Bruce Springsteen: JON PARELES

Wrecking Ball Dept: The album has been growing on me with each play; it starts out heavy-handed, but by the end it moves from duty to pleasure. Springsteen definitely picked the right title song. Wrecking Ball, written from the first-person point of view of the old Giants Stadium, turns a conceit into a homily into a hoot, according to The Chronicle Herald and jON PARELES: Jon, if good intentions were all that mattered, Bruce Springsteen s Wrecking Ball would be a shoo-in for album of the year which is, not coincidentally, an election year. Wrecking Ball is Springsteen s latest manifesto in support of the workingman. It s sincere, ambitious and angry, which can lead to mixed outcomes. It also which may be a surprise on an album billed as a broadside holds some of Springsteen s most elaborate studio concoctions since Born to Run. But he was less strategic making We Take Care of Our Own, the first single. In my imagination he was watching that Republican debate when someone in the audience cheered the idea of letting the uninsured die, and his sense of duty kicked in; he thought he should write a song that insists compassion is patriotic. It s a trademark E Street Band sound, from the chord changes to the glockenspiel to the backup vocals, and it feels awkward and hectoring. I don t think, as you wrote after the Grammys, that it s jingoistic, only that it tries to associate flag-waving nationalism with shared responsibility. But there s much better stuff on the album. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.