In the days following 9/11, when we were reeling and disoriented, there was a kind of solace to be found in old recordings, and even pseudo-folk singers like James Taylor seemed to be safeguarding something, drawing back bygone days. Tired old songs, thrust into the limelight on compilation recordings like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, forced us to listen once again to songs about chain gangs and hopeful Depression laments like "Big Rock Candy Mountain." All of this was done in good faith, but ultimately-at least for this writer-it was another wearisome reminder of our unhealthy obsession with authenticity, a never-ending search that dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when suddenly everything could be replicated, from furniture to images. Even the best of us are like a bunch of D.A.R. widows drinking tea and tracing our roots proudly back to Plymouth Rock.

Shortly after 9/11, in the spirit of folk, Bruce Springsteen gathered up the E Street Band and made The Rising, a record that tried hard to address our national trauma. Though a bit long and uneven, at its best the album produced classic Springsteen anthems, folkloric in their fidelity to old modes, that commanded us to rise up, throw our arms helplessly into the air and exalt, if only because we were alive together, survivors all. (I experienced this en masse when I went to see the Boss at Giant Stadium on a warm summer night and heard a thousand souls trust their untrained vocal cords to the soggy marsh breeze of the Meadowlands in a kind of supersized tent revival.)

"Devils and Dust"-the title song on the new Columbia Records CD/DVD from Mr. Springsteen-is comprised of lyrics that are spare and simple, spoken by a soul with a finger on the trigger of a gun, locked in a moment of existential choice. This character may be at war, but we don't know exactly where he or she might be, only that there's something to be confronted, and that a question has been posed:

What if what you do to survive

Kills the things you love

Fear's a powerful thing

It can turn your heart black you

can trust

It'll take your God-filled soul

And fill it with devils and dust.

Outside of the song-as with most folk music-the lyrics seem lame, derivative, obvious. But as intoned by Mr. Springsteen they arrive in a tune that moves forward, steady and stately, with the beat of a funeral dirge, as flat and blunt as a protest song. Slowly, gradually, layers of background music are added, including a little hip-hop drum, so that in the end, without pushing it too far, the song feels thick and fully meaningful and completely contemporary.

The slow layering allows us to move seamlessly from folkloric Bruce to pop-star Bruce-from folk past to pop present-in a single song. It carries with it the deeper burdens of the last three and a half years; it seems the first song to truly address not only what happened on the morning of Sept. 11-back when that date was just another day on the calendar-but also the philosophical questions that arose from our response, here at home and in Iraq.

Mr. Springsteen quickly leaves Manhattan behind and heads out west, across the lonely reaches that he seems to know well, until he arrives in a Nevada hotel room, where a young man is about to be serviced by a prostitute. There's a disorienting sensation when hearing "Reno" for the first time, partly because it's one of the most sexually intimate folk songs ever written, revealing not only a story of two lonely souls but of the country itself, where everything is available for a price, where the streets are cluttered with material goods but lives are lived alone, in the deepest kind of isolation. A lonely john and a lonely prostitute quickly set down the economic terms ("Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass"); they share a moment of deep alienation, some casual banter and, in the end, a redemptive laugh.

"Reno," which has already garnered attention for its explicit lyrics (which really aren't that explicit), feels like the absolute center of the album, the dark star out of which radiate Raymond Carver–esque stories, each one about souls in thick domestic situations. "Long Time Comin'" is a defiant statement, the voice of a man who has traveled rough roads to arrive at an extreme but pure love. It moves vaguely forward on such lines as: "I'm riding hard carryin' a catch of roses / And a fresh map that I made / Tonight I'm gonna get birth naked and bury my old soul / And dance on its grave." But then, as the song draws close to its end, the lyrics grow more specific, zeroing in on the beloved, reaching for a deeper but more precise poetry: "Out 'neath the arms of Cassiopeia / Where the sword of Orion sweeps / It's me and you, Rosie, cracklin' like crossed wires."

If solace can't come from the great American capitalist machine, these songs seem to say, at least it can be found between the sheets. The theme re-emerges later in a somewhat blunter form, in a song called "Maria's Bed": "I was burned by the angels, sold wings of lead / Then I fell in the roses and sweet salvation of Maria's bed."

