The Ghost Of Tom Joad
Bruce
Springsteen
Columbia,
1995
Reviewed by
Thomas French
Ten years after the hype and mass adulation that surrounded him the mid-80s,
Bruce Springsteen stepped back out into the spotlight and delivered a quiet, haunting
masterpiece. His most devastating work since Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad
chronicles the lives of drifters, broken lovers, and lost souls trying to find their way
back home in a country that has already forgotten them.
The album is one long testament to the transforming power of empathy. Working with a
stripped-down band, Springsteen sheds his own skin and silently slips into the lives of
his burned-out characters. Bruce was always a talented writer, but here he cuts it to the
bone, carving out each story with the sparest detail and understated emotion. "The
New Timer" follows a migrant worker riding freight trains and wondering if his son
back home still remembers his face. "Sinaloa Cowboys" tells of two brothers who
leave Mexico and wind up working in a crystal meth lab in California. There is an
explosion, and in the end one of the brother buries the other in a hole in the ground they
have already dug to hide their profits.
In the title song, Springsteen takes us on an angry tour of modern-day America, seen
through the eyes of those whom the economic boom has left behind. We walk railroad tracks
with unemployed workers who have no place to go, meet families forced to live out of their
cars, crouch in front of a campfire with anonymous men and women, all hoping for something
they cannot name. "He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag/Preacher lights up
a butt and takes a drag/Waitin' for when the last shall be first and the first shall be
last/In a cardboard box 'neath the underpass."
Springsteen's 11th album is beautiful, unforgettable, absolutely fearless in its
willingness to go searching in places most songwriters would rather not even think about.
Four years after its release, The Ghost of Tom Joad only grows in its ability to
astonish.
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