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Bruce crushed expectations for this album when he released a title cut that, despite its good intentions, sounded like one of those songs he could have written in his sleep.
Fortunately, it doesn't speak for the rest of "Working on a Dream," a quickly assembled E Street Band album that almost seems timed as a Super Bowl memento. While 2007's "Magic" was a tortured manifesto on the state of a country that had drifted from its moral center, "Working on a Dream" sounds more like the breath of a new day. We can go ahead and say that the promise of an Obama administration got the Boss' mind off of the world's problems and even got him whistling.
Springsteen's more celebratory outlook manifests itself in a return to the kind of blissful love and relationship songs he was doing back on "Lucky Town." Maybe they had been building up in his notebook all along, but it almost sounds like he had wedding planners on his mind with the effusive tracks like "My Lucky Day," "This Life" and "Kingdom of Days," where he actually gushes, "I love you, I love you, I love you, I do."
Not all is sweetness and lace. On the more tension-filled "Life Itself," which comes complete with a psychedelic Byrds guitar solo, Bruce wonders, "Why do the things we treasure most slip away in time/'til to the music we grow deaf and to god's beauty blind."
Sonically, Springsteen expands on the Spector-ish pop we heard on "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" from "Magic," no more so than on the lovely "Queen of the Supermarket," a song that could have come off "The River." Producer Brendan O'Brien thankfully rinses the mud he likes so much out of the mix to let the songs breathe.
Considering the theme, it was an odd choice to start the album with "Outlaw Pete," an 8-minute western folk opera. It's one of a few curveballs, along with "Good Eye," a noisy blues stomper a la R.L. Burnsides, and a bonus track of the spare haunting theme song to "The Wrestler."
"Working on a Dream" doesn't belong in the pantheon with the E Street Band's glory days (and a few of these tracks aren't iPod-worthy), but there are plenty of keepers obviously written when the Boss was inspired -- and wide awake.
First Published: January 29, 2009, 10:00 a.m.