Throughout Devils and Dust, characters negotiate the desire to move onward, to seek out whatever the hinterland offers, with the deeper need to find something intimate, warm and true. In "Black Cowboys," a kid from Mott Haven quits the daily gunfire in the streets of the Bronx for a safer (perhaps) future in the mythic West. It's a strange, allusive song that somehow makes sense, in part because it's an inversion of the stereotypical western, turning the old pattern on its head: Gunfire and lawlessness lie to the East, and maybe, just maybe, one ghetto kid can be saved if he lights out for the territory. But the song refuses to guarantee a happy ending; the last image is of the moon rising up over the rutted hills of Oklahoma, stripping the earth down to the bone.

Halfway through the record, which was produced by Brendan O'Brien (who also produced The Rising), Mr. Springsteen ducks into church where we listen to a beautiful hymn, complete with a moment of quivering organ in the background. "Jesus Was an Only Son" is built around the eternal, everyday dynamic of mother and son, but the lyrics open up to the dark, unsolved mystery of unrequited love: The parent must release the child into the world.

Eventually, the stories in Devil and Dust stretch all the way to the Mexican border, where Mr. Springsteen once again explores that symbolically porous line in the sand. "Matamoros Banks" is a simple and sad elegy to a body at the bottom of the river. "For two days the river keeps you down / Then you rise to the light without a sound," the song begins. "Your clothes give way to the current and river stone / Till every trace of who you ever were is gone." Mr. Springsteen takes us to the terminus of the American Dream, the place where the hope for a better life meets a blunt reality. Borrowing the voice of the dead, Mr. Springsteen sings: "Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanks …. Meet me on the Matamoros banks." It's an appropriate end to the record, using a folk song to enter into the soul of someone discarded and left to rot.

No matter how wonderful the lyrics are, how evocative, several of the songs on the CD side of Devils and Dust are never allowed to fall fully into the category of folk, to completely embody the narratives they unfold. Instead of unadorned craft, we get something layered and embellished. Brendan O'Brien's production skills result in a clean, wide sound, and the final product is perfectly fine-perhaps one of the better Springsteen solo efforts. But my assessment of the music flipped at the same time I flipped over this so-called DualDisc and watched Mr. Springsteen perform five of the songs stripped of studio overdubs. Alone in a stark room, in an old chair with his pointy black boots on, he seems to become the words of the song. (Introducing one of them, he tells us: "Your voice is supposed to disappear into the voice of the person you're singing about.") Without the background instruments, the focus is on the intricate shifts of his voice, leaping up into falsettos, threading through the landscapes.

In light of the unplugged DVD performance, the tracks on the CD side of the disc (with the exception of a pair of up-tempo songs, "All the Way Home" and "Long Time Comin'") suddenly seem stranded in a limbo between the arena-rock voice of the Boss and that barren nakedness he found for his seminal work, Nebraska. According to Mr. Springsteen, the songs on Devils and Dust were written some years back, composed alone on his guitar and harmonica. With their delicate modulations and their lonely themes, they were meant to stay that way, I think, embraced simply by the calloused fingers on the strings, the singular voice, the occasional harmonica riff.

My gut tells me-and who am I to look into my hero's heart?-that Mr. Springsteen knows these songs work best as folk tunes. That's why he's taking them on the road alone, without a back-up band, presenting them to his audiences as they were originally created, born out of threadbare traditions, crafted out of history itself, bringing stories to light that would otherwise not be told.

David Means is the author of The Secret Goldfish and Assorted Fire Events, both of which will be out in paperback from Perennial in the fall.

Certainly, the British embrace of technology has gone haywire at times. The band Yes-a quintessentially progressive outfit if ever there was one-hit the ascetic balance with Fragile , a wildly underappreciated, amazingly produced rock album, but then went on to produce horrific exercises in bombast. In a similar fashion, Pink Floyd went to absurd limits to stretch sound formations, sometimes falling into self-parody-but when everything clicked, as it did on Dark Side of the Moon , the band made masterful music that has held up to infinite listenings.

