Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Inyo’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

The cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Inyo” album.

(Note: This is the fifth post in a series in which I am reviewing the seven albums in Bruce Springsteen’s “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” boxed set, separately. The set will come out on June 27.)

Bruce Springsteen fans will remember that “Adelita” — the song from the Tracks II album Inyo that was released as a single last month — features mariachi musicians. So does another Inyo song, “The Last Charro,” and this one is even more musically lush and lyrically melodramatic. “Godmother, when I die, make of my clay a jar/And when you are thirsty, drink from it,” Springsteen sings.

Most of the Tracks II songs represent styles of music that Springsteen has previously explored, at one time or another. You could easily make the case that “The Last Charro” his boldest attempt, on the boxed set, to try something completely new.

Inyo is not, though, a mariachi album. Beyond “Adelita” and “The Last Charro,” the album is, rather, very much in the style of The Ghost of Tom Joad — somber story-songs about the struggles of Mexican-American immigrants and Native Americans, set mostly in California and Texas.

One track, “One False Move,” is clearly a cousin of Joad‘s “Straight Time,” with which it shares a theme (the temptation of the outlaw life to an ex-con trying to go straight); one particular line (“You get used to anything/Sooner or later it becomes your life”); and the way it uses coldness as a metaphor (“that cold feelin’ of my luck runnin’ out” in “One False Move” vs. “I got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line” in “Straight Time”). “One False Move” even uses the phrase, “straight time.”

Most of the music, throughout the album, is played by Springsteen himself, with co-producer Ron Aniello on bass and, occasionally, other instruments. Three E Streeters appear: Soozie Tyrell, contributing crucial violin and backing vocals to three tracks; trumpeter Curt Ramm, playing a gorgeous solo on “Ciudad Juarez”; and trumpeter Barry Danielian, adding to the rich mix of “Adelita.”

For the most part, these are songs that aren’t made for casual listening. You have to spend some time with them: to figure out who the characters are and what their stories are about, and even, at times, to make sense out of historical and cultural references. Of all the Tracks II albums, this may be the one with the least commercial potential.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” will be released on June 27.

Still, there are some sublime moments. One comes in “El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona),” which is about a gardener who is mourning his deceased daughter. She has returned to the ground, in a sense, and he sees her and feels her in “the roses (that) rise so perfectly out of the desert floor.” He thinks, “with my work here in this garden, we’ll both live again.”

The title track is a historically precise tale of the abuses of the rich, and the revenge of the poor. It reminded me, at times, of “Youngstown” and “Death to My Hometown.”

“Our Lady of Monroe,” the only song set in the East (in New Jersey, in fact!), is about a retired, jaded Newark police detective who, as Springsteen memorably puts out, is “trying to lose some of what he’d seen.” In an attempt to do that, he sets off to check out a Monroe Township backyard where a man had been claiming to have visions of the Virgin Mary.

“From his desk in the South precinct, he’d walked that dirty mile,” Springsteen sings of the ex-cop. “Well, that was all over now/He was gonna learn to live, just to live for a while.”

The album ends with “When I Build My Beautiful House,” which is an outlier. No characters, no historical references … just a graceful little folk song, expressing the universal desire to live beyond “shadow and doubt,” in a place “where pain and memory have been stilled.”

According to Erik Flannigan’s liner notes, “When I Build My Beautiful House” is from a session at which Springsteen also recorded material that ended up on The Ghost of Tom Joad and the Tracks II album Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.

Flannigan then quotes Springsteen: “This was all just miscellaneous writing I was doing with no sense of where it might end up or what it might end up being, except I knew I was enjoying writing in this vein. So I did it and continued to do it for quite a while.”

Springsteen concludes by saying, of Inyo as a whole, “This particular record and Devils & Dust, they all kind of came out of The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

The songs of Inyo are:

“Inyo”
“Indian Town”
“Adelita”
“The Aztec Dance”
“The Lost Charro”
“Our Lady of Monroe”
“Silver Mountain”
“El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona)”
“One False Move”
“Ciudad Juarez”
“When I Build My Beautiful House”

For more information, visit lostalbums.net.

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s first album, “LA Garage Sessions ’83.”

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s second album, “Streets of Philadelphia Sessions.”

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s third album, “Faithless.”

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s fourth album, “Somewhere North of Nashville.”

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s sixth album, “Twilight Hours.”

HERE is my review of the boxed set’s seventh album, “Perfect World.”