McNutt Against the Music (EP)

Bruce Springsteen - “Wrecking Ball” (Live at Giants Stadium, October 2009)

Sometimes, I’m asked to explain why it is that I hold Bruce Springsteen in such high regard. I have MANY reasons, but chief among them is that I’ve never found another songwriter so great at grounding sweeping, broad canvas emotion—a requirement of great pop music—in the world of the ordinary. “Wrecking Ball,” now announced as the title track of his new album, is case in point: ostensibly, it’s a song about a stadium being torn down, but that’s just the plot at hand. What “Wrecking Ball” is really ABOUT is coming to terms with a life well-lived—the joys, the tears, the triumphs, the pains—and greeting the oncoming conclusion with the same proud defiance. Springsteen’s brilliance is spelling out greater meanings without losing the tangible in the process.

Related: Though it’s clearly a farewell album in hindsight, I totally missed the cues on R.E.M.’s Collapse Into Now that suggested it as such. Between “Wrecking Ball,” the mission-statement-esque “We Take Care of Our Own”—which has the same fusion of irony and sincerity that made “Born in the USA” compelling (and, to some people, confusing)—and the resurrection of the utopian “Land of Hope and Dreams”…I can’t shake the feeling that Springsteen is perhaps laying the groundwork for his own goodbye.