Magic

About

Bruce Springsteen reconvened the E Street Band to record 2007’s <i>Magic</i>, one of his most underrated albums—and one of his most thoroughly political. Producer Brendan O’Brien was once again behind the mixing desk, helping to deliver a modern-sounding, radio-friendly album, full of catchy tunes that backed up fierce, uncompromising lyric. “Radio Nowhere,” the buzzy opening track, pays tribute to FM radio while also mourning its rapidly approaching demise; the song finally gave Springsteen an on-the-record opportunity to cry out “Is anybody alive out there?”—a line he’d been exhorting at live shows for year. “Girls in Their Summer Clothe,” meanwhile, is a ballad that casts Springsteen in the role of the crooner, with a touch of Wall of Sound on the production. But the heart of the record is in its unabashed criticism of George W. Bush’s administration, and the Iraq War it had undertaken in the early 2000. Springsteen said that the title is about the times “when what’s true can be made to seem like a lie, and what’s a lie can be made to seem true”—and that’s exactly what he sings about in the title track: sleight-of-hand, subterfuge, legerdemain. The theme continues on “Livin’ in the Future,” in which the narrator insists that the terrible things they see and feel aren’t real: “We’re livin’ in the future/And none of this has happened yet.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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