20. Bruce Springsteen- Devils & Dust

With every album released this man just grows in stature for me. After the complete musical delights of The Rising, Bruce doesn't take the easy way and tries to recreate the same album but reaches back to the storyteller-albums like Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad. As a chronicler of modern America he is almost without peer. Musically he usurps everything between country, pop and rock and creates great undergrounds for his rasping, weather worn voice. Lyrically he delivers 12 tales of memory, loss, love and heartbreak without any banality but with a knife-edged reality and poetic romantic sense. No politics like on Tom Joad but tales like a young man's first visit to a hooker, the plight of young Mexicans trying to cross a river onto freedom and sadly drowning, a dream of a boy riding horses trying to remember his mother, a prizefighter telling his life story and Jesus not being depicted as the Saviour but as a son. Emotive and honest. The songs are more lusciously arranged than on Tom Joad and Nebraska- one could argue it detracts from the lyrics but the music it like a soothing balm on the raw spots the vocals leave behind.