What Others May Want For Free
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MgLp46U4oo?feature=oembed&w=459&h=344]
Over his last few records, Bruce Springsteen has embraced the art of the “album cut” — a song that is good enough for a record, but not necessarily a stand-out on its own. It fits loosely in the theme, it’s probably not skippable, but you won’t be hearing it as a fixture of the live set, or blaring on adult-contemporary modern rock radio anytime soon. (Actually, you probably won’t be hearing ANY new Springsteen on the radio anytime soon. Sorry to break it to you. The year is 2012. Buy an iPhone.)
I’d go so far as to wager that his lengthy production processes during the classic 1975–1984 era were due largely to his avoidance of album cuts. Maybe it’s just hindsight talking but there’s not a single wasted second on Darkness or Born to Run.
On The Rising, there’s “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin).” On Wrecking Ball, there’s “You Got It.”
On Magic, perhaps the most all-killer-no-filler record Springsteen has released since 1984, there’s “I’ll Work For Your Love.” It’s hard to call a Springsteen song “slight,” especially one that opens with a trademark glockenspiel/piano intro and features some nice dirty harmonica in the outro.
But this is not Springsteen at his most focused trying to blend personal relationships and societal issues into a seamless whole. This is Springsteen shuffling through his notebook for one more song and finding this half-baked collection of awkward religious analogies just in time to teach it to the band and finish the damn album. (NOTE: I don’t think that’s what really happened, but you know what I mean.)
And yet…there’s something here. The idea that work and love can be commingled together is one that emerged on Tunnel of Love and has woven its way through his modern output, especially on Working On A Dream, where it does in fact get blended with some of that patented Springsteen social commentary. We’re all working, us American folk; we’re working for love, we’re working for pay, and in working for what we want, we find menaing. The lack of work emerges on the Wrecking Ball album in a song like “Jack of All Trades” as a void in the life of its narrator; “we’ll be all right,” he sings, but you’re not sure he means it.
Even the religious iconography has a bit of a point, in the sense that it elevates a simple love song into something that has a seeming weight to it. “I watch your hands smooth the front of your blouse and seven drops of blood fall” echoes another blood/love reference from earlier in the record, “Like when we kissed/the taste of blood on your tongue,” from “Living In The Future.” It makes me think of the Flaming Lips’ magnificent 1999 release The Soft Bulletin, an album where the lines between sinew and soul, between flesh and love, are blurry and permeable.
Let’s not give the guy too much credit, though — I’m no chiropractor, but I feel pretty confident saying the bones in no one’s back are like the Stations of the Cross.
