Springsteen sings of what this hard land was, is, and... might one day be - Danny Alexander on INYO
- Danny Alexander
- Aug 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 10
August 8, 2025
I was drawn to Inyo, first, because of the apparent ways it speaks to The Ghost of Tom Joad and especially its tour. Tom Joad was a startling break from what Springsteen had released before, even Nebraska, because much of the music seemed little more than ambient orchestration for the words. I remember struggling to hang on as I played it over and over again in my living room. But less than two weeks after its release, I was lucky enough to see one of the early shows on the Joad tour in the Rosemont Theater outside Chicago, and I could not have imagined one person with a guitar conjuring up a more moving performance. The musical heart of the songs became apparent, and when Springsteen dipped into the back catalog, new dimensions appeared. Using his guitar as percussion for an acapella “Promised Land” close, I could swear that a twister rolled around the darkness of the theater.
Regarding this newly released collection recorded around the time of that tour, Joad’s live “Across the Border” offered a glimpse of what we hear on Inyo. At the place in “Border” where the “hope in our hearts” takes the migrant’s imagination, a place he can only dream of because it hasn’t yet been reached, Springsteen kept singing wordlessly after the lyrics, a high keening sound in a register I certainly didn’t know he had. It was a falsetto in a sense common in regional Mexican music, a leap that reached beyond what seems possible in search of something the heart feels sure is true. It was a haunted and haunting sound, as if the singer were actively trying to find and hold onto that place in the song where “pain and memory will be stilled.”
We hear Springsteen using that kind of vocal again here, almost serving the same purpose on the album’s most beautiful song, “El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona).” Every note on the guitar is a tender struggle like the daily details of the gardener’s work as he tries to find his lost daughter in the beauty that surrounds him. Each step is a deeply convicted effort. The character worries that his grief may itself be a sin of indulgence, and he trims branches to allow the breezes he associates with Ramona’s spirit to blow freely. He works for his living son, and he works for his wife, yet he finds himself asking, “how will my heart ever mend?” At the end, he’s left crying wordlessly again, layer upon layer of those vocals over deliberate steps of guitar, that high head voice blending with shimmering keys as if the father’s and daughter’s ghosts have aligned.
On one level, Springsteen is at his most Woody Guthrie on this record—as with “Tom Joad,” “1913 Massacre,” and “Deportee,” telling stories that have been told before in his own way, telling stories heard along the beloved Mother Road, Route 66, the bulk of it in the desert Southwest, and telling stories he read in the newspaper. The title track uses the Owens Valley water wars to lay a deep foundation for the ongoing California water crisis and the region’s ongoing fires, not to mention water wars and fires that rage nationwide.
In that song, the Paiute who were pushed off the land are only mentioned briefly, but it’s not long before the album’s hard focus becomes the lives of the Indigenous peoples of that Southwest that take up most of the record—those here before the Spanish and here before northern Europeans gave the whole thing a Southern European name while attempting to drive the Spanish-speaking peoples across the Southern border. In fact, while the actual protagonists of “Indian Town,” “Our Lady of Monroe,” “One False Move,” and “When I Build My Beautiful House,” may not explicitly be Indigenous or Mexican American characters, they just as easily could be. It’s hard to miss the parallel between “Monroe’s” “little brown-eyed girl shootin’ cans in the river” and the revolutionary warrior “Adelita,” who “stood above us firing her rifle till the gunpowder turned her hand black.” As with much of the best of Springsteen’s work, this is a story about who we are as Americans and intentionally blurs the lines between that question and who we once were in hopes of connecting us around who we might be.
For such reasons, I’m not only thankful for the great musical leaps provided by mariachi bands on “Adelita” and “The Lost Charro,” but I find these songs career triumphs. The trumpet and harp on both songs are thrilling, and the great vocal percussive notes on “Adelita” call to mind Ennio Morricone’s beautiful western orchestrations. Surprisingly, Springsteen’s creative use of synth (that sounds a lot like ethereal vocals) and Curt Ramm’s trumpet create a similar cinematic effect on “Ciudad Juarez.”
Regarding the falsetto mentioned earlier, “The Lost Charro” uses such vocal leaps in repeated refrains as a now-migrant worker remembers his lariat. It’s a kind of playful grace note that manages to evoke the painful yearning in the memory. Not incidentally, it also calls to mind Roy Orbison and his own ranchera influences. In some ways, this music is, in fact, also about all those lonely dreams Orbison sang about, where they came from and how they bind us together.
Though not numerous, among the more prominent and welcome nods to Guthrie and the folk tradition are the singable choruses here. “Inyo” itself may have pretty-much-unsingable verses, but the “ain’t you feeling dry” chorus invites Soozie Tyrell to chime in vocally as does the chorus of “When I Build My Beautiful House.” The “Godmother when I die” refrain of “The Lost Charro” takes on rowdy choral backing as it builds.
“When I Build My Beautiful House,” as a folkie closer, calls to mind “My Best Was Never Good Enough” in its simplicity, but its tone is very different: an earnest dream of something beyond the ephemera, in that sense more like “Across the Border.” In fact, “When I Build My Beautiful House” actually was written and recorded before “Across The Border,” as was “Blue Highway” from Somewhere North of Nashville, both of which contain variations of the same house-on-a-hill-where-pain-and-memory-have-been-stilled phrasing/imagery that ended up in “Across The Border.” The origins of another album closer also glimpsed here is a twinkle of “We Are Alive” in “The Aztec Dance.”
A deceptively slight-sounding piece, “The Aztec Dance” relies on sustained synth and whispery guitar arpeggios for accompaniment, eventually accented by a smattering of bright notes on piano. In this case, Springsteen seems most concerned that the music does not get in the way of the words at all. If anything, the sounds are there to add a slight patina to this portrait of young boys with machetes and young girls in satin dresses doing traditional folkloric dances.
The song is after the universal in the specific. By the end of the first stanza, it’s focused on one dancer in particular, Teresa, and her mother who is fixing her hair, helping her get ready. She complains to her mother about the ways strangers talk about her people, and her mother tells her about the Edenic world before the Europeans arrived and enslaved her ancestors. “City gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world,” the mother explains just before the tenderest and most powerful of affirmations, “But here in this world, my daughter, they have you." With that line, a mother hands her daughter a sense of connection, dignity, and purpose, perhaps what all of us need most in today’s climate so hostile to such beauty.
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Danny Alexander is a Kansas-based writer, teacher, and activist. He is also the author of Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige (available for purchase here and here,) and the co-editor (with Daniel Wolff) of Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes, and Rallying Cries from 35 Years of Music Writing by Dave Marsh.
