The often underrated 13th album "The Ghosts of Tom Joad" shows the Boss mostly without backing, only voice with guitar and harmonica, a singer-songwriter album in the traditional sense, the ambivalence Springsteen against his home country showing how its spiritual predecessor "Nebraska" , Here Springsteen has the characters do not simply stolen by Steinbeck, from movies or newspaper articles, but he turns them into modern humans and turns them into a part of his observations of contemporary America. Topics of often depremierenden songs are poverty and despair. Time it comes to the lonely border policeman who falls in love with a Mexican woman who is desperate to get on illegally in the United States ("The Line"), sometimes to an unemployed person who leaves his home in Pennsylvania to as the Hobos the Great Depression to travel on freight trains across the country ("The New Timer"), while others deal with Vietnam veterans who fail to gain a foothold in society. The titular track was named after a performer of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath". Here Springsteen sings: "The highway is alive tonight / but nobody's kiddin 'nobody about where it goes". The highway is no longer a metaphor for hope, as even in "Born to Run", but as a synonym of hopelessness, the home for the losers of society. If I close my eyes while listening to "Tom Joad", then I see lonely lakes and herds of cattle before glaring sunsets, then I smell cornfields and feel the lame of endless car journeys back, the rough leather of Ami-carriage, the cross on dead straight highways roars through the American Midwest. It is a masterpiece of mood!