In the past six years, Oxford's Radiohead has not only resurrected the grand tradition of English rock that began with the Beatles, it has also miraculously walked a tightrope over the canyon of grandiosity. With the release of the seminal OK Computer in 1997, and continuing through Kid A in 2000 and Amnesiac in 2001-sonic masterpieces all-Radiohead found a way to combine deeply literary (albeit highly fragmented and often inaudible) lyrics with brutally modern, sparse and often electronic soundscapes. One way or another, Thom Yorke on vocals, Colin Greenwood on bass, Jonny Greenwood on guitar and various electronics, Ed O'Brien on guitar, Phil Selway on drums and Nigel Godrich at the controls create music that-for all its cold deliberation on the technical level-is deeply emotional, earthy and reflective of a world that strives hard to deplete us of our humanity.

Listening to these Radiohead recordings is like reading Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing . One is plunged into an extremely desolate linguistic space, and yet one is heartened by the sound of the language (and, of course, the music) and the sense that it coheres into something rich and thick and-I hesitate to use the words, but must-morally complex, something reflective of the human condition.

Radiohead's moral element seems to come from Mr. Yorke's lyrical sense, which evokes a hipster T.S. Eliot wailing about his own paltry figure (on a stick), measuring his life with coffee spoons (and computer bytes) and trying to find faith (in a post-industrial wasteland). Propelling these narratives is a diplomatic, often highly technical music that is always responsive to Mr. Yorke's singing. Together, like a jazz ensemble-except using both old-school rock gear and whatever technical stuff is on the edge-the band and singer find pathways through Mr. Yorke's shaggy narratives, no matter how choppy and incoherent.

So, as one would expect, a huge critical tension has formed around the release of the new Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief . The question seems to be: Can the band extend its previous efforts? Can Radiohead continue to produce work that is more original, fresher, and just as cohesive and worthy of attention as Kid A and Amnesiac ?

To be honest, this question seems slightly unfair; rock bands-and art in general-don't move along strict evolutionary lines, with one album leading to the next in a progressive, orderly manner. Some hipsters, consumed with ranking and tracking the original sources, might find reason to attack this new record because it seems in part to antedate Kid A . And it's clear that, like U2 in the late 80's, the band has milked their sound to an endgame. But in songs like "I Will" and "A Punchup at a Wedding," with the beat clear and steady, Mr. Yorke's voice loosens, and he seems to nudge out of the digital entrapment and engage-as best he can-the world at hand. In "A Wolf at the Door" he expresses a public/private paranoia that reminds me of Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind." "I keep the wolf from the door," Mr. Yorke sings, "but he calls me up on the phone / tells me all the ways that he's gonna mess me up / steal all my children if I don't pay the ransom …. "

In Kid A and Amnesiac , Mr. Yorke's lyrics were often unfathomable, moaned and mumbled and forced beneath the surface of the music. In Hail to the Thief , most but not all of the words can be decoded after a few listens. There are still patches where, even with headphones on and a great deal of repetition, the vocals prove impossible to understand. In a strange way, these unintelligible portions serve to heighten the power of the songs. Hearing Mr. Yorke sing in these muddled passages reminded me of how much enjoyment I got last year listening to poets in Galway read their work in Irish. The beautiful, interesting sound was all that really mattered. And perhaps at some weird artistic level, incomprehensible lyrics serve to remind us of our own inability to articulate. In any case, the technique here seems to be to make clear those phrases that are actually important to the sense of the song. For instance, in "Sit Down. Stand Up," the phrase "Sit down. / Stand up / Walk into / The jaws of hell" was clear enough to understand, whereas the repetitive phrase that ends the piece-"the raindrops"-was made clear to me only when I read the lyrics that accompanied the beautifully designed press kit. It was a strange thing to see, for the first time, an entire CD's worth of Mr. Yorke's lyrics written out on the page. And I have to admit that having the printed lyrics in hand gave me a sudden, almost Talmudic ability to decode the text and to hear things clearly.

Aside from the album's pointed title, which for me at least evoked our last Presidential election, Hail to the Thief skirts direct political rhetoric. There are political tones to some of Mr. Yorke's lyrics, but only insofar as anything uttered these days about death or bunkers or bullets is going to find itself in the context of the post-9/11, post-Iraq fear festival. Phrases such as "Murderers you're murderers / we are not the same as you," from "The Gloaming," might refer to our most recent war, or not. The song "We Suck Young Blood," which plods along like a funeral march, could be interpreted as an indictment of the exploitation of the young by international media conglomerates.

