I'm sure there are a zillion reviews of this record floating around right now so you don't need me to tell you it's good. It is a mellower follow-up to The Rising. I've read about comparisons with Nebraska, which I can see. What I hear, besides Springsteen's own signature sound, is echoes of Bob Dylan (no surprise) around the Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. I also hear a lot of early Leonard Cohen here.

One thing that is cool about the CD I bought is that it is audio on one side, and when you flip it over, you have a DVD. The tricky part is whether the audio will play on your CD player. I haven't tried it in my stereo, but I couldn't get it to play on my PC. So what I did was rip the files to my PC. I haven't tried burning a copy to CD (for the car) but I'm sure that should work.

-- April 29, 2005 (DD)