Bruce Springsteen's The Rising may be the catchiest album I've ever heard about a mass murder. One song after another delivers memorable hooks, sing-along choruses and catch phrases, and the deathless satisfaction of the release from verse to refrain. But I don't know whether this is what Springsteen had in mind. And though I like all the songs on the new album, I've yet to grow completely comfortable liking them, even as I sing along.

The Rising, as you know unless you've been living under a rock for the past month, is Springsteen's September 11 album. He wrote "My City of Ruins" prior to September 11, as an elegy for his old haunt of Asbury Park, but he sang it at the televised Tribute to Heroes memorial, and it fit. He had followed the World Trade Center disaster from his home in New Jersey, and soon -- "within days after the towers collapsed," Time magazine informs us -- he was writing songs.

When I attended his Ghost of Tom Joad concert at the Orpheum in Boston back in 1995, it occurred to me that Springsteen -- singing solo with an acoustic guitar -- was one of the last of the American folkie troubadours. Between his songs about migrant farm workers and hard-luck blue-collar types, he explained how he'd collected material for his portraits, and one image remains from those stories: Springsteen taking long solo motorcycle rides, from the Los Angeles hills where he'd been living into the California valleys and the farther reaches of the American Southwest. And now he was bringing us the news from these places that are on the margins, even though they're what we tend to think of when we think of "heartland" America -- not the Midwest, but a country of ordinary lives and ordinary labors, and of the dispossessed, far removed from the Hollywood hills or big-time media. And on that tour Springsteen was the troubadour traveling the country and bringing us the news about ourselves.

Although the Tom Joad tour was criticized for its monochromatic, tuneless tunes, the Orpheum date reconnected me with the Springsteen of old and reminded me why I liked him in the first place. The Human Touch/Lucky Town tour of '92 was the Bruce of the big arenas and the revival-meeting pomp; Tom Joad was the Bruce of personal connection. It wasn't the thrill of community, exactly -- it was his ability to talk plainly, so you felt he was speaking directly to you. You liked the guy. And the pale monochrome of Tom Joad suited its material.

For The Rising, Springsteen has also collected material -- "reporting" is the word Time used to describe it. Reading the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the Times, he began conducting phone interviews with widows of men who had mentioned that they were really into Springsteen. The Rising, then, is his own "Portraits of Grief," set to his unique mix of bar-band blues and camp-meeting gospel. It's not about mass murder, of course (though there are flares of vengeance); it's about grief and redemption.

There are complications roiling under the surfaces of the songs on The Rising, but in the end they're all smoothed over in the faith of those reassuring pop structures, in the majestic layering of guitars and keyboards and strings, even a touch of qawaali, and in last-minute lyric reprieves. The Rising never feels insincere or exploitive, but at times Springsteen leaves his reporting behind to create an impossible fiction -- getting inside the head of a suicide bomber ("Paradise"), or the head of firefighters climbing the towers ("Into the Fire," "The Rising"). And at times his refrains of "it's all right" ("Lonesome Day") or his promises to chase the clouds away ("Waitin' on Sunny Day") don't convince. Even when "Paradise" switches from the bomber's head to a widow's dreams, he concludes, "They're as empty as paradise," only to reassure us, "I break above the waves/Feel the sun upon my face."

I'm not saying The Rising is a fraud. There are plenty of ugly, deep-felt moments in these songs, and you can sense Springsteen's honest struggle in each of them. "The Fuse" is just that -- a portrait of rage barely contained, and sublimated into depression. "Further On (Up the Road)" has the hard, angry edge of a Social Distortion song. And in the simple verbal turn of the "everything is everything" refrain of "You're Missing," the mundane details of daily life, of memory, become the immensity of eternal absence and a void that can't be filled, of closure deferred, a loved one turned to "dust on my shoes." But more often than not, the old-fashioned party anthem "Mary's Place" brushes over the doubt at its core: "Tell me how do you live/Broken-hearted." To reverse a criticism by one of Martin Scorsese's old mentors: The Rising is too much Easter Sunday and not enough Good Friday.

Issue Date: August 9 - 15, 2002