New Springsteen in April

[BlueChair]

Found this on Billboard:

Springsteen Stares Down 'Devils' On New Album

Bruce Springsteen re-teams with producer Brendan O'Brien on his 19th album, "Devils & Dust," which Columbia will release on April 26. The 12-track set follows the format of Springsteen's '90s studio work, in which he was surrounded by a rotating cast of collaborators, including some members of the E Street Band.

The title cut has been in Springsteen's catalog for several years, and was dusted off in soundchecks for the E Street Band's run on last fall's Vote for Change tour, but never performed at a show.

Two of the tracks -- "Long Time Comin'" and "The Hitter" -- date back at least 10 years and were performed during the tour in support of the 1995 album "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

Like much of the material on that set, the songs are both first-person narratives, using details and fragmented scenes to sketch out a life's story. The first is about a father celebrating the optimism that comes with an awaited child; the second about a street fighter nearing the end of an unenviable career.

Springsteen will tour in support of the new album, but no details have been announced as to who will back him or what size venues he will play.

"Devils & Dust" is the artist's first studio album since 2002's O'Brien-produced "The Rising," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 2.09 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The tour in support of the set grossed $221.5 million from 121 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore.

As previously reported, Springsteen won a Grammy on Sunday for best solo rock vocal performance for the "Code of Silence," which was released on the 2003 collection "The Essential Bruce Springsteen."

Here is the track list for "Devils & Dust":

"Devils & Dust"
"All The Way Home"
"Reno"
"Long Time Comin'"
"Black Cowboys"
"Maria's Bed"
"Silver Palomino"
"Jesus Was an Only Son"
"Leah"
"The Hitter"
"All I'm Thinkin' About"
"Matamoras Banks"

[Jackson Monk]

great stuff!

[BlueChair]

Another article is reporting that "Springsteen said the accompanying tour would be an acoustic affair whether he performs alone or with a band, targeting theaters and smaller venues."

[Jackson Monk]

I'll look out for him at the Corby Steelworkers Union Club then.

[martinfoyle]

A week at Whelans would do nicely, thank you. Elvis could do support.

[VonOfterdingen]

New Album - what a pleasant surprise

[Pov]

I am VERY excited about this I hear it's going to be essentially an accoustic record, maybe with some country flavor.

[bambooneedle]

From http://www.backstreets.com/news.html :

Springsteen's 19th album, Devils & Dust will be released on April 26. Not an E Street Band project, the album features the primary trio of Springsteen, Steve Jordan (drums), and Brendan O'Brien (bass). Produced (as The Rising was) by O'Brien, the new album was recorded at Thrill Hill Recording Studios in Los Angeles and New Jersey with additional engineering at Southern Tracks in Atlanta.

Speaking to Larry McShane of the Associated Press this week about the forthcoming album, Springsteen said, "A lot of it is set in the west, in what feels like a rural setting." In that sense, and judging by the song titles, it would seem to share much with 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad. But while we're anticipating a return to that storytelling vein, don't look for Tom Joad II; our impression is that this record will go in more different directions (including a fair share of rockage), with a fuller sound as opposed to the more uniform folk fare of Tom Joad. Still, according to McShane, the album is a "quieter, more acoustic affair than The Rising... pedal steel guitar, harmonica and violin fill in the sparse, rootsy arrangements."

[so lacklustre]

Same date as the new Eels album 'BLINKING LIGHTS AND OTHER REVELATIONS' . Some samplers here:

http://www.eelstheband.com/main.asp

[invisible Pole]

Some more news on the upcoming album:
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/artic ... 1000828375

Springsteen Spiffs Up 'Devils & Dust'

Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Devils & Dust," will be released in DualDisc format on April 26. In addition to the standard audio tracks on one side, the DVD side will sport acoustic renditions of the title track, "Long Time Comin'," "Reno," All I'm Thinkin' About" and "Matamoras Banks," filmed by Danny Clinch last month in New Jersey.

