A Thick Desert Dust on Your Skin

Song: Devil's Arcade
Album: Magic
Year: 2007

When you've been writing music and touring for twenty years, you're bound to get a little tense. A few knots in the shoulders. A stiff neck. But then you go to the spa to dig into that deep tish, and you hear the new-age garbage they're playing, and you're like, "Ugh, I'm Bruce Springsteen, I deserve better than this."

That's right: you deserve a Bruce Springsteen-ified version of that new-age garbage. And so you make a song of your very own that captures the soothing essence of a waterfall while also being deeply critical of war.

It's lyrically a very beautiful song (I am pretending it's about soldiers who are kind of in love with each other even though I know that's not even a little bit correct), but the way The Boss sings this sounds like he's doing an impression of himself and it is very distracting—"your" becomes "yer," that sort of nonsense. It's probably because his mouth is too relaxed to open properly, thanks to the spa-like vibe he's created.

Rating: 4 slow games of poker with [sexy] Lieutenant Ray out of 10.

This makes me feel: like getting a massage and also not going to Afghanistan.

Fun Bruce fact: His nickname was "Doctor" before it was The Boss. Some people don't even get ONE nickname, and here he goes hogging the two best ones. Rude, Bruce. Rude.