If anything, the undercurrent of paranoia that infected the last three Radiohead recordings has dissipated slightly, and the band has turned toward something more optimistic. A vague, existential hope forms when deeply personal statements arise from an inner world, statements that struggle outward to condemn the barbaric actions of large organizations. The line between real and unreal is as fragile as ever, Mr. Yorke seems to say, but at the same time it's a line that has been with us since the beginnings of art, when the earliest cave painters first reached up to adorn the stone walls of their caves. So the only way out of the terror of modern life is through song and abstract lyric. If that fails, then constrict the voice, drive it beneath the surface and let out a good, long wail. At the same time, Radiohead seems to be saying in "2 + 2 = 5" and "Go to Sleep," for example, that one must find a way to release pent-up energies and to rock 'n' roll.

Throughout Hail to the Thief , the band swerves to avoid the posturing of grandness you find in those current bands whose work is clearly inspired by Radiohead. Just when a song starts to sound like Coldplay, it veers off, twists around acrobatically and shows a new exterior.

What I appreciate about Radiohead's work-and it's most evident in Hail to the Thief -is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band's albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness. That was the genius of the great Beatles albums, too: a sense of completeness was created out of totally odd, often disjointed abutments. Think of the song "Something" placed next to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on Abbey Road , or "Taxman" placed beside "Eleanor Rigby" on Revolver .

Hail to the Thief has that kind of completeness. Exactly what makes it work so well is partly an aesthetic mystery: the same mystery you feel listening to a Schönberg piano piece or reading Dante's Inferno -a deep, perplexing interconnection within the work that, when sorted out and picked apart, never quite adds up to anything as beautiful and complete as the whole.

Trying to figure Mr. Dylan out-a full-time job for some fans-is about as easy as trying to get to Kafka's Castle, or pasting together a history of Ireland from the verbal antics of Finnegans Wake ; the fun is inherently linked to the labyrinthine impossibility of success.

But for me, understanding Mr. Dylan and his work is actually as simple as putting an ear to the ground and listening to the vibrations of the freight trains that still lug goods along the CSX tracks that pass near my house and slink north along the western flank of the Hudson River. The sound of the trains-like that of Mr. Dylan's music-remains rooted in an industrial past that spawned such now-arcane ideas as an empowered working class; an age that provided a backdrop for figures like Woody Guthrie, who sang of heroes struggling not to be devoured by the maw of the mighty machine. The fact is, the freight-train business is thriving big-time, and the suburban folks in places like Valley Cottage, N.Y., are writing letters to the local paper complaining about the incessant tooting of the late-night horns.

As if to coincide with this boxcar boom, Mr. Dylan has re-emerged over the past five years, beginning with his critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind (a phrase right out of Edgar Allan Poe) and culminating in his Sept. 11, 2001, release, Love and Theft , a recording that seemed to rise out of the detritus and dust of that tragic date. Love and Theft spoke with eerie precision of the complexity of our national identity, and our grappling for snake-oil cures and grace. A stunningly pliant, vaudevillian series of songs salvaged the hidden stuff of America, from the submerged history of the Johnstown flood to the shape-shifting antics of Slim Shady.

As a matter of fact, there are some correlations between The Eminem Show and Love and Theft . On both recordings, the songwriters playfully take stances, mocking and affirming them at the same time, tapping into the unlimited supply of submerged material. Take a listen to Eminem's song "Square Dance," for an example. And isn't Marshall Mathers being Dylanesque when he performs himself performing a character nicknamed Rabbit in the film 8 Mile ?

On Nov. 26, Columbia/Legacy will release Bob Dylan Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue , a compilation of live performances from the first half of that circus-like tour. Billed as the fifth volume of the label's so-called "Bootleg Series" of Mr. Dylan's work-a reference to those hissy homemade-concert and demo tapes that fans trade and examine with Talmudic devotion-the two-CD set is about as far from a bootleg as you can get. Not only is it carefully produced, using sound-truck recordings cobbled together from several shows (mostly in small, intimate venues around New England), but it sounds perfect, pristine, and reveals Mr. Dylan at his very best. In fact, it's his best live recording to date.

