Album Review: Bruce Springsteen - We Shall Overcome

Who is this old guy? The Boss provided the artistic response to 9/11 with 2002's The Rising and in many ways his newest album feels like an acknowledgement of Katrina, minus some of the moodiness of The Rising. There are times when you feel as though you're sitting on a barstool in the Bourbon Street of old. "Old Dan Tucker", the first song on the album can only be described as "rip-roarin'". Horns! Fiddles! Springsteen's increasingly raspy voice! Some ragtime piano! To be sure, Springsteen leads a musical tour here--track 3, "Mrs. McGrath", is an Irish dirge of sorts and track 4 is an African American spiritual with lyrics like "Pharaoh's army got drown-ded"--but songs like "Jacob's Ladder", "Pay Me My Money Down" and "Froggie Went a Courtin'" keep the CD rooted in the Bayou. Yet even better than the sound of the album is the storytelling. Springsteen channels Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie on tracks like "John Henry", a simple yet fascinating song about a hammer. On "My Oklahoma Home", Springsteen complains that in the dust bowl "everything but my mortgage blew away". A perfect song for post-Katrina New Orleans.