Призрак Тома Джоуда: Альбом Брюса Спрингстина

the album

The Ghost of Tom Joad is the eleventh studio album, and the second acoustic album, by the American singer songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released on November 21, 1995, by Columbia Records. It reached the top ten in two countries, and the top twenty in five more, including No. 11 in the United States, his first studio album to fail to reach the top ten in the US in over two decades. It won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Springsteen wrote and recorded the album between March and September, 1995, at Thrill Hill West, his home studio in Los Angeles, California. Following that year's studio reunion with the E Street Band and the release of Greatest Hits, Springsteen's writing activity had increased significantly, resulting in this album, which consists of seven solo tracks and five band tracks. Most tracks are backed by acoustic guitar work and the lyrics are generally a somber reflection of life in the mid 1990s in America and Mexico. The character of Tom Joad entered the American consciousness in John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, set against the economic hardships of the Great Depression. The album's release was followed by Springsteen's solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, which ran from 1995 to 1997 and took place in mostly small venues. However, it broke a string of eight consecutive Top 5 studio albums in the United States for Springsteen. The album won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

The Ghost of Tom Joad received mostly favorable reviews, but also drew some sharp criticism. Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone called it "Springsteen's best album in ten years," and considered it "among the bravest work that anyone has given us this decade." In The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for the year's best albums, The Ghost of Tom Joad placed at No. 8. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, simultaneously commended and criticized the album for being "the most courageous and the most depressing of the year," pointing out that Springsteen was the only artist in the poll's Top 40 "to directly address the war on the poor (and, increasingly, what is called the middle class) that is now the political agenda of the industrialized world." He also took aim at what he said was Springsteen's choice "to muffle his songs, so that only those who really want to hear their despair will bother trying." Christgau lamented that the "tunes, arrangements, and mysteriously praised 'phrasing' aren’t just forbiddingly minimal — often they’re rather careless", and dubbed the album "a bore".

All songs are written by Bruce Springsteen.