In addition, Springsteen has added his extensive introductions to the tracks. The DVD also boasts a 5.1 Surround Sound mix of the album.

"Devils & Dust" will be available as a deluxe edition, with exclusive photographs and what the label describes as "unique, song-specific elements" for each of the 12 tracks. This version will also be issued as a DualDisc.

The new album follows the format of Springsteen's '90s studio work, in which he eschewed the presence of the full E Street Band and was instead surrounded by a rotating cast of collaborators. The core band features only Springsteen on guitar, producer Brendan O'Brien on bass and Steve Jordan (Steely Dan, Keith Richards) on drums. The latter also produced Springsteen's wife Patti Scialfa's 2004 Columbia studio album, "23rd Street Lullaby."

An acoustic tour is in the works but no dates have yet been announced.

[King Hoarse]

My Springsteen freak friend says the tour will start out solo (maybe with Soozie Tyrell), then pick up one member after the other along the way until next year the whole of E Street & maybe more will be there, playing bigger & bigger venues, possibly climaxing in another already recorded E Street record.

I think that's probably the way the tour will progress but I guess the E Street record is more of a rumour.

I for one hope to see him solo at last, 'cause those are the parts of the band concerts I've attended I liked the best. Especially the opening three songs in Stockholm circa 1993: 1. Seeds (with beautiful new melody) 2. Adam Raised A Cain (almost a Dylan impersonation, but incredibly great) 3. This Hard Land (which we only knew from bootlegs at this point)

[invisible Pole]

King Hoarse wrote :

My Springsteen freak friend says the tour will start out solo (maybe with Soozie Tyrell), then pick up one member after the other along the way until next year the whole of E Street & maybe more will be there

You mean like an extended version of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense concert ?

[clairequilty]

If Springsteen has 19 albums I must've slept for a decade.

Even allowing for 1 live and 1 greatest hits, i count about 14.

[King Hoarse]

My guess at that count:

1. Greetings
2. Wild Innocent
3. Born To Run
4. Darkness
5. River
6. Nebraska
7. USA
8. Live box
9. Tunnel
10. Human
11. Lucky
12. Plugged
13. Greatest Hits
14. Tom Joad
15. Tracks
16. 14 (?) Tracks
17. Live NY
18. Rising
19. Devils & Dust

[clairequilty]

Every artist in my opinion is allowed 1 hits record and one live record (which I accomodated for in my post), so beyond that, can you tell me bout the wonderful remixes/reissues/live witticisms on Tracks, or Plugged, or Live NY? or 14 (?) Tracks?

Come on, Elvis has 20 plus records of released original material.

I'm as big a BS fan as the next guy, but to allude to a 19 album backlog is just not correct. He held back for years (it seems) between most albums (to our benefit) so to credit him with 19 appears forgiving.

Shit, The Beatles probably released 8 albums, but nobody discounts them.

All I'm saying is anyone who has followed Srpingsteen could not look back in their heart over the last 33 years and fondly recall 19 new releases. We wish!

[bambooneedle]

Here's the proposed album cover:


Other Springsteen news is that he'll be featured on VH1's Storytellers in April and that the Dual Disc format release of Devils & Dust, as reported on above by Invisible Pole, will be for the US only. Elsewhere will get everything on two separate discs instead, on a CD and a DVD (at extra cost? Hope not). Springsteen is reported to have agreed to the Dual Disc format only if it is sold for no more than a regular CD.

[invisible Pole]

This is from: http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/artic ... 1000855505

Springsteen Single To Premiere Monday

The title track and first single from Bruce Springsteen's upcoming album, "Devils & Dust," will premiere beginning 12:01 AM Monday (March 28) via AOL Music's First Listen initiative. The next day, it will be exclusively available for download from Apple's iTunes Music Store for a week.

[Who Shot Sam?]