Gone is the reductive, cavernous stadium noise, and the sense that he's hooting out his words into a deep void; gone is the walloping, often submerging intensity of the Band's backup performances. Instead, we hear Mr. Dylan meeting the audience on equal terms, gathering energy from their open ears and singing with a newfound precision. There's a sensational sense, listening to the over two hours of music here, of loving intimacy, of a meeting between Mr. Dylan's brilliance as a poet and singer and the deep, abiding care of those fans lucky enough to be out there, in the darkness, listening and shouting out occasional, clearly audible comments. And, it should be noted, Mr. Dylan answers them.

I suppose it might be called a magic moment. It's the kind of thing musicians must hope for, and it was sparked in part by the background musicians-including the guitarists T-Bone Burnett and Bobby Neuwirth-who play with a surprisingly light touch that seems to draw exuberance internally, from the music and lyrics instead of the concept of an experimental road show. Nothing is being proved; it's all up front.

Just about every song in the collection stands out as a gem. Even "Mr. Tambourine Man," which by 1975 was as threadbare as anything, sounds rejuvenated and fresh. When Joan Baez joins Mr. Dylan to sing "I Shall Be Released" and "Blowing in the Wind," there's a charged energy in the air. Someone in the audience calls out, "What a lovely couple"-and then, when they sing, their voices helix around each other like old scarves. Ms. Baez's voice sounds slightly hard, edgy, and she seems unwilling to meet her ex-lover halfway.

Underneath their songs-and the entire CD-runs the painful last remnants of the Vietnam era: the death of writer/musician Richard Fariña (as portrayed in David Hajdu's fun Positively 4th Street ), the resolution of the Southeast Asian conflict, and the fact that merging politics with art has gone out of fashion. It's as if Mr. Dylan decided one last time to recapture the vitality and urgency of his early folk days, a time when the audience and the artist put on a pretense of meeting on mutual terms.

Even the new songs from Desire , which was recorded shortly before the Rolling Thunder tour began, are thrust out at the audience with brilliant immediacy. And Desire 's "Hurricane"-a song that struggles, and fails, to expand Rubin Carter's dilemma into a larger polemic-here sounds like a direct plea to the masses (in Worcester, Mass.) for action.

After several listens to Live 1975 , I tried hard to figure out the exact musical combination that makes this the best live Dylan release. I came up with two theories. One is that Mr. Dylan is not running scared on this album. Yes, I believe that even Bob Dylan has lived in fear, like any other artist-and when he's spooked, he sometimes allows his bands to overpower him, and, in turn, finds himself singing in giant, bardic yelps that seem almost beyond the lyrics.

A second factor is the tour's tight rhythm section, Luther Rix on drums and Rob Stoner on bass provide a precise musical counterpoint to Mr. Dylan's tight phrasings, especially in such songs as "Oh Sister," "Love Minus Zero" and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." These elements combine with the aforementioned clarity of singing-and the charged energy of the venues-to make a revealing, historic recording.

All of this culminates in the album's standout, "Sara," which is sung with an intimacy that re-acquaints us with the radically confessional nature of the song and its astonishing beauty: a love confession in the painful vein of John Berryman's Dreamsongs , combined with the clear-cut, no-nonsense vernacular of William Carlos Williams. It turns out that Sara was actually in the audience during that concert, so one might conclude-at least I do-that Mr. Dylan and his muse were in the same place at the same time.

Immediately, this new recording has slipped into my pantheon of favorite live recordings, sandwiched between Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison and Nirvana's Unplugged in New York , nuzzled up against Sviatoslav Richter's Richter Rediscovered: The Carnegie Hall Recital . With his usual talent for impeccable re-emergence, Mr. Dylan has released a masterwork. It's like one of those Hubbell photographs of deep-space nebulas: light arriving after 9,000 years, unmarred by all that distance. And wondrously beautiful.

Back in the day, Bruce Springsteen was a larynx channeler, drawing forth the twangy voice of the Dust Bowl, of Woody Guthrie (who in turn was doing his own channeling). His best songs were self-contained narratives of what the short-story master Frank O'Connor liked to call the submerged population-people on the edge, people with secrets to keep. The action was limited, but specific. People ran away from home. Cars crashed. Crosses were carried. Redemption was sought. The best songs resolved themselves-in the manner of short stories-by leaving us with a small sliver of the overall picture and a narrative nudge forward. If Turgenev came out from under Gogol's "Overcoat," then Bruce came out from under Woody Guthrie's denim shirt.

