I spent a lot of the past weekend listening to Bruce Springsteen's new music. His 17th album, Wrecking Ball, will come out in March, and the lead single, "We Take Care of Our Own" is good. It's about America, and the belief in the country's better ideals. Knowing Bruce's politics, as he's let us (forced us?) to be more and more aware of over the past decade, I first thought that the this song was ripe for the same kind of misappropriation that "Born in the U.S.A." suffered when it came out in 1984—when Ronald Reagan ignored the bitter irony in its lyrics and quoted it in some rah-rah-U.S.A.!!!-U.S.A.!!! campaign speeches. But it's different from that.

As Awl pal Stephen Hazan Arnoff noted, there is no irony in "We Take Care of Our Own." Instead, it's a challenge.

As he is wont to do, Springsteen has thrown down the gauntlet for anyone running for the highest office in the land. An artist who has thrived for four decades on interpreting American archetypes—flags, cars, promises and promised lands, and a sea-to-shining-sea are just a few—is peeling back the layers obscuring these archetypes just as Reagan tried to smooth his voice over Springsteen's. Simple as a kid on a playground sticking a finger in your chest and in a way that you never forget, Springsteen isn't interested in the commentary. He just wants the facts. "Hey," he says, "what are you really made of?" As the song spirals to its end, the answer to this question is "We Take Care of Our Own." That's the place where the commentary begins.

Those are big ambitions for a rock song. And it seems Bruce is swinging for the fences with this album like he did with The Rising ten years ago. And judging from "We Take of Our Own" and also from two other new songs he's been playing in concert over this past year—"Land of Hope and Dreams" and "Wrecking Ball"—it seems like he might be similarly successful. These are well-crafted songs, big, bouyant tunes with focused, direct, sing-along lyrics. They have that thing where they sound like songs you've know for a long time. (The secondary melody in "Wrecking Ball," that violin that's probably actually a synthesizer, is rehashed from the very pretty "Secret Garden" song from 1995. While the single's wobbly organ line would not have sounded out of place on Wilco's Summerteeth album. But these are both fine jobs of borrowing.)

But there is a problem. One that has to do, I think, with the broad, universalist, brotherhood-of-man sentiments in these songs. It is the lyrics. And the same problem plagued The Rising. As great as that album is, as successful as it was in achieving its goal of helping a lot of people deal with the pain of 9/11 (that sounds cheesy but is true), it is far from Bruce's sharpest lyric-writing. Back when it came out, in a review for The New Yorker, Alan Light hit on why:

Rather than tell individual stories as allegories of a broader social condition (the way the characters on Born in the U.S.A. and Nebraska chronicled the fallout from Reaganomics), Springsteen seems to be striving for something universal to capture the mood of the whole nation. Language that strives for universality can often lapse into imprecision, though, and in some cases Springsteen's decision to avoid fully fleshed-out stories plays away from his greatest strength...

Much of Bruce's work since The Rising is like that—lacking the specificity in detail and the finely drawn characters of his best work. (Notably, the under appreciated, mostly acoustic 2005 album Devils & Dust has detail in spades. It happens to be very dark detail—from Bruce's inhabitation of George W. Bush's mindset on the title track to the prostitute who charges extra for anal sex in "Reno" to the fact that turtles eat the eyelids off drowning victims in the gorgeous "Matamores Banks"—but this is why its so great.) I did not spend a lot of time with either of his last two albums, Magic or Working On a Dream. "Girls In Summer Clothes" on the former and "Outlaw Pete" on the latter seemed to be trying for that classic Bruce feel, but they didn't quite get to it. (I very strongly do not like writing less-than-loving appraisals of Bruce Springsteen's music. Bruce holds a very, very big place in my heart. "Outlaw Pete," though, is just something I can't quite get my head around. It's like, did he let Max Weinberg write the first song on that album, just as a lark?) Devils & Dust and these clumsy attempts aside, unfortunately, it does seem like Bruce is actually changing his approach. In his efforts to inspire lots of people, in talking to the country as a whole, maybe, as opposed to say, the guy sitting next to him at the Globe bar in Red Bank, in trying to be a sort of "voice of the people," and actually affect the world like he did with The Rising, like he failed to do with his support of John Kerry in 2004, like he did, arguably, with his support of Obama in 2008, he is moving to a broader, flatter, macro style of communication. But his wide-angle lens is not nearly as good as his close-ups. He gets far more out of character-study and finely-honed visual imagery than he does out of aphorism.

But again, on the whole, I really like "We Take Care of Own." And "Land of Hope and Dreams" and "Wrecking Ball," too. There's more to rock music than the lyrics. And who knows, maybe he's even rewriting some of the words to "Wrecking Ball" before it comes out as a title track on an album. After all, that one was written quickly, as a special send-off tribute just before Giants Stadium was torn down. It is a song written from the perspective of a stadium, which, at the very least, lends it some novelty. And it's burly and confrontational like "We Take Care of Our Own." But lines like "Take your best shot/Let me see what you got..." do not qualify as among Bruce's best.