Has any rock musician invoked the powers of lament as powerfully as Bruce Springsteen? I was listening, just now, to 'Something in the Night', a track from Darkness on the Edge of Town. There's this terrifying wail that begins the song, a long, many-toned howl of lamentation that flattens my veins and freezes my blood. And punctuates the song, again and again. Then there are these words:

When we found the things we'd loved

They were crushed and dying in the dirt.

We tried to pick up the pieces

And get away without getting hurt.

'Factory', another song from the same album, vocalizes another sense of loss, another source of mourning.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain

I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain.

Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,

The working, the working, just the working life.

Lament. Lament gives Springsteen his force: the force of mourning, and also, peculiarly, the redemptive anger and energy that bleeds out of it. The Ghost of Tom Joad (his best album, I think) is a lament for the American working class and its lives and deaths. Its most moving moments, though, come in invocations of landscapes of sky and wind and forests and springs, of friendship and love that lie 'where pain and memory have been stilled / There across the border.' A lament which seeks to regenerate. A voice and music which, for this very reason, will never deny or understate loss.

Lament as regeneration, and as force. The young man who feels 'so weak I just want to explode / Explode and tear this town apart / Take a knife and cut out this pain from my heart' decides, when the moment of decision arrives, to do something else. Weld his losses together and do something unexpected. Something new.

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain't got the faith to stand its ground.

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing

but lost and brokenhearted.

He strides off into the storm, looking for his promised land.

And all of this comes from sadness, from loss, from mourning. From lament.