Mr. Springsteen was a working-class Catholic East Coast kid who eventually reached outward to the rural to find his subject matter. Bob Dylan was pretty much a guy from the hinterlands who came to Green Witch Village, as we call it out there, to find his scene. Bruce shape-shifted slowly-over the course of four records-until he found himself embodying the isolated regions of the working class. By the time The River came out, he was poised in dusty old country farmhouse interiors, singing of Ramrods, of redemptive trips down to the River, of Jackson Cage, of Cadillac Ranch. The bombast of his early work had fallen away and left us with something like unpolished silver, a voice that was darkly tarnished yet, with a few swipes of melody, revealed a shimmering purity beneath. When he recorded his masterpiece, Nebraska , in his home studio, the Boss had a voice that zeroed in on something deeply, brilliantly, perfectly authentic. His hoots and hollers, his laments about two brothers-one good, one bad-his mansions on the hill and his highway patrolmen were solidly, radically true. They went fully against the Reagan myth-making machine.

Above all, Nebraska was a blatant attempt at documentation. In a landscape scraped clear by postmodernism, the sound of authenticity is what matters. The credentials of the source seemed secondary to the vision. Now Nebraska is a cult record, passed on by word of mouth among younger fans, cited on lists of influences in Rolling Stone , and the subject of tributes. Bruce's mode of redocumentation has now been embraced by the people who flocked to O Brother, Where Art Thou? , by those who accept Gillian Welch, and by most people who celebrate Lucinda Williams. In some ways, you can hear overtones of Nebraska all over the place: in Wilco's brilliant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot , and even in the White Stripes' masterful White Blood Cells .

Then Bruce took the tight, echoey silence of the Nebraska recording, the incognito vibrancy of that singular howling voice, and reunited with the E Street Band to produce Born in the U.S.A. : a beautiful rendition of the American Spirit, the force of the working class, the pounding lament to Vietnam, and the paradox of hanging tight to those lame promises made, to a belief in the great American Sisyphean dream machine. A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of Born in the U.S.A. , twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it. I remembered walking the East Village streets, literally just off the bus from Michigan, a Midwestern bumpkin (there's no other word) working a summer internship at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, listening to Born in the U.S.A. in my Walkman headphones, keenly aware of the wildly divergent nature of Bruce's vision-the elegiac, mythic nature of his vocal intonations combining with the pre-gentrified grit of the East Village crossing my field of vision. I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played At Folsom Prison constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican.

But I like to believe that I knew that one day Cash would become cool. In Michigan, my next-door neighbor was a lank old coot, an electrician at the paper mill down the hill; he came home drunk deep in the heart of the night and sang laments to himself. I'd wake up, press my face against the screen, gaze down at him on his porch to see his shadowy arm lifting the bottle. So it seemed natural-walking the New York streets for the first time-to hear Bruce belting out the stories I knew to be true. Anyway, I cared little for the concept of cool I saw around me in the East Village during the 80's. It seemed shallow and cold. My idea of cool-unfashionable as it was at that time-was to know how to properly hop a freight without having your foot amputated.

When the news was announced a few weeks ago that Bruce had reunited with the E Street Band to record their first studio album in 17 years, a post–9/11 CD called The Rising , my hope was that he would follow Tom Waits and Dylan into middle age, reinventing his old sound and, in the process, producing his best work. My hope was that Bruce and the E Street Band would rock with tight narrative spirals, inturning and eternal, like the gyre in the Yeats poem, self-sustaining, outside the reductive noise of pop culture.

A few days ago, before I heard the entire CD, I went over to Borders in White Plains, bought the single "The Rising," and listened to it driving back over the Tappan Zee Bridge. What I heard made my heart sink. Bruce sang but didn't seem to inhabit his words, and he even seemed slightly hesitant, as if he hadn't fully internalized the possible phrasings. The song seemed overproduced. As a power anthem, it felt muddled and cluttered. In the old days, Max Weinberg's drums usually served as a kind of maypole of beats, steady and hard, around which Bruce wrapped his voice. Here there was little distance between my ears and the music. "The Rising" was inspirational in a vague way, ethereal and wide. The allusion is to something called the Rising; the command is that we should all come up to it.

