Meet the new Boss - not the same as the old Boss! Or is he? When you think about it, this is quite possibly the least surprising album of Springsteen’s entire career. Despite his glory days as a rocker beyond compare circa Born To Run/Darkness On The Edge Of Town, he has always been a folk artist, in spirit if not in deed. Blue collar credentials aside, he was once touted as the “new Dylan” and signed to Columbia by the legendary John Hammond on the basis of a bunch of acoustic demos. His first couple of albums had songs such as the decidedly folksy ‘Mary Queen Of Arkansas’ and the carnival folk-jazz of ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story’. In the intervening years he’s recorded any number of folk standards, from Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and ‘Vigilante Man’ to Dylan’s ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ and Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’. Even something like his own ‘I’m On Fire’ – a hit single, remember – from his most commercial album, Born In The USA (and later recorded by Johnny Cash) is a folk song by any other name.
The logical conclusion to all that is this fully-fledged, all-acoustic album of traditional American songs and ballads made popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s by the legendary Pete Seeger (still going strong at 87). Recorded over three beer ‘n’ whiskey soaked sessions on the Springsteen family farm in New Jersey with a cast of a dozen or so largely unknown musicians, it amounts to a knees-up par excellence with Bruce as bandleader and party-host directing the proceedings with a looseness and bonhomie that he’s rarely shown on record. The results are sometimes spectacular and never less than compelling; this is joyous, uplifting and exuberant stuff, especially on irresistibly toe-tapping fare like ‘Old Dan Tucker’, ‘John Henry’, ‘Froggie Went A Courtin’’ and a definite highlight, ‘Pay Me My Money Down’ (which has the new line, “I wish I was Mr Gates…they’d haul my money in, in crates”. The Irish “rebel” ballad ‘Mrs McGrath’ (me neither!) will be of interest in these parts while the gently rollicking ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’ (Mary, again!) and similarly-paced ‘Eyrie Canal’ are made for audience participation.
Despite the plethora of organic sounds which, along with guitars, includes banjo, accordion, fiddle and horns, all fighting to be heard, it never amounts to the racket you might expect. On the contrary, it’s a great sounding record, a warm and sepia-toned string-driven thing, with a deep bottom-end thanks to the floor-shaking upright bass. The only song that seems out of place here is the title-track – the clichéd Civil Rights anthem sounding a tad dated, while his voice on the otherwise beautifully arranged ‘Shenandoah’ appears to be off-key at times. These minor complaints aside, this is a triumph which in time will be likened to The Band’s Basement Tapes, Van Morrison’s collaboration with the Chieftains on Irish Heartbeat and Billy Bragg’s Wilco-assisted Woody Guthrie project Mermaid Avenue (it’s also been compared to The Kinks masterpiece Muswell Hillbillies). Whether it’ll be seen as a side-project or a permanent new direction for Springsteen, only time will tell but on this evidence the upcoming live shows will be unmissable (the package comes with a DVD featuring video footage and a high-resolution DVD-audio version of the album.)
That’s all folk!