Devils & Dust

Devils & Dust is the thirteenth studio album by American recording artist Bruce Springsteen, and his third acoustic album (after Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad). It was released on April 25, 2005 in Europe and on April 26, 2005, in the United States. It debuted at number one the US Billboard 200 album chart.

Background

Springsteen was very open about the fact that many of the songs from Devils & Dust dated back a decade or more. Springsteen wrote the song "All the Way Home" for Southside Johnny to use in his album Better Days which was released in 1991. The songs "Long Time Comin'" and "The Hitter" were written and performed during Springsteen's solo Ghost of Tom Joad Tour in 1996. "Devils & Dust" is also known to have been written previously, and was featured in soundchecks during The Rising Tour beginning in the summer of 2003 and the following year during the Vote for Change Tour in late 2004. (Springsteen had "Devils & Dust" on his set list for at least one Vote for Change show, but at the last moment decided to perform a 12 string guitar rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner", which he would later release for free through his official website).

Devils & Dust (song)

"Devils & Dust" is the title track on Bruce Springsteen's thirteenth studio album Devils & Dust, and was released as a single in 2005. Concerning the Iraq War, the song gained critical praise, a Grammy Award for Song of the Year nomination. The song was featured in the trailer for the film Money Monster

History

The song tells the story of a troubled American soldier who is presumably serving in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The soldier questions his role and struggles to find guidance in his mission, all the while wary of the changes he is undergoing:

Unsure of whom to trust in a time of tremendous moral ambiguity, the narrator's reliance upon God is tested when he sees his comrade and fellow soldier, Bobbie, dying in "a field of blood and stone." As the song concludes, the soldier maintains that he "wants to take a righteous stand" and will continue to search for a morally correct solution. It is thus not an anti-war song in a conventional sense. The line "I got God on my side" might be a reference to Bob Dylan's classic anti-war song "With God on Our Side".