I listened to "The Rising" several times, downloaded it into my iBook, and fed it into my head via my headphones. Eventually, I began to like the song. I didn't love it, but I understood where it was coming from and what it was trying to do and the fact that it was written to inspire and that it came from the Boss' heart. It was a new sound, but it was still Bruce singing, and I could deal with his calling upon me to lift myself up above the darkness. Whatever the Rising was, I wanted to be in on it.

The day the CD appeared at my door, I was on my way to visit my good friend Rabbi Jeff Hoffman. I put off listening to the record and went over to Jeff's house. He explained to me that it happened to be Tishah, the saddest day of the Jewish year. He showed me an essay he had just contributed to a collection of kinot , poems expressing mourning, pain and sorrow. They are poetic responses to events such as the destruction of the First and Second Temples. The titles of the kinot speak for themselves and even sound like good song titles: "Seek, You Who Have Been Consumed by Fire," "Oh That My Head Were Water," "On This Night My Children Cry." And in some ways, we agreed, The Rising is a collection of kinot , a series of poetic laments alluding-most of the time-to the events of 9/11.

There is no simple way to suffer, no easy way into the terror and loss that happened on a single day at the tip of Manhattan. So like all of us, Bruce had to struggle his way into the metaphors, search for the possible expressions, the right images that might-or might not-convey a sense of loss, and a way into redemption. Out of this search comes an unevenness that is reasonable and even in some ways hopeful. On the best songs there is a sense of inhabiting the pain, clear images and metaphors married neatly with the music, which at times moves experimentally forward. On the weaker songs you sense an urgency, a desire to become bardic, to speak to the audience in a hopeful manner. It feels painfully obvious that many of the songs were recorded in haste. They are devoid of precise images, and produced in a way that rearranges the old, classic E Street sound. Gone is the echoey space of Nebraska , the raucous roar of Born in the U.S.A. , and the austerity of The River ; long gone is the elegiac overlaying of Born to Run .

It's hard to say what exact element is missing, but it seems to have something to do with composition, with the unity that once came from arranging several songs into a neat 45-minute vinyl disk, each song intricately talking to the other to create a perfect whole.

After several listens, I came up with this conclusion: The mix, produced by a new guy, Brendan O'Brien, is off-the sound has an awkward spatial sense, too immediate, too bright and too digital. In many songs, the subject matter is at odds with this brightness. When it works, it works, such as in the song "Nothing Man," a narrative about a dead fireman (I think), with fine lyrics and a sense of Bruce really getting into the skin of the story, singing, "Around here, everybody acts like nothing's changed / Friday night, the club meets at Al's Barbecue / The sky's still the same unbelievable blue." "Counting on a Miracle" sounds close to the old E Street sound, with a few electronic flourishes and nice string arrangements (there are lots of strings appearing on this CD). Something Southern seeped in that reminded me of Steve Earle.

The song that struck me the most and that has stayed with me is called "Empty Sky." It's a deeply personal lament in which the sadness of the lyrics merges perfectly with the mechanical movement of the forward beat: "I want a kiss from your lips / I want an eye for an eye / I woke up this morning to an empty sky." A few nights ago, I put "Empty Sky" on as I drove down 9W. My kids were in the back seat-we were going to an old ice-cream stand up near Stony Point-and coming out on the Honda's feeble stereo speakers, the tune sounded perfect. As a matter of fact, most of The Rising benefits from being played over the Honda speakers, which tones down the shrill quality and gives it a dusky a.m. yellowish hue, moving Bruce's vocals to the back a little bit.

In "Worlds Apart," Bruce stretches, reaching for a new sound, and ends up with a strange yet highly familiar amalgamation of "Dead Man Walking" vocals mixed with world music. It's Sting territory. It feels too safe to be genuinely new. But once Springsteen starts really singing, it rocks more than anything Sting has done since he left the Police. But this song, more than any other on the record, seems representative of the overall problem: Bruce is still Bruce, still singing as well as ever, but the music itself doesn't serve his vision. This is the case, in particular, with the songs that are meant to be rockers in the tradition of "Hungry Heart." One such song, "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)," feels lacking in lyrical focus. Even fun songs need narrative details. "Hungry Heart" has one story line: "Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack / I went out for a ride and I never went back." That " … Baltimore, Jack" is just enough to root the song in narrative. Once you have that, you can rock along to the rest without worry. You believe in the song. You go along with the story. Most of the weaker songs on The Rising lack that specific pinpoint moment.

