Back to the Badlands

摘要

Spirits are at home in Bruce Springsteen's new album, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," and not just the one in the title. These bare, half-whispered songs, many recorded with just Springsteen accompanying himself on guitar and keyboards, are crawling with ghosts of everyday life: drifters and freight-train jumpers, street kids and drug dealers, illegal immigrants and migrant workers, absentee fathers and vanished lovers. There are ghosts, too, of Springsteen's past songs: Mary, the heroine of "Thunder Road" and "The River," crops up in "Straight Time" with a cold new glint in her eye. But the ghost that most pervasively haunts "Tom Joad" is that of a scrawny, wiry loner who 13 years ago wrote a dark little masterpiece called "Nebraska." After its release, that loner kind of disappeared. Nobody's quite sure what happened to him. A bigger, buffer fellow took his place, and he wrote some good songs, too, but that scrawny guy was missed. So sorely missed, in fact, that even today people haven't forgotten about him.