Canter Bridge

Don’t judge a book by its cover, nuestros abuelos taught us in a spasm of earthy wisdom.

If you did, you might think Bob Seger was about to declare himself washed up and done for in the blues-rock entree to this 2006 album. Where the younger Seger could claim that things were gettin’ better and better’, the grizzled graybeard of Face the Promise finds things decidedly on the down swing, and toys with the idea that he might just ‘wreck this heart’.

Don’t take the old boy’s crotchety pose too seriously. Even in this complaining first track, he concedes that when he gets back home to his lady, everything’ll be all right. Really, Seger is merely setting himself up to deliver a classically Seger-esque affirmation of life and love of the kind we’ve come to expect.

‘No need to wait any longer than Track 2, a fallible man’s ode to long-lasting love and his own bootstrap ability to pull himself up to love’s measure when the heat is on.

If Seger has caught a touch of the blues, it’s not the poor-me variety but the more robust variant called I’ve-paid-my-dues-baby-I’m-fed-up-and-I’m-goin’ home’. If the blues like the flu are inevitable, it’s much more dignified to catch the kind Seger’s symptoms suggest he has. ‘So long, Arizona’, he says, dissing every small-town repeat of his show when his soul has already made the turn and headed westward towards home.

This is an edgier, older, less accomodating Seger than we’ve known. A bit rockier, a little less balladesque. But it’s still our Bob in there, belting out the blue-collar convictions about trusting the heart, your good woman, and little else.

He sounds like a man with designs on becoming an elder statesman to the kids who will get knocked about a little as they learn the truths that have come down to him over the year. Hear track four, ‘No Matter Who You Are’, a kind of democratic Hard Knocks Creed:

No matter who you are no matter what you do
There’s gonna be someone wants something else from you
Yeah
This is an ancient test, it’s a shiny lie
Discover somethin’ pure then sit and watch it die
Yeah
No matter who you are no matter where you’ve been
No matter what you’ve done you’ll have to start again
No matter who you are
Between the soaring dreams and the bottom line
So much is given up so much is left behind
Yeah

This is the price you pay, this is the beast you feed
When you abandon hope and you give in to greed

No matter who you are no matter who you’ve been
You’ll have to sort it out and start again

No matter who you are

No matter who you are
Don’t take this wrong don’t let it bring you down
It’s just the way things work in this great big town

Seger’s take on the reality he describes is interesting: ‘Don’t take this wrong, Don’t let it bring you down, It’s just the way things work in this great big town.’

Gentle cynicism is, after all, perhaps not an oxymoron.

‘Truth is, song after song on this album is shot through with the sentiment that ‘this world is out to get you the way it’s gotten me’ (‘Between’). That, and the kind of poignant statement of love’s bereavement that we hear in his gorgeous duet with Patty Loveless and in the album’s closing track, ‘The Long Goodbye’.

So what is our Bobster up to? This album reads like a man’s statement of his legacy. I don’t mean to suggest that Seger is anything close to finished singing. I simply observe that the very fine rock and roll that comes at you track after track on this album congeals into something like a statement.

Of what? Gentle cynicism. Loss of faith but not of energy. Weathered old wood that still shines when just the right light falls upon it.

Good old lumber that is, in the last words of the album’s final track, ‘still here’.