Just listened to this, here:

http://boots.illusionfxnet.com/Devils%2 ... 20Dust.mp3

Very stripped down opening, reminiscent of some of the stuff from "Nebraska". Nice work on harmonica. I'll have to listen to this a few more times before I know what I think of it. Even with the echoes of "Nebraska", the tune's structure is closer to some of the stuff on "The Rising" - that kind of slow build up. Don't really know what to make of the "God on our side" references. Made me think immediately of Dylan and Iraq, of course - devils, dust, hmmmm....

[VonOfterdingen]

Springsteens tour dates - (including Copenhagen ) But it will be close to impossible to get hold of a ticket

http://gaffa.dk/live/view.php/news_id=13397

[martinfoyle]

I downloaded this album earlier this evening and have given it a few spins. Initial impressions are that it's a cross between Tunnel of Love and Tom Joad. Rolls long nicely, gets quite quiet towards the end. It's a good one, I'll be buying a copy this weekend.

[VonOfterdingen]

Me too - together with two copies of King of America and EC live dvd.
That's a nice order i think

[bambooneedle]

Springsteen is sharp on edgy 'Devils'
By Steve Morse, Globe Staff | April 22, 2005

Once a decade, Bruce Springsteen unstraps his electric guitar, goes acoustic, and makes music that marks him as a Woody Guthrie of his time. In the '80s, he issued ''Nebraska," then came ''The Ghost of Tom Joad" in the '90s, and now ''Devils & Dust," which arrives in stores Tuesday.


The new disc has some seriously dark moments, but it's not as grim as ''Tom Joad." That record was the poorest-selling of Springsteen's career, so he may have taken stock. The new album is again laden with humans on the edge (''These are all people who are in danger or at risk," Springsteen says in the DVD portion of this DualDisc), but five of the 12 songs are filled with hope and optimism, providing much-needed release.

Springsteen's sermons and songs inspire on VH1's ''Storytellers." D12

''The characters on this record are all trying to find their way," Springsteen says on the DVD, which contains solo acoustic performances of five tunes. ''Some do it somewhat successfully -- and some come to tragic ends."

The net result is an emotional powerhouse -- a high-water mark of Springsteen's career that has seen him go from Asbury Park party boy to literary folk poet of the Western prairie and desert. He compels us to feel for the dust-swept soldier in the somber title track, the displaced street kid in ''Black Cowboys" (which could serve as a companion piece to ''Sinaloa Cowboys" from ''Tom Joad"), the boy grieving his mother in ''Silver Palomino," and the men who have found joy and salvation through committed love relationships in ''All the Way Home" and ''Leah."

Although Springsteen spent last fall doing shows to support John Kerry's presidential campaign, there is an absence of political rhetoric, though the title track was inspired by the Iraq war. It was written just after the start of the war and deals with the anxiety of an American soldier, though Iraq is not specifically mentioned. ''Fear's a dangerous thing and it can turn your heart black . . . I've got my finger on the trigger and tonight faith just ain't enough," Springsteen sings.

The album, which contains songs he has written over the last 10 years, has more overall bounce than ''Tom Joad." There is some twangy country-rock that could have fit onto Springsteen's ''The River" album -- and though he sparingly uses a few members of his regular E Street Band (notably wife Patti Scialfa on harmonies), he stretches out by playing guitar, keyboards, and drums on the euphoric ''All I'm Thinking About." He happily repeats that phrase 24 times as he depicts a man who can't wait to get home. ''Ain't nothin' in this world I can do about it -- all I'm thinking about is you," he sings in a vein similar to ''Mary's Place" from his previous album, ''The Rising." Continued...

Page 2 of 2 -- The darker songs, however, are absolutely heart wrenching. ''Reno" is unlike anything he has done -- a bluesy lament about a hooker who thinks she is really pleasing her client (''She poured me another whiskey, said 'Here's to the best you ever had' "), yet the protagonist concludes, ''It wasn't the best I ever had/ It wasn't even close." The graphic imagery includes a reference to a sex act and is responsible for the disclaimer on the CD jacket: ''This song contains some adult imagery."

