Greasy Lake Review: High Hopes
For an album that is, allegedly, mostly meant to tie up some loose ends and fulfill Bruce’s desire to release more music, the new High Hopes album, released last week, has been the subject of an unexpected controversy. Bruce shouldn’t include cover songs, he should write new songs instead of releasing leftovers, Tom Morello has no place on a Springsteen record, the music sucks … Those have been just some of the complaints from fans who have seemed personally insulted by Bruce’s choices.
Taste is taste and opinions are opinions, and everybody is entitled to theirs. There’s no doubt this is in some ways an unusual album: the inclusion of three cover songs, the re-recording of “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, the significant fingerprints by a non-E Street Band member on an otherwise mostly E Street Band album, the fact that there are no newly written songs on it. Those are all firsts for Bruce. However, including songs recorded for earlier projects? Not so much. Bruce has done that for almost as long as there has been such a thing as “earlier projects” for him.
Besides the fact that you can probably go through every Springsteen album and make an equally long list of “firsts” for every one of them (the Born to Run album was the first album that saw Bruce let in a new producer… Jon Landau), if you feel that these particular “firsts” somehow disqualify High Hopes from being a proper, worthwhile Springsteen album, that would be a mistake and deprive you of some pretty outstanding musical moments.
Back in the mid-Nineties, in an interview with Neil Strauss, Bruce, like he often did, expressed a desire to release more music, but what was more interesting was that he wanted to release albums based not so much on a lyrical common denominator, but on a sound or an instrument. He wanted to make a guitar album.
With High Hopes Bruce hasn’t made an album based on the guitar so much as an album based on a guitarist. Rather than a common theme or a common period in time, Tom Morello is the glue that holds High Hopes together. His instrument can be heard on most of the tracks, and he is directly responsible for at least two song inclusions: “High Hopes”, which he brought to Bruce’s attention before the Australian tour in 2013, and “Hunter of Invisible Game”, a Springsteen demo that Brendan O’Brien had played privately to Morello in the studio.
But although this isn’t a guitar album per se, it’s still the most guitar-oriented studio album Bruce has released. From Morello’s rhythmic licks on the title track to his majestic and frantic final solo of “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, we get numerous examples of his sublime technique that still somehow never gets in the way of the emotion he puts into his strings. This of course is a matter of taste. To these ears, his playing blends perfectly with Bruce’s music and adds new dimensions. The “scratch” sequence that culminates the “The Ghost of Tom Joad” solo is just one example of an unlikely and yet fitting addition to a song that, until recently, we thought was a somber folk tune.
High Hopes may not be as thematically structured as Wrecking Ball or Tunnel of Love or Magic, but it’s not like the songs point in 12 different directions. We are for the most part in familiar Bruce territory. Hope and dreams in the face of struggle. And violence. Violence seems to be running rampant. From the unspeakable violence lingering just beneath the surface in “Harry’s Place”, to the bloody river of “American Skin”, the aftermath of a terror attack in “Down in the Hole”, and the broken war veteran of “The Wall”, violence is all around, literally, or the consequences of it. Heck, even love uses a sword in “This Is Your Sword”.
Speaking of “The Wall”, if you thought High Hopes was just a bunch of random songs thrown randomly together, that segue from the screeching guitar attack of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to the no less powerful acoustic opening chords of “The Wall” must rank among the greatest pairings of any songs on any Springsteen album.
Stylistically, High Hopes is the perfect summary of the 21st century Bruce. Echoes of The Rising, Seeger Sessions, Devils & Dust, Magic, Working on a Dream, and Wrecking Ball are all present. While “Down in the Hole” is often - rightfully - compared with “I’m on Fire”, an even more obvious companion piece would be “Paradise” from The Rising. “This Is Your Sword” would have blended right in on Wrecking Ball, and “Frankie Fell in Love”, one of Bruce’s best garage rockers since The River album, would have been a great alternative to Working on a Dream’s “My Lucky Day”, which is the kind of song that would have come out of a computer programmed to write a Bruce Springsteen song.
If you need a new Springsteen song and don’t want to use a computer and don’t have the man himself on hand, the best solution may be to contact Australian alternative rock band The Saints. They wrote “Just Like Fire Would”, the second of three cover songs on High Hopes. Of all the songs on the album, this is perhaps the most archetypal Bruce Springsteen song, including Bruce’s own. Channeling his best 1978 voice, Bruce delivers a passionate and intense vocal performance that should convince even the skeptics that he owns this song as much as he owns Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped”. “Just Like Fire Would” was recorded in Australia mid-tour in 2013. Hopefully not the last time Bruce uses this approach.
So while most songs on High Hopes revisit styles from earlier projects, not everything sounds familiar. “High Hopes” itself points forward to a new E Street Band era of funky rhythms that may be modern, but are also rooted way back around The Wild, the Innocent. And “Heaven’s Wall” may have gospel written all over it, but there’s something else. Could it be - deliberate or not - Bruce’s first attempt at… disco? Horrifying to some. A minor revelation to those of us who, in our older days, all of a sudden find ourselves appreciating enticing bass lines and slightly cheesy synthesizer strings.
The album ends with the hypnotic “Dream Baby Dream” known from the Devils & Dust Tour. Repeating that live version in the studio would have been impossible. It took a two-hour concert to lead up to that and make it work. So here we get a more polished, stringent version that almost unnoticeably grows from a voice and keyboard to what sounds like a full orchestra.
And in much the same way, the High Hopes album grows on repeated listenings from insignificant to a fully-fledged Bruce Springsteen album that may not threaten Born to Run and Darkness on the throne of Bruce Springsteen albums, but which also cannot be dismissed as a throwaway of stale leftovers. Listen to the music and forget about the distractions. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll.