The Boss At Sixty

What is it about Bruce Springsteen, who turns sixty today, that keeps people coming back for more?

It's likely the way he's been able to articulate our hopes and desires, along with our disillusionment and worries, so well. He's always had and uncanny ability to turn desolation into some kind of dramatic grandeur and find majesty in the smallest positive gestures.

It helps that Springsteen is from New Jersey. As a resident of a state with everything from romanticized seashore towns and expansive pine forests to ruined cities and horrific chemical refinery scenes, a state neither rural nor urban, with wealthy townscapes and working-class neighborhoods, Springsteen has seen the best and worst of America, in all its messy diversity. He's seen it along this long, narrow corridor between the Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean and he's been able to put it in a context that anyone can understand. Springsteen's America is our America, and vice versa. And it's New Jersey. Even if you've never been to New Jersey, you can learn a great deal about this state simply by listening to Springsteen.

Only Bob Seger, who's had more worldly experience than the Boss - Seger actually worked in a factory - rivals him as the all-American rock and roller. But while Seger has advantages over Springsteen, the Boss has his own personality and his own mystique that lends a quality to his music that no one can match. maybe that's why Springsteen felt a need to musically respond to 9/11 . . . and responded.

So what's my favorite Springsteen album? Nebraska, perhaps, because it's such a deeply personal album, with an intimacy that illuminates loneliness to an art form. Born In the U.S.A. always sounded bombastic to me, though I can listen to Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and Born To Run repeatedly.