E-Mail This Article to a Friend Working-men blues Sweating to the oldies with Bruce Springsteen and Trent Reznor BY MATT ASHARE

Will the real Bruce Springsteen please stand up? I’ve been trying to find him somewhere in Devils & Dust (Columbia), his new semi-acoustic DualDisc collection of a dozen new songs and a short-film video in which he plays five of those tunes with only acoustic accompaniment. It hasn’t been easy. Is he the righteous haunted soul who contemplates suicide on the disc’s title track? Or the broken man who makes an earnest pass at a divorcee in "All the Way Home"? Is he the faithful lover with the fragile falsetto driving "a barbed-wire highway" on a long trip home to his sweet woman in "Maria’s Bed"? Or the deep-voiced shady character detailing an encounter with a prostitute and earning the Boss his first parental-advisory sticker in "Reno"? There’s also the hard-riding dude in "Long Time Comin’ " flying down some moonlit highway with a "catch of roses" for his old girl Rosie, only this Rosie’s "cracklin’ like crossed wires" and this time he’s gonna get it right because if he "had one wish in this god forsaken world, kids, it’d be that your mistakes would be your own." And there’s the old, broken-down boxer who drops names (Jack Thompson, John McDowell) like broken teeth in "The Hitter," and the doomed Mexican border crosser who seems to know the geography of the American Southwest like the back of his hand in "Matamoros Banks."

Three decades after he was christened "rock and roll future" by Jon Landau, who’d just seen some kid from New Jersey play a tiny Cambridge club, in the pages of a paper quite like this one, Springsteen is sounding more and more like some distant, mythic past. That’s no dis. The first George Bush didn’t even know how supermarket scanners worked, much less what a working man pays for a gallon of milk. His son fakes it better than most. But Springsteen’s a different breed altogether. He’s sold millions of albums, played huge arenas worldwide, and made more than a comfortable living in the process. The bubble he lives in can’t be easy to penetrate, and it’s not as if he could walk into any old Stop and Shop for a gallon of milk without threatening to start a riot. And yet, as he’s aged, he’s taken on the trappings of the mythic American troubadour — the scruffy, rootless singer-songwriter who travels from town to town, taking odd jobs where he can get them, making friends where he can find them, collecting stories and turning the fabric of a humble work day into poetry about the human condition. Every song on Devils & Dust sounds lived in. And he fleshes out the characters who populate those songs with real-life details that you don’t trip across on your way to a stadium stage or in the corridor of a million-dollar mansion — the blueberry wine the migrant farmworker sips in the back of a flatbed Ford in "All I’m Thinkin’ About," the rates ("two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass") the call girl in "Reno" quotes, the smell of mesquite in the air in "Long Time Comin’."

If Springsteen’s to be trusted — and there may be no more trustworthy troubadour in rock today — he goes out on his bike and rides the same streets and highways he imagines his characters do. And like a writer bent on not just getting the story but capturing the accents and the moods, the sounds and the smells of his subjects, he has a talent for taking it all in. Given his rock-star status, that’s a minor miracle. That he’s then able on an album like Devils & Dust — my favorite since Nebraska — to craft coherent character sketches that weave his own passions into epic little stories that convey the dryness of the desert, the feel of a finger on a trigger, the longing for the comfort of a lover’s arms — the very stuff of life — is what will always set him apart from his peers. If he still has any.

I’m still looking for he real Bruce Springsteen on Devils & Dust, and I can’t find him in any one song. But there have always been at least two Springsteens: the pumped-up guy in tight denim jeans dancing clumsily in the Technicolor dark to the overly anthemic crescendi of the E-Street Band on MTV, and the understated author of Nebraska singing stark and ragged songs about the cracks and fissures in an eroding American dream. To that you could add a third in the eager young rocker Landau encountered, but I’m not old enough to remember him. And there will always be the "Born in the U.S.A." Boss misappropriated by Reagan as some jingoistic yahoo after he’d written what may be the most misunderstood hit song of all time. Springsteen wasn’t blameless for that little mix-up: as he belatedly realized, when people rally round a chorus as bombastic as "Born in the U.S.A.," they often miss the subtleties of the verses.

An album like Devils & Dust — with its spare musical backdrops courtesy of drummer Steve Jordan and producer/bassist Brendan O’Brien, a little pedal steel here, a little trumpet there — is built to diffuse the blind patriotic pride "Born in the U.S.A." evoked. It’s less self-consciously literary than 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (Columbia), and catchier, too. But don’t let its soft acoustic façade or a bright, sing-along chorus like "All I’m thinkin’ about is you, baby" fool you: Devils & Dust has teeth and soul and suffering and beauty and joy and desire. Springsteen feels your pain — or rather, the pain of a full spectrum of people he’s never met but somehow seems to know. And he deals with themes so universal, you don’t have to identify with every character to get the point. It’s Springsteen who does the identifying. He loses himself in his characters, creating the illusion, if only for a minute or two, that he’s that guy sipping blueberry wine.

The spell is broken on the B-side of Devils & Dust, in the five-song DVD mini documentary that places our hero on a set fabricated to look like some anonymous abandoned home that could be right down the street from where you live. "You’re supposed to disappear into the voice of the person you’re singing about," Springsteen explains before taking a seat in the corner of a room and picking at the strings of a beat-up acoustic guitar with only the tap of his boot and the occasional harmonica solo to keep him company. Here he’s just a guy with a gift, another strummer with a song to sing. And that’s good enough for me, because in the end, the only Springsteen that matters is the one you hear on Devils & Dust.