I thank Bruce so deeply. I worked on a medic crew all that first eve and night down there on the hallowed ground, before it was misused for other agendas. I frequently rollerbladed down the river past the trade towers at night, before and after 9/11. The first night the Winter Garden was re-opened, and many nights thereafter after work I would go down there... in 2003 began my documentary called "Dialogues", mostly written and completed inside, under those palm trees, at night, stillness. I would some nights just repeat a hundred times some of the tunes on the Rising... that and a few from Van, and Sibelius's 5th. But the Rising was most inspired and I credit much of the congruency of heart in the documentary to Bruce. Thank you so much very good man.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band reached out to us to give us hope and love through the tragidy of 09/11. Music is the best way to express our feelings in it's lyrics and music. It makes us laugh, cry and lift our spirits. God will always give us strength and help us through the hardest of times. Bruce's faith and music helps us heal but never forget our love ones who died that day. My heart goes out to all those people who lost their love ones that day. May the 10th anniversary of 09/11 not open any old wounds. These people have suffered enough on 09/11/2001. God bless you all.

So like, Who is John Cook?

You're right John Cook, Bruce has no idea what it feels like to jump from the 27th floor of a burning sky-scraper, but neither do YOU so get off your high horse. There are less delicate topics out there for you to decimate. If this record improved and continues to improve people's emotional health about 9-11 just let it be! At least its making someone feel better, isnt that what music is all about? You just sound like a miserable hater.

Whether it's great and lasting music or not isn't my perspective as a 9-11 widow. The album is not a requiem or symphony; it was and is a statement. Springsteen reached out to an extent to the people directly affected by 9/11 - widows such as myself and rescue workers, trying to pay it back. The score was good for performance, occasionally large, perhaps not his best. The book was meant to pull heartstrings. It did pull ours. The band comp'ed our widows group to a concert in Secaucus. It was a wonderful gesture that we truly appreciated. The tunes were beside the point. The words felt like secrets told.

Bruce gave us a brilliant, empathetic, cathartic way to snatch an epiphany from the jaws of despair. Mr. Cook's scathing criticism is almost ignorant: the greatest poets give us what we cannot give ourselves. Bruce did not presumptuously stand in the shoes of those who died or suffered deaths of loved ones: he gave us the dust, the tears, the severe clear of that Tuesday's blue sky, the sickened mind of suicide bombers and their empty beliefs, and turned them into a book of hymns.

To turn the felling of our Towers and all the events of 9/11 into a prayer that rises and keeps on rising is the way to tell just how great he is as an artist. And, Bruce has not really written about his personal experiences, but about Everyman characters and their experiences, our experiences. And, if ever an experience belonged to all of us, none ever did so as much as September 11, 2001.
Bruce did a great job, one that no other artist could have done, in my opinion.

Joan

Why would I want to read John Cooke dissing an album that I love?

John Cooke gets it exactly right. An *adequate *insufficiency is precisely what The Rising *lacks. The song about crossed calls is indeed a "small good thing," and as such it's precisely what was called for. The vulnerability created and pointed to by 9/11 is a precious inadequacy that is with us always. Trying to cover that truth with cliches and "forcing it" (as The Rising does) does the event, and everyone responding to it, a disservice. Crossed calls has a humility and an unassumingness that might have been present to some degree in Springsteen's early work but is certainly absent from Rising. P.S. AO Scott, you still rock.

Does Mr. Cook know how many firefighters, victims and victims' family members Springsteen spoke to? Even so, that's immaterial in principle.

Questioning Springsteen's ability and right to place himself in a character, in comparison with other writers is utterly unsound.

Portastatic's "In the Wires" seems like a fine song, commendable for its observation of that particular 9/11 experience. My only problem with it is the singer's voice, which is a more subjective matter.

ouch! what a vitriolic response-I needed the enormity, the "greek" quality, the Shakespere quality-I needed The Rising, and it helped to heal me, I was able to "dance out" my feelings, a physical catharsis that the rock n roll and majesty of Bruce gave to me

John Cook gets it exactly wrong. Springsteen has always written much more than what he knows from his own firsthand experience. We all reacted to 9/11 with obvious, inadequate words-- Springsteen pulled that stuff together in what was exactly the kind of cathartic album we needed at the time. We didn't need modest, tiny, oblique quotidian references at that point. We needed more of a gospel record.

a mixed bag, like most of his late career releases, but Mary's Place has the last GREAT Clarence sax solo!

Only Bruce could have garnered so much attention with this album. Had this been released by a garage band, it would have gone nowhere.

Our choir will sing "The Rising" this Sunday - fabulous tribute to those who died and those who died trying to save them.

One of these past 9/11's, I came across "Somewhere Only We Know" by KIeane, and found a lot of symbolism in it that helped me mourn by 9/11 and our environmental tragedies.

It's a flawed record, with perhaps a few songs that might have been eliminated in the choice process, but I remember hearing it for the first time - I'd slipped it into the cd walkman and went down Wall Street toward my ferry home to New Jersey. I'll never forget watching the faces of the people on that street while hearing the opening lines of "Lonesome Day" and wondering how many of them were getting through theirs.

There are those who find "The Fuse" to be an anomaly on the record. I think it's a terrific example of what Bruce does so well - the snapshot moment of life being lived - in this case, the "long black line in front of Holy Cross" being one of the images played out all over the towns near my home. The idea that, in the face of overwhelming sadness, one turns to one's partner for some solace - in a room "burning with the noon sun", perhaps.

The title track holds up really well, in my opinion. So do the songs "Empty Sky" "Further On" and, despite the fact it was written for Asbury Park and not New York City, "My City of Ruins".

I'm looking forward to the discussion today.

Kerry