Happy 20th Anniversary to Bruce Springsteen’s twelfth studio album The Rising, originally released July 30, 2002.
The E Street Band was back. After Bruce Springsteen decided to part ways with the beloved group in the late eighties, the band was dormant for a decade. Then, there was a world-conquering tour in 1999 and 2000, and even as they traversed the country delivering their special brand of heartland bar-band ecstasy, one thing had not yet been delivered: the triumphant studio album.
Springsteen’s studio output had been quiet for a while. Since breaking up the band, he had put out three records: the twin disappointments Lucky Town (1992) and Human Touch (1992) and The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), which is fine but suffers from comparisons to the inimitable Nebraska (1982). But, with his jolly backing band behind him, it was time for a return to form.
Then, September 11th happened. The story goes that Springsteen was sitting on a bench a few days later and a driver pulled up and said “Bruce, we need you.” Springsteen had an obligation to lift the country up on record in the same way that he and his band had been doing live for the past two years—and so the natural thing to do would be to deliver the loudest, most uplifting, joyful, American album he had ever done, bringing back the righteous anger and sense of place that can be heard on works like Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978).
That’s…not what happened. The fact that Springsteen’s 9/11 album is not a remake of Darkness has long puzzled me. This was his moment to make an enormous comeback, claim himself the once and future king of the tri-state area, and rally his people.
Instead, The Rising is Springsteen’s most aesthetically experimental album—gone are the character-driven sagas that defined his early work, as are most of the anthemic electric guitars and searing saxophone solos. The Rising has hand percussion, strings, and altogether a much more subdued nature than the post-9/11 jingoism would imply. (Let’s take a moment to recall that Neil Young, of all people, succumbed to the frenzy by writing “Let’s Roll.”) With massive national trauma to heal and a comeback to mount, The Rising is…not the record I would have expected.
Springsteen’s decision to not go all out and dive for the cliché is a testament to his gifts as an artist—he knew that the world was full of people doing Bruce Springsteen impressions, and so he had to go for the more complicated, grittier emotions that had started to define the 9/11 experience.
None of this happens at the expense of pathos. Album opener “Lonesome Day” starts with a low-key string motif that signals the arrival of the new aesthetic. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but then the turnaround, a guitar reaches the top of the scale seemingly a measure too early. The band is left hanging out in the white space before Max Weinberg is able to bring us back in with one of his glorious fills. This moment is signature E Street Band, but with a twist: the band would usually sit in the tension in order to build a more satisfying release, but the string motif from the beginning of the song wiggles its way in, just before the landing. Here, the softer string part adds just enough drama to earn a new kind of climax: the DNA of the E Street Band is still here, but it's not going to be used in the same way ever again.
That’s not to say that the band couldn’t do what they had once set out to do. The Darkness-reminiscent “Counting On A Miracle,” the hard-rocking “Further On (Up The Road),” and super-fun “Mary’s Place” show that the E Street Band can still summon up everything that they were known for—and two decades of touring after The Rising have proven this is still the case.
But Springsteen shows us here that his renewed sound is also going way more places than he ever had before. “You’re Missing” is a slow, violin-driven, loping piece that avoids the masculine drama of Springsteen’s best ballads (e.g., “Drive All Night” or “Racing In The Street”) and opts instead for straight despair. “Nothing Man,” another slower song, foreshadows Western Stars (2019) with its string-forward backing and narrative focused on the best things in life slipping away.
Generally, the experimentation works—I don’t think “Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin)” really holds up twenty years later, but in 2002, people needed to hear a lot of different things from Bruce Springsteen. I’m willing to bet that there were loads of people who loved the idea of Springsteen spending one telling them everything would be okay, that we can all just have a nice time. The maximalism of The Rising allows this one-on-one approach to work—not everything on this record is for everyone, but everyone can find something on it that speaks to them.
For my money, the masterpiece is “Paradise,” a song snuck between the ostentatious title track and the Dramatic Closer “My City of Ruins.” It’s so quiet you can almost miss it, and I definitely did my first few times through the record. It tells three stories, one about a suicide bomber, one about someone who lost a loved one in the Pentagon, and one about someone who attempts to drown themselves. Springsteen’s voice is high up in his register, fragile. He’s showing the audience that he’s moving on from everything that happened, choosing to live and build and make things better, but acknowledging that it is so hard to do so.
Twenty years later, it’s this honesty that still resonates with me—America needed Springsteen then, but the answer was not a rallying cry like Darkness On The Edge Of Town. It was an extended, sensitive record, with a new sound to match the new world that we had woken up in. It was a record that had more questions than answers, one that wasn’t hasty to jump to conclusions (Lord knows we needed that in 2002 more than we needed anything). I don’t find a lot of peace in The Rising, but I find peace in the fact that it even got made.
Enjoyed this article? Read more about Bruce Springsteen here:
Devils & Dust (2005) | Western Stars (2019) | Letter To You (2020)
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