse of the country, that disassociation and confusion would be the most telling, and invigorating, strands in Magic.

There’s something else we need to talk about with ’00s Bruce, and that’s the issue of production. Having brought on producer Brendan O’Brien with The Rising, a lot of Springsteen’s recent albums have taken on a modern rock gloss (that goes for even the ones done without O’Brien) that doesn’t seem fitting to Springsteen’s music in general, nor the ideas he’s trying to convey. Everything about Magic feels too compressed and synthetically punchy, slick to the point where it feels overcooked and distant at times. The sepia-toned cover art, though appealing aesthetically, seems symbolic: It has a sort of proto-Instagram relationship to authenticity, relying on digital alterations both visual and sonic to achieve the sense of grunginess that the E Street Band could more than easily bring to driving rock music like this on their own. That all holds Magic back from engaging in the same way as some of Bruce’s best work. It’s all rugged sheen, but underneath we’re denied the true grit we need to connect with the issues at hand.