I worry that I’ve become a reformed smoker where Bruce Springsteen is concerned. There was a time before Born in the U.S.A. when I loved Springsteen, but as time passed, I found Max Weinberg’s impossibly square-on-the-beat drums irritating and the general blare of his sound off-putting. That and the obligatory love letters to Springsteen (and their own youth) by middle-aged white men that accompany each new release make really hearing a Springsteen album hard because there’s so much musical and intellectual noise.

 

The album starts terribly with the surliest photo to accompany anything called Magic, and one of Springsteen’s least interesting songs, “Radio Nowhere.” Besides the grumpy delivery and Tommy Tutone melody, it suffers from Old Man Syndrome. Like Tom Petty’s “The Last DJ,” the song complains about how lousy radio is, and for someone who benefited mightily from radio when it played the hits from Born in the U.S.A., such griping sounds small, even when they’re accurate. Sinatra and everyone who was once popular before Bruce groused about the same thing, and it made all of them sound out of touch. Fortunately, it’s the only time that charge can be made on Magic.

 

Rock critics love Springsteen because he does walk it like he talks it, and is one of the few musicians with money who sounds credible echoing working class concerns. He also shares a love of rock ’n’ roll history with at least a generation or two of music writers, and that love shows up in his songs. He musically quotes himself and the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright,” but you get the feeling he’d be disappointed if you didn’t recognize the references. His sound is a guitar-driven version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound, and he still writes in the language of rock ’n’ roll mythology. His career suggests that rock ’n’ roll can really speak to the country’s ills, and that’s validates all our career choice. Magic rises and falls with how deftly he works with those elements.

 

The songs that adhere most closely to the familiar Springsteen are the least interesting—never lousy, but too familiar in sound and language for anything to emerge and stick. On the other hand, the songs that offer a contemporary version of his sound—“Your Own Worst Enemy,” “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” “Last to Die” and “Devil’s Arcade”—work wonderfully. Even if you know why the girls pass him by—he’s friggin’ 57, figure it out!—the song’s details erase the years and the melancholy that accompanies feeling ignored connects. “Last to Die” pins down the central question in Iraq, asking how many more soldiers have to be sacrificed for a mistake.

 

In those tracks, Springsteen does what he has struggled to do since Born in the U.S.A.—find a version of his sound that is of the moment, something with notes from the past that isn’t bound by nostalgia. Some incarnations lost the resonance; some erred too much on the side of getting the ol’ gang together again. On The Seeger Sessions, he dodged the question entirely by exploring folk music’s echoes instead.

 

Fans set the bar ridiculously low for Springsteen, and it’s to his credit that there are few songs in his career where it sounds like he settled, and even the slightest ideas—“I’ll Work for Your Love” on Magic—have something to redeem them. And bad ideas like “Radio Nowhere” he commits to. In short, the album’s almost always admirable, usually entertaining if a little familiar, and excellent when he’s most at home with himself in the 21st Century.