March 2nd, 2012 
James Shotwell 
Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Album: Wrecking Ball
Genre: Rock
Label: Columbia
In 1982, I was one year old. I was living in a broken down trailer park, the product of an abusive marriage and a broken home. My mom was a single mother and a Wichita Lineman. Though I lived with her, we were not often in the same room. This was generally due to the fact that she worked long shifts and hard labor to keep the leaky roof over my head. She was the epitome of blue collar struggle.
It would take me 20 years to realize that my mom was a Bruce Springsteen album.
That same year (1982), Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska. The album would later change my life. Chock-full of cut-and-dry snapshots of characters with their backs shoved against the wall, Nebraska manages to capture the essence of growing up without hope. With a simplicity in storytelling comparable to Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Springsteen manages to fingerprint the turning point of the lives of the forgotten while spotlighting the vitality of their roles in our own lives. His words about living with struggle speak louder on Nebraska than any words penned since the release of the album. On a more personal level, his words on this album have helped me understand where I came from more than any other.
Wrecking Ball, Springsteen’s seventeenth studio effort, doesn’t stray far from Nebraska. Sure, if you want to break it down musically, the two albums lie miles apart. While Nebraska was released as a collection of stripped down demos, primarily sampled on a cassette recorder, Wrecking Ball is stacked with the E-Street sound that has been filling arenas since I was in diapers. The subject matter, however, lies right in the heart of the Garden State. Springsteen manages to highlight that the working class struggle is just as prevalent in 2012 as it was in 1982.
Take “Jack of All Trades,” the album’s fourth cut, for example. This song is a flawless combination of piano and insecurity. The song’s narrator monologues to his wife a list of jobs he could take to make ends meet. This jack-of-all-trades confesses his willingness to “take the work that God provides,” while revealing a touch of skepticism as he replies “Honey, we’ll be alright.” The song builds into a beautiful swarm of trumpets and guitars, peaking with a fit of aggression: “So you use what you’ve got and you learn to make due/You take the old and you make it new/If I had me a gun I’d find the bastards and shoot them on sight/I’m a jack-of-all-trades, we’ll be alright.” This attention to emotion spotlights Springsteen’s impeccable understanding and appreciation for humanity. He revisits the concept of having relationships strained by the struggling economy two songs later in “This Depression.”
He remembers to point out that a job is more than just a paycheck. It is also your livelihood.
If by the end of these songs you don’t have goose bumps, you’re simply not listening. These songs are to music what Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is to the banking concept of education.
But Springsteen doesn’t stop professing there. Both “Death to my Hometown” and “Wrecking Ball” depict the struggle and disappearance of the American business. The album’s title track focuses heavily on the deterioration of the foundations built by the working class. The lyrics paint vivid landscapes of years of work transformed into parking lots and beloved cities becoming ghost towns. The underlining anger of the songs seems to stem from the damages left in these cities by greed. The phrase “wrecking ball” is not only aimed at the tool used to knock down the factories of our working class, but the results of the poor and glutinous management. The album’s opening cut, “We Take Care of Our Own” furthers this concept by reintegrating the importance of sticking together and remaining morally grounded as a country. The boss’ voice remains stern as he repeats his message: Stand up for something instead of letting them make you hard. Push back as a union, not as a group of individuals.
It is that fire that makes Springsteen not only the voice of my mother’s generation, but also the voice of mine. At 62, he maneuvers his way around the subjects that fill my picket signs in a way most people my age could never find the words for. That exact reason serves as the foundation of why he still manages to matter on his fourth decade of making music, when others seem to have become out of touch.
Even today, Bruce Springsteen is the voice of the American people.
It is that connection and passion, placed over the legendary E-Street band, that makes Wrecking Ball both the best album of 2012 and Springsteen’s best album in thirty years.
If you don’t spin this record, you simply have no place being a fan of music. If you do give it a listen and are not instantly inspired to change the world, you have no heart. This record is a piece of Americana, leading the march of the next generation of protest singers. Make sure your voice is heard.
SCORE: 10/10
Review written by: Joshua Hammond
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