Then there are two power anthems that wake things up: the aforementioned "The Rising," and the opening song, "Lonesome Day," which is bright and strong but also has an overmixed feeling, a sensation of being both too clear and too muddled at the same time. But ultimately, the failure seems rooted in the writing and the structure of the songs; there just isn't enough lyrical complexity to keep things going over the long haul. The repetitive use of the phrase "Lonesome Day" lacks weight when it isn't backed up by any specific details. Again, I longed for stories. I wanted screen doors to slam; I wanted fights in the back streets.

In a few places, the new technology melds just right with the song to provide forceful laments: A favorite is "The Fuse," a song that stretches Bruce into new territory musically, yet has the kind of writing that he does best: "Down at the court house they're ringing the flag down / Long black line of cars snaking / Slow through town." "Mary's Place" and "Further Down the Road" are both a return to form. The band kicks in like the old E Street; there is narrative at work. I hate to use the phrase, but these songs-aside from new sound production that isn't quite right-seem like the old Bruce. A lonely edge rides beneath the songs, a taint of the sadness that must inhabit all good stories. Here we go, I thought. The fact that it sounded a little too bright and too digital can be forgiven.

When I was told friends I was reviewing The Rising , some shrugged and said they didn't like Bruce anymore, or never had. Others told me they loved his old stuff, the Born to Run era, and some warned me to be careful not to trash it, because the diehard fans would come after me. But I think it's the diehard fans-at least the younger ones-who are going to come down hardest on this new record. The older fans-like me-will be happy to have some new E Street material. We'll program our CD players, do our own editing, and find the perfect play list. But the young fans, who have embraced Nebraska and his early work, who listen to Ralph Stanley and Johnny Cash, are going to pick The Rising apart. They're used to new masterpieces by old fogies like Dylan and Waits. The Rising isn't Springsteen's masterpiece. It suffers slightly from CD bloat: 73 minutes is too much music. In the early years the Boss took his time, discarded the clunkers (all of which were released on the recent three-disk compilation, Tracks ) and shaped the production so that it was exactly right. He trusted the sophistication of his fans and the fact that he was a populist singer, not a popular one.

But if Bruce is anything, he's heartfelt and sincere and brave and upbeat. He believes in the human spirit. He's an optimist. In The Rising , we feel his sorrow over 9/11 and his desire to come out into the public again as our national bard; to represent us all at this time of need. But inherent in this task comes risk and stress. Our national bard of the working class has met his match in the empty-tooth gap of the Manhattan skyline, and in the dead firemen enshrouded in the American flag. Even the Boss is slightly at a loss for words. And who can blame him? Not me.

The howls and yelps of Born in the U.S.A. seem more apropos to our time: music painfully rooted in our national geopolitical nightmare in Southeast Asia, placed alongside songs that tell stories of the homeland: "No Surrender," "Darlington County," "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark." It's a mystery the way art surpasses history and time. Bob Dylan released Love and Theft on 9/11, and just about everything in it speaks directly to the events of that day. A few months later, Tom Waits releases Blood Money , a record with a thumping lament of a song-a healing masterpiece-called "Misery Is the River of the World."

Of course, none of this matters. Most Springsteen fans are just glad to have a new record. I'll certainly be playing much of this CD as I drive to Michigan tomorrow, and already my daughter, age 10, is in love with the song "Empty Sky." She knows what it means and sings along with it and loves the phrase "I woke up this morning to an empty sky," because it's the right phrase at the right time. We did wake up to an empty sky that day, and we still wake up to an empty sky, and that's about all there is to say about it at this point.

Ultimately, I consider The Rising to be the first in a series of comeback recordings, a stepping stone of sorts, a way into the future. Now that the E Street Band is reunited with the Boss, our great working-class storyteller is about to return completely to form. He'll give voice again to the stories of the submerged populace, who, by the time the next record comes out in a couple of years, will be nickel-and-diming their way through the post-Enron dust bowl. But for now, I'm still gonna be listening to The Rising , all summer, as I drive westward into the hinterlands.

David Means' most recent collection of stories, Assorted Fire Events , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.