The problem with the lyrics in "Reno" and other songs on Devils & Dust lies elsewhere. Apparently, the Boss has been spending time curled up with high-minded literary fiction ("The sun bloodied the sky and sliced through the hotel blinds"; "In the Valle de dos Rios, smell of mock orange filled the air"; "We rode with the vaqueros down into cool rivers of green"; etc.). "Reno" even comes with footnotes: The lyric booklet includes a glossary of terms, like "Amatitlan" ("Central Mexican River"), that Springsteen peppers liberally throughout the album.

On Devils & Dust Springsteen the melodist has gone missing, and the poet has turned into a poetaster. Springsteen started out as an exuberantly verbose lyricist clearly under Dylan's spell, but by the time he made The River (1980), he'd evolved the spare, brisk narrative style that's been his hallmark ever since. The result was some of the best American songwriting of the past three decades, fusing autobiography, rock-and-roll mythology and folklore and backed by surging, transcendent music. Consider these verses from Springsteen's first Top 10 hit, "Hungry Heart" (1980):

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack.
I went out for a ride, and I never went back.
Like a river that don't know where it's flowing,
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going....
I met her in a Kingstown bar.
We fell in love I knew it had to end.
We took what we had, and we ripped it apart.
Now here I am down in Kingstown again....

These lines are almost entirely monosyllabic; they eschew adjectives and flowery language. But "Hungry Heart" conjures a whole world, and a worldview, and its strangely festive melody and honking baritone sax and gliding background vocals are sublime--and you can dance to it. The songs on Devils & Dust are by contrast saddled with adjectives--the moon is sallow, the hills are rutted, the sky is pearl--fancy literary language and portentous religious imagery. Worse, many of the songs are set against a mythic Southwestern landscape, all rolling thunder and mountain passes and "harsh scrub pine," with horses and mustañeros ("mustangers") wandering through. Has Bruce Springsteen decided he'd rather be Cormac McCarthy?

This oppressively self-serious album, reeking of research and literary pretension, is especially surprising coming from Springsteen, who over the course of a dozen previous studio records has achieved a monumental and decidedly literary feat, bringing to life a milieu--North Jersey and environs--as rich and distinctive as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. His songwriting has moved away from that home turf in recent years, in large part, I think, because he has ceased to regard himself as a compelling subject. Springsteen's best work has always been confessional. This is true not just of his overtly autobiographical material, like the devastating cycle of songs about his father, but of all his albums up to Tom Joad. His characters were variously named--Scooter and Johnny and Bobby and Frank--but one story was being told: that of a son of Freehold, New Jersey, and his search for love and meaning.

On Devils & Dust, that man is present only as a narrator of other people's stories: a semi-pro boxer, a black cowboy, Jesus, Mary. On the DVD, Springsteen declares his desire to "channel the voices" of his characters, but his ventriloquism simply doesn't carry the emotional force of his confessions, and no amount of folkie flat-picking can make it feel any more genuine. At this stage of his career, real musical authenticity from Springsteen may mean laying aside the acoustic guitar and the Okie accent and the sepia-toned storytelling, and once again trying to make music about his own life--the life of a 55-year-old multimillionaire family man. This may be an uncomfortable task for Springsteen, with his romantic attachment to working-class experience, but challenges can bring out the best in songwriters, and he's done this sort of thing before: His finest record of the last two decades, Tunnel of Love (1987), was a chronicle of his crumbling first marriage. Here's hoping that the next Springsteen album will have fewer mustañeros and more Bruce.

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