Home’s A Long, Long Way From Us
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQHqPyxFq4?feature=oembed&w=459&h=344]
Devils & Dust is an album preoccupied with home — how to get home, taking others home, being far from home in a foreign land on an uncertain battlefield.
On the title song, Springsteen sketches the distance between home and war with metaphor and detail; the singer dreams of someone he loves “in a field of blood and stone.” It’s impossible to tell if the narrator is the one in the field, thinking of his lover; or if the horrors of conflict have driven him to imagine his lover actually bleeding and dying.
God is on his side, but fear “takes your God-filled soul/fills it with devils and dust.” If nothing else, God represents comfort, solace, home; losing that connection to life is what brings the devils and the dust. What you do to survive — killing, fighting, and executing the orders of leaders driven by their own lust for power — can kill the things you love. Another metaphor, where doing what is necessary to survive war may bring you home, but not as your recognizable self. You lose that person to the realities of battle.
Home is a long, long way from the singer. It’s so far away, it may be impossible to ever return.
We sing our anthems and mouth our platitudes in serene confidence that the men and women dispatched to “protect” our country are engaging in a noble self-sacrifice to help us live secure in our freedoms. We never consider the true cost of war, not just the bodies but the inner deaths, the souls consumed by devils and dust that can lose their “home” forever. Men and women return from conflict and may never feel safe again. It’s a price we pay — well, not a price WE pay, necessarily, because if you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve never had to pay that price. We seem comfortable paying that price as long as others are the ones footing the tab.
Listen to what Springsteen does with the arrangement here; starting on voice and acoustic guitar, the song slowly expands, bringing in bass-heavy piano and a rumbling electric guitar. Then that spinning string arrangement, looping around the melody again and again; three notes, pushing constantly forward toward nothing. The tambourine and drum, like a distant gunshot in the night; a harmonica solo, like sandpaper on skin.
It’s that violin accompaniment that lingers, even when the song concludes in an echo of feedback. The song makes its statement, seems to end, but the agonies it describes — war itself, or the damages of war — they never stop. They just play on.
