Critical opinion on the new Springsteen seems mixed, and many tracks are simply baffling reviewers. So Grundrisse is gonna sort it out for us, track by track. We start with track 1, “Outlaw Pete,” which Variety named the weakest album opener of Springsteen’s career. I don’t know Human Touch or Lucky Town very well, so I can’t be unequivocal on this, but “Outlaw Pete” definitely sucks, and it’s definitely a weird song to put at the beginning of an album. Last night, my friend Jason informed me that the song may have been inspired by a bedtime story that Springsteen’s mother used to tell him before he went to bed. Every night she would make up a new episode. If this is true, it makes the song somewhat more intelligible and at least aesthetically interesting. Translating his mother’s tongue into pop song seems of a piece with Springsteen’s recent collaborations and encomia to Pete Seeger, and intersects with his traditional thematic interests in memory and authenticity, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be skipping the song when I play this disc.
It also bears a pathetic resemblance to Kiss’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You.” Weird.
