This Is My Confession

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEiynKZtvRM?rel=0]

Bruce Springsteen writes about proud, defiant people, and that pride is both a virtue and a downfall. On “This Depression,” he sings as a man who is feeling incredibly defeated, but lacks the capacity to process it. He’s experiencing devastation beyond anything he’s felt before. He reaches out from an abyss to the one person who can help rescue him through simple understanding.

There’s something more bleak and naked about “This Depression” than most of Springsteen’s other songs. These are raw, unprocessed feelings, none of them hiding behind language or metaphor. The narrator is in a bleak place but there’s only the briefest moment of redemption in the lyrics. Even that is just a few fingers clawing onto the edge of a black pit. He’s not pushing ‘till it’s understood; he’s ready to collapse.

These feelings aren’t packaged within a narrative, either. Within the context of the Wrecking Ball album, it’s easy to imagine this narrator as someone who has been driven to a dark place by the pressures of a crumbling American society — by poverty, joblessness, and abandonment. It’s also hard not to hear the song as relating to the reaction of Springsteen and his friends to the loss of Clarence Clemons.

But maybe it’s not the words of “This Depression” that make the real impact. Maybe it’s that Tom Morello guitar solo, elegaic and beautiful, tracing a complete emotional arc within its soaring notes. When words fail, let the music speak.