The Ghost Of Tom Joad

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ALBUM INFORMATION

Total Tracks: 12   Total Length: 49:24

eMusic Review

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Glenn Kenny

eMusic Contributor

06.30.09
Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost Of Tom Joad
Label: Columbia

Springsteen's modern-day Western — the easternmost point of the US it mentions is Pennsylvania, and that's just as a jumping off point for a journey into what was once pioneer country. As its title indicates, the record's an exploration of Grapes of Wrath country, post-Steinbeck. Mexican illegals sneak into the country to try and make an honest living, and wind up as cooks in a meth lab; a border patrolman faces an untenable moral choice; and more. Quieter (albeit more polished) than Nebraska, and just as dark, a critical and commercial debacle when it was first released, it now feels like one of Springsteen's most deeply considered and resonant works.

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15 years later...

JessePresleyLives

Every year since it came out I rediscover the message and music of this album, and I can never get over them. I'm not a huge Springsteen fan, but I've never heard songs like these. The whole message is brought home in a line from the song The New Timer: "My sweet Jesus your gracious love and mercy, tonight I'm sorry cannot fill my heart like one good rifle, and the name of who I ought to kill." It's the place where the devastated human condition overcomes even the strongest faith rather than the other way around.

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a modern day Woodie

musicloverforlife

Bruce is at his best when he plays the modern day storyteller. This is a moving, mostly acoustic CD, with thoughtful storytelling! No one has a voice like Springsteen!

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Powerful storytelling at its best!

rabidstitch

This is one of his albums that shows the master storyteller that Springsteen is. His use of language is focused and powerful in each song. Nebraska is amazing, Devils & Dust is great as well - but I think this is his best "acoustic" album.

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A Powerful Album . . .

downingcr

. . . for those who can appreciate the accoustic nature of it. Like Nebraksa, this is a stripped down album where the lyrics take center stage. Nearly all of the songs are "story songs" and tend to focus on blue-collar folks, often including immigrants. Some of these songs came back later in full-band versions (check out Youngstown from the New York 2000 CD for one of the best rock songs since Prove It All Night). Here they are slow and haunting, and in my opinion, worth every penny.

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eMusic Features

0fdb823c3e0f9fc973880113c2e6b106

Icon: Bruce Springsteen

By Glenn Kenny

If ever there was a rock 'n 'roll icon who needed no introduction, Bruce Springsteen - who got his nickname "The Boss" because, from very early on, he was the guy who made sure the band got paid - is surely that guy. As for that band, the current lineup of his longtime crew the E Street Band is Nils Lofgren on guitar, Miami Steve Van Zandt on guitar and sundries, Clarence "the Big Man"… more »

They Say All Media Guide

In 1982, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and much of America torn between a newly fierce patriotism and the dispassionate conservatism of the dawning “Greed Is Good” era, a number of roots-oriented rock musicians began examining the State of the Union in song, and one of the most powerful albums to come out of this movement was Bruce Springsteen’s stark, home-recorded masterpiece Nebraska. In 1995, Bill Clinton was president, America was congratulating itself for a new era of high-tech peace and prosperity, and Springsteen returned to the themes and approach of Nebraska with The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album that suggested little had changed in the past 13 years — except Americans had gotten better at ignoring the increasingly sharp divide between the rich and the poor, and that illegal aliens who had come to America looking for the fabled Land of Milk and Honey were being forced to shoulder a heavy and dangerous burden in America’s underground economy. With several of its songs drawn directly from news stories, The Ghost of Tom Joad is more explicitly political than Nebraska (more so than anything in Springsteen’s catalog, for that matter), and while the arrangements are more full-bodied than those on Nebraska (five cuts feature a full band), the production and the overall tone is, if anything, even starker and more low-key, with the lyrics all the more powerful for their spare backdrops. While there’s an undertow of bitterness in this album’s tales of an America that has turned its back on the working class and the foreign-born, there’s also a tremendous compassion in songs like “The Line,” “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “Balboa Park,” and the title cut, which lend their subjects a dignity fate failed to give them. Individually, these songs, either angry or plaintive, are clean and expertly drawn tales of life along this nation’s margins, and their cumulative effect is nothing short of heartbreaking; anyone who pegged Springsteen as a zealously patriotic conservative in the wake of the widely misunderstood Born in the U.S.A. needs to hear this disc. The Ghost of Tom Joad failed to find the same audience (or the same wealth of media attention) that embraced Nebraska, but on it’s own terms it’s a striking and powerful album, and certainly one of Springsteen’s most deeply personal works. – Mark Deming

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