You could make a pretty good case that Magic, released in 2007, was the best album Bruce Springsteen made with the E Street Band in a couple of decades. The band played with the old force and swagger once again, and Springsteen came up with a batch of songs filled with fun, fire, and surprises.
Magic is an excellent album from top to bottom. We believe that these five songs stand above the pack.
5. “Magic”
The title track is one of the quietest on the album, consisting of a steady, brooding pulse and some eerie atmospherics, courtesy of Soozie Tyrell’s violin and Patrick Warren’s keyboard effects. That leaves plenty of room for Springsteen’s lyrics to take hold, even as he sings them without rising too much about a low groan. In the first few verses, the narrator seems like nothing more than a garden-variety huckster pulling off harmless cons. It’s only as the song progresses that we realize the damage he’s doing is on a much wider scale, and he’s a metaphor for every fast-talking, prevaricating person in any position of power.
4. “Livin’ in the Future”
When you hear Clarence Clemons’ saxophone blowing through a rollicking rhythm in the opening moments of this song, it’s natural for us to assume that we’re about to enter a typical good-timey, bar-band romp that this band had long since perfected. But Springsteen uses that setup as a bit of misdirection. The narrator is actually beset by all kinds of hardships, both personal and political. But he’s willing to indulge in a little self-deception, and he wants to bring us along for the ride: We’re liviin’ in the future / And none of this has happened yet. Even the na-na-na refrains at the end of the song can’t fool us.
3. “Radio Nowhere”
It’s not often that we think of Springsteen as a riff-rocker, but what else can you call this track, which acted as the opening song on the album and was the lead single. Even if that riff is mostly repurposed from a certain Tommy Tutone ’80s hit, Springsteen at least gives it enough of a serrated edge to make it a fierce foundation. It allows him to vent his frustrations at the lack of connection between people, which goes beyond his obvious concerns about what’s going out over the radio airwaves. It’s pretty clever how he finds a spot in the song for a question that he’s often asked his live audiences: Is there anybody alive out there?
2. “Your Own Worst Enemy”
Springsteen with strings? Think about it: It hadn’t really happened all that much since the Born to Run era. To accommodate this stylistic curve, he delivers one of his prettiest melodies. The production owes a little bit to Pet Sounds and a lot to baroque pop acts like The Left Banke. But the lyrics are pure Boss, as he uses the old phrase your own worst enemy to examine how a person can tear apart their life when the darker parts of their nature start making all the decisions. It was fascinating to hear Springsteen breaking relatively new ground with the sonic framework of this song at such an advanced stage in his career.
1. “Girls in Their Summer Clothes”
Springsteen followed up Magic in relatively short succession with the album Working on a Dream in 2009, one in which he indulged his love for the classic sounds of his youth. “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” sort of pointed the way to that stylistic shift. In addition, the song wouldn’t sound at all out of place on his 2019 gem Western Stars, as there’s a lot of Jimmy Webb’s influence in the detail-heavy writing, even if the setting is more typical of Springsteen. In any case, it’s an irresistibly catchy track, so much so that you get caught up in the lush melody and can almost miss that the narrator is keeping up optimism that’s totally unfounded based on his sorry state.
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