I have tried to like folk music but other than the occasional folk number interspersed with some rock I tend to avoid it. Don't get me wrong, I respect folk music- I respect it like I respect the union folks who've gone before me, and I've tried the Dylan but frankly, in the end I like him electric. I am a product of the 70's and 80's. I like riffs and keyboards and weird sounds and I like the feel the music. That said I love the new Springsteen album. It's alive, it's old and new simultaneously, and it comes from the heart. It conjures an America when people came together to kick it out: of smokey dancehalls and barns and buses or trains of people heading somewhere to fight something unjust, and a little like those Martin Luther King Day assemblies we had back in school. It's an album about people and stories and people overcoming shit and it's the album for this moment in our history because it is our history. It's good for stomping yer feet and I bet it's good on a picket line.