Springsteen also explores the bonds between mothers and sons in several mournful numbers. The most affecting is ''Silver Palomino," about a boy whose mother's hand ''slips from his hair" as she dies. He then rides into the mountains and spies a palomino whose spirit is as untamed as his mother's. It's an exalting image. The song is followed by the lightly syncopated ''Jesus Was an Only Son," describing one's mother as ''a light you'll never see in another face."

Further probing these bonds are the recitative ''Black Cowboys" (about a son who runs away after his mother is corrupted by the law-breaking behavior of a new lover) and the spellbinding ''The Hitter," about a boxer who has punched himself into a world of no restraint and mercy yet shows up at his mother's door on a rainy night, saying, ''I ask of you nothin', not a kiss, not a smile/ Just open the door and let me lie down for a while."

Springsteen, who performs a sold-out show at the Orpheum May 20, concludes with the prayerful piece de resistance, ''Matamoros Banks." It ingeniously backtracks a man's journey from the bottom of the Rio Grande, where he has died after trying to cross the border from Mexico to Texas, back to the safety of his lover's arms at home.

It's also a poignant highlight on the flip-side DVD, on which a black-garbed Springsteen sings alone in a dimly framed corner of a country house, lit only by an antique lamp. These live performances are more downcast than the overall tone of the album, and he adds an extended keening wail to ''Matamoros Banks" that is absent from the CD version.

Springsteen's songwriting has never been more precise. The balance he achieves on the album between light and dark, joy and despair, assures that it will touch his most diehard fans, even though it may be too real for a marketplace that seems to require an endless supply of escapism.

=========

By David Fricke http://www.Rollingstone.com

Bruce Springsteen's thirteenth studio album is, in many ways, his most conventional singer-songwriter record since his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. Devils and Dust is twelve songs of assorted vintage and narrative setting, rendered with a subdued, mostly acoustic flair that smells of wood smoke and sparkles in the right places like stars in a clear Plains sky. There is no connected, redemptive urgency to these stories; this is not The Rising. And there is no E Street Band to turn Springsteen's trademark compulsion to save and be saved into fireball baptism: You get Steve Jordan on drums, producer Brendan O'Brien on bass and Springsteen on almost everything else, with his wife, singer Patti Scialfa, and E Street violinist Soozie Tyrell making brush-stroke appearances.
Yet Devils and Dust is, in striking and affecting ways, also Springsteen's most audacious record since the home-demo American Gothic of 1982's Nebraska. It opens with mortal sin -- the title song, a sand-caked letter home from a war where both sides kill in God's name -- and ends in death: "Matamoros Banks," a prayer for remembrance by an illegal immigrant who doesn't make it across the Rio Grande. With its tender fingerpicking, singing-wire curls of dobro and soft, billowing orchestration, "Reno" floats like a night breeze through an open bedroom window. But the sex inside is adulterous and graphic, and it costs: " 'Two hundred dollars straight in/Two-fifty up the ass,' she smiled and said." In the next song, "Long Time Comin'," Springsteen uses the word "fuck" for the first time on record, in the sense of swearing never to screw up again. There is no apology, though, in "The Hitter": A fallen boxer frankly recalls the brutality of a life in which a man is paid to all but murder other men for entertainment. Springsteen first played the song in his 1995-1997 solo acoustic shows; he sings it here with a vivid, craggy exhaustion. The knockout punch actually comes in the first verse -- the palooka is confessing to his mother. After that, it's all blood, shards of bone and universal guilt: "Understand, in the end, Ma, every man plays the game/ If you know one different, then speak out his name." "The Hitter" is one of several songs on Devils and Dust that Springsteen wrote almost a decade ago, in a concentrated burst of inspiration as he toured behind the spectral-country song cycle, 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad. He reprises the dust-bowl topography and marooned spirits of that album with moving results. In "Long Time Comin'," a rustic sprint lit with square-dance fiddle and pearly steel guitar, a father prays for his children as the family sleeps rough, under "the sword of Orion": "If I had one wish in this Godforsaken world, kids/It'd be that your mistakes would be your own." But Devils and Dust is also as immediate and troubling as this morning's paper. These people are our neighbors, and these worries are Springsteen's, too. He wrote the title song in 2003, after the start of the Iraq War, and it shows. His cracked, vocal agony when he looks his God in the eye ("I've got my finger on the trigger/And tonight faith just ain't enough") is as old as Stephen Crane and as fresh as Fallujah. "All the Way Home," in contrast, is much older than it seems, predating Springsteen's plunge into party politics last fall with the Vote for Change Tour. But he steps into the first lines -- "I know what it's like to have failed, baby/With the whole world lookin' on" -- with the grizzled force of experience. The specific echoes of the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" -- the bees-army buzz of sitar and tamboura coating the rolling twang -- are no accident either.

