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That Springsteen so liberally uses such elemental images-river, stone, ocean bed, dust, moon, bone-is not accidental. The pale moon opens the earth to its bones

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My pockets full of dust, my mouth filled with cool stone I walk on sandals of twine and tire tread Over rivers of stone and ancient ocean beds Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanksįascinating and instantly arresting as the opening verse is, the second verse ups the emotional ante by taking a step backwards in time, to when the narrator was just starting out on his journey. That's the opening verse-a corpse, desecrated by animals, bobs to the surface of the water in which the singer died, and it leads to the chorus, simpler than the plainest hymn: That the things of heaven may do the sameĪgain with the contrasting imagines of water and stone, heaven and earth, leading to an interesting assertion, that clothes are evidence of who you were-an echo of the well-known phrase 'the clothes make the man,' a saying that goes back at least as far as Mark Twain-setting up and in some ways seemingly refuting the earth/heaven balancing of the next couplet, while that couplet at the same time echoes the belief that only by giving up one's earthly possessions can one enter the kingdom of heaven. 'Till every trace of who you ever were is goneĪnd the things of the earth they make their claim Your clothes give way to the current and river stone And, amazingly, it's not presented with any sort of ironic tone. and hey! now you can see the stars all the time-isn't that nice? look, I'm not going to come right out and say you're better off this way.but. but in a glass half-full kind of way, they were, you know, kinda cute wild animals. Sure, you were eaten by eaten by wild animals. Such a horrible thing, and yet here it's portrayed as almost a boon. The first line is delightful and grim in one sentence, but the second half of the couplet combines brutality and effulgence. But the next sentence ups the ante considerably, as the corpse's eyelids are eaten by animals, allowing them to view the stars without obstruction. These lines are a remarkable study in contrast, with the pleasant, youthful connotation of the playgrounds immediately juxtaposed against the derelict train yards.

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The turtles eat the skin from your eyes so they lay open to the stars Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards Meanwhile, the second half of the sentence will come to assume more significance a little later on. But more than that, it's an upending of the more common view of a river in literature, which is as a giver of life, and bringer of civilization. Opening with the flat assertion that the river holds you down is probably not meant as an in-joke, per se, but when dealing with a writer of Springsteen's nature and calibre, it's unlikely it wouldn't have occurred to him. Then you rise to the light without a sound

Given that the song opens with the narrator's dead body being eaten by wild animals, this is no mean feat. An admitted sequel of sorts to Tom Joad's 'Across the Border'-itself a tribute to Ry Cooder's 'Across the Borderline'-it bookends the opening title track with its ambiguity, religious questions and focus on death and love, but with a markedly more upbeat tone (if not tempo). 'Matamoros Banks,' the LP's closing song, is one of the album's strongest, and one of Springsteen's sweetest-albeit of a decidedly bittersweet nature-since his commercial revival. Kind of a lot for a hodgepodge of old and new songs, all of which were newly recorded with producer Brendan O'Brien. The album shared Tom Joad's exploration of the southwestern area of the United States, as well presaging his next LP's meditation on the Iraq War, while also continuing Springsteen's obsession with familial bonds and religion. Some of them were brilliant (the title track, 'Reno,' the 'Rosalita' sequel 'Long Time Comin''), some were.not, even if well-intentioned ('Black Cowboys,' 'Silver Palomino') and some were simply enjoyable if surprisingly lightweight love songs ('Leah,' 'Maria's Bed,' 'All the Way Home,' 'All I'm Thinkin' About'). His seventh #1 album, a solo album sorta kinda fitting into a trilogy with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad almost, it was something of a grab bag of songs, with many of them going back a decade or more. ABy the time of 2005's Devils & Dust, Bruce Springsteen was solidly back on (or at least near the) top.