Album Companion: Wrecking Ball

In the fickle field of popular music, few artists maintain their audience a half-century into their career. Those who do benefit from a back catalog deemed “timeless,” “classic,” or any other of a host of synonyms that imply a free pass from producing relevant new material.

But even amongst this select group, only an elite pantheon can claim a second half that’s even stronger than their first.

No one exemplifies that kind of vitality better than Bruce Springsteen.

Although it may seem like anathema to those of us who grew up on classics like Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Born in the U.S.A., if we set aside our formative history with these undeniably great albums it’s hard to argue they’re not artistically surpassed by The Rising, Working on a Dream, and Western Stars.

(It almost seems unfair to compare any album to the sublime Western Stars, so much does it outdistance the rest of Springsteen’s work. But that’s exactly my point: that high-water mark came at an astonishing 46 years into his career.)

And then there is Wrecking Ball, by far the best and most summational E Street Band album. If you want to introduce Bruce’s music to someone who’s never heard it before, there’s no better and stronger document of his lifelong themes than his seventeenth studio album.

Released in late 2011, Wrecking Ball represented a turning point in Bruce’s songwriting. After four decades of penning intimate profiles of characters struggling to survive–let alone rise above–the economic wreckage of the American dream, Springsteen closed that chapter with a mic-drop of an opening run unparalleled in its thematic cohesion:

• “We Take Care of Our Own” welds the righteous anger and empathy of “Born in the U.S.A.” to the joyously galvanizing adrenaline rush of “Badlands” and outdoes both of them as opener on both disc and stage.
• “Easy Money” is a slyer “Atlantic City” that compares unrepentant pinstriped executives to the connected mobsters of Bruce’s 1982 classic, contrasting the former’s jubilant criminal embrace to the latter’s existential reluctance.
• “Shackled and Drawn” marries the monotony of “Factory” working life to the fatalism of “The River” and wraps them in an irresistible mélange that’s part carnival, part revival, and part shanty. If Bruce is the bard of the working man, there’s no better ode to the satisfaction of honest work than this.
• “Jack of All Trades” is one of the oldest songs on the album, both in origin and sound. Written at the height of the Great Recession, Springsteen employs a Depression-era arrangement of strings, tuba, and bass drum to condemn and contextualize our inability to learn the lessons of history more effectively than songs like “The Ghost of Tom Joad” could with lyrics alone.
• “Death to My Hometown” is of course a direct sequel to “My Hometown,” the son from Bruce’s 1985 Top Ten single now a father teaching life lessons to a son of his own.  Springsteen constructs a song that’s astonishingly parallel to its predecessor structurally and thematically, while casting it in a backing track as martial as the original is nostalgic. It’s powerful enough on its own, but it’s devastating when you recognize the connection.

Find me a stronger while still thematically cohesive opening five-pack anywhere in Bruce’s catalog, and forgive me if I don’t wait.

I don’t think you’ll find it, because these are songs that could only be written by an artist exhausted from decades of calling out social and economic inequality and exasperated by a perennial lack of accountability.

Although he’d hinted at it in songs like “Two Faces” and “Something in the Night,” Wrecking Ball also features Springsteen’s most intimate insights into his as-yet-unrevealed lifelong struggle with chronic depression.

Both “This Depression” and “Swallowed Up (In the Belly of the Whale)” (one of two essential tracks categorized as “bonus” for some unfathomable reason) are deeply informed by his own personal struggles.

Ever the magician, Bruce managed to slip both songs by critics and fans by camouflaging them on an album more outward focused than inward. It’s a tribute to his skill and subtlety as songwriter that both work in either context. The latter especially is an essential listen; more than any other song on the album, it sums up the themes of Wrecking Ball.

For vinyl aficionados, Disc Two kicks off with the only two songs out of sync with the album. The first, ironically, is the title track.

“Wrecking Ball” was written in 2009 as a farewell to the storied Giants Stadium. Bruce anthropomorphizes the arena as a past-his-prime prize-fighter who refuses to step aside at the suggestion that his time is past, and it’s clear to anyone familiar with the artist that there’s more than a little projection at play.

A cocktail of nostalgia, defiance, and solidarity, “Wrecking Ball” was an instant fan-favorite anthem. It’s an older and wiser “Badlands,” twice as stubborn and four times as joyful. It’s the definitive anthem of the second half of Bruce’s career, and if it’s thematically out of place on the album it lends its name to, we can forgive that for the middle finger it gives to any critic who dares to review the album through a “classic rock” lens.

And then there’s “You’ve Got It,” the only thing that keeps Wrecking Ball away from perfect album status. As long-time readers know, I’m as much a fan of Bruce’s pop trifles as his more sober work, but “You’ve Got It” is no “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.” It’s inoffensive, and that’s about the most I can say about it.

The album finishes as strongly as it opens, with a run of four songs that rank not just among the best of his modern catalog but across his entire five-decade body of work.

• “Rocky Ground” is the most artistically daring and nuanced song on the album, employing gospel tropes to contrast the battle between faith and pragmatism.
• “Land of Hope and Dreams” was written long before the rest of the album, of course, dating back to the E Street Band’s Reunion Tour. You wouldn’t know it from its placement on the album though–it reflects the themes of Wrecking Ball but offers the hope of a better and more accepting tomorrow. The first words I ever wrote for this blog were, In a better world, “Land of Hope and Dreams” would be our national anthem. It’s certainly my personal one. It’s still true, and it remains my favorite Springsteen song to this day.
• “We Are Alive” carries that optimism through a tour of tragedy and cruelty to a place of connection and community, conjuring voices from the past to offer faith for the future and urge perseverance.
• “American Land” closes the album by adapting a Slovakian dirge into an anthem of righteous fury and relentless optimism. Bruce came to it through Pete Seeger and adapted it for his short-lived Sessions Band. It turned out to be a perfect album and show-closer for the E Street Band, just as “We Take Care of Our Own” turned out to be the perfect opener.

Wrecking Ball was more than an artistic success–it was also the commercial success it deserved to be, or at least as much as we could hope for in the crowded 21st-century musical landscape. It debuted at #1 in the U.S., the U.K. and fourteen other countries, tying him for third with Elvis for the most Number One albums of all time. (He’d go on to have one more.)

Rolling Stone awarded Wrecking Ball their Best Album of the Year accolade, and the Grammy Awards honored it with three nominations. (It won none.)

And it wasn’t just the album–the tour was a smash success, too. Featuring a stellar array of backing vocalists and the welcome return of a full horn section–including Jake Clemons ably stepping into his uncle’s oversized shoes in this first tour since The Big Man’s passing–the super-sized E Street Band sounded brighter, bolder, and more nimble than ever.

As the tour progressed over two years (morphing along the way into the High Hopes Tour), Bruce took fans on a career-spanning tour of reinvented classics, never-played deep cuts, and daringly inventive covers–all interwoven with Wrecking Ball material that sounded both as fresh and as timeless as anything in Bruce’s catalog.

More than a decade on, Wrecking Ball stands tall as one of Springsteen’s finest albums. Even if you reject my ranking of it above his classic albums of the 1970s and 1980s, surely we can agree that the title track deserves its nightly spotlight on his current tour, and both “Land of Hope and Dreams” and “Death to My Hometown” deserved their cameos.

If you haven’t done so recently, do yourself a favor and give Wrecking Ball a fresh listen. You’ll enjoy the work of a rock and roll titan at the peak of his powers, captured on an album that’s likely to stand the test of time as one of his very best.

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every week!