There are times, like Springsteen's outbreak of whispered falsetto in the campfire rockabilly of "All I'm Thinkin' About," when you can't help waiting for the E Street payoff that never comes. But many of Springsteen's best songs, going back to "Born to Run," are about the salvation just out of reach, around the next curve and over the next hill -- and what it takes to get there. The rewards are often slender here, when they come at all. Still, the promise never fades. "These days I don't stand on pride/ And I ain't afraid to take a fall," Springsteen sings with gravelly swagger in "All the Way Home" -- like a guy already back on his feet.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Or even sooner than April in 2009! January, even, for Working on a Dream. What with Bruce playing for Obama, at the Superbowl and the new LP, it' a busy old time. Splendid interview in yesterday's Observer Music Monthly with free download of an excellent new track, 'Life Itself'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/ja ... -interview

I found this interview incredibly moving. He's so honest, and he speaks so potently. I've had 'The River' in my head for days but only have it on cassette, so can't relieve the itch via iPod or CD! Will go back to the Copenhagen busking version off YouTube...

[BlueChair]

Springsteen gets snubbed at the Oscars! You'd think a live performance of "The Wrestler" would have been enough of a reason to nominate him for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture, but no, this year they decided to cut back the nominees in that category to three, one of which is Peter Gabriel's song from Wall-E and the other two being from Slumdog Millionaire.

The good news for Springsteen fans is that it appears that Darkness On The Edge Of Town will be receiving similar treatment as Born To Run did for its 30th anniversary.

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Bruce Springsteen is about to release a new album and play the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show, but there's another project in the works that will be welcomed by fans: a deluxe reissue of 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

The "Darkness" package will be similar to Columbia's 2005 30th-anniversary boxed-set treatment of the New Jersey rocker's "Born to Run." That reissue included a Grammy-winning documentary about the album's creation and a 1975 concert from London. It was a huge hit with fans, debuting at No. 18 on the U.S. album chart with first-week sales of more than 53,000 copies.

The new edition of "Darkness" will "involve remastering that record, doing the kind of super-creative reconstruction and documentary of how it all came about and finding usable live footage from that point in time," Springsteen manager Jon Landau told Billboard. "That's a big one, and not that far from completion, and when we can find six weeks to sit down and finish it, I'm sure we will."

[Otis Westinghouse]

Working on a Dream comes out here on Monday. The Guardian's review makes me want to get it, along with the fact that the above-mentioned downloadable 'Life Itself' sounds great:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/ja ... eam-review

In the mid-70s when Bowie had moved to the US he claimed he wanted to be Springsteen, identifying some sense of 'being real' as opposed to his own 'plastic soul' thing. Around this time he recorded 'Growing Up' and a few others. This segues neatly into another link from the above site, samples of Bowie backing vocalist and fellow traveller Geoff McCormack who has a book out of his Bowie photos and an exhibition of them in London right now that I'd love to see. 12 samples with commentary here. One is very famous (with the trilby, used for promo use, as mentioned in the notes), and many are great, but the one that stands out for me is in the studio during the recording of Station To Station, because Bowie famously can't remember a thing about recording the LP due to the cocaine and whatever else abuse. So seeing a photo of his stick thin self is a weird counter to that:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery ... =342181580