Album of the Week: Magic

Ten years ago this fall Bruce Springsteen released “Magic,” the first album he had put out with the E Street Band at full force since 1984. Barack Obama’s election was a year away and a lot of America was still coming to terms with how the world and the country had changed during the two terms of George W. Bush. While “Magic” is a very driven rock album, it’s also a pointed criticism of the actions and consequences of the Bush administration. It’s arguably Bruce’s most political album to date. 

Sadly, the idea of criticizing George W. Bush as misguided and incompetent seems almost quaint now. To be fair, most of the album doesn’t really go after the man himself, but tells the stories of characters, some of them returning veterans, experiencing the confusion and disillusionment of defending a country and a set of ideals that don’t seem to follow through as expected. The title track is the only song addressing this theme directly, or as directly as you can through metaphor, bringing forth a thinly-veiled attack on the politics of distraction that are at least as present now as they were ten years ago: “Trust none of what you hear, less of what you see / This is what we’ll be.”

Even with all of that, I still think of it as a summertime album, in the most positive of ways. In fact, the first time I got behind the wheel of my car to drive anywhere after my final work day of the school year, “Magic” was the album I played. It seems to creep back into the rotation for awhile at the beginning of each summer. 

The songs, regardless of the stories they tell, boil down to relationships. Much of the music follows a recognizable template used in many of Bruce’s songs, in which he will contrast the joyful bounce of a rock-and-roll party anthem with depressing, and even nihilistic, lyrics. I’ve always been able to take in this album on two levels: thinking about the political statement, and enjoying the musical tone: the storm warning siren saxophone solo by the late, great Clarence Clemons in the middle of “Radio Nowhere;” the organ part from “Living in the Future” that echoes right out of half the songs on “The River” album from 1981; the self-assured strut of “You’ll Be Coming Down;” the mid tempo warm-weather carnival romance of “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.”

Like most of Bruce’s albums — and, let’s face the facts, like most albums period — there are a few songs here that don’t carry their weight. That’s okay, though. When you take an album as a continuous piece of music instead of just a collection of songs, even the weaker moments play their roles in contributing to the overall narrative. There are three or four songs here that I don’t think I’ve ever included on any derivation of a “Best Of Bruce” playlist, but when I listen to the whole album all the way through, they’re just as essential as any of my favorites. 

Like I said eariler, “Magic” came out in the fall of 2007, which, if memory serves, was within a month of when I sold my town home and bought my house, which serendipitously happened about three weeks before the housing market went underwater. Bruce and the E Street Band toured behind the album, and came to St. Paul sometime later that spring — I’m thinking March, but don’t quote me on that. My cousin John came up to the Cities and stayed with me so we could see the show. We’d bought four tickets, and the other two went to my sister Jenny and the guy she was dating, David. I don’t have the timeline locked down on this, but I think I’d already met David for the first time by then, a few months earlier at Thanksgiving. Either way I hadn’t spent much time with him before the concert, so it turned out to be another chance to get to know him better. 

A few years down the road and he became my brother-in-law. Since he showed himself early on to be the kind of guy who would bring my sister to a Springsteen concert, he scored some good points with me.

It was not the last Springsteen concert we both attended.