It took some doing to get Springsteen, an “isolationist” by nature, to settle into a real marriage, and resist the urge to dwell only in his music and onstage. “Now I see that two of the best days of my life,” he once told a reporter for Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”

Scialfa smiled at that. “When you are that serious and that creative, and non-trusting on an intimate level, and your art has given you so much, your ability to create something becomes your medicine,” she said. “It’s the only thing that’s given you that stability, that joy, that self-esteem. And so you are, like, ‘This part of me no one is going to touch.’ When you’re young, that works, because it gets you from A to B. When you get older, when you are trying to have a family and children, it doesn’t work. I think that some artists can be prone to protecting the well that they fetched their inspiration from so well that they are actually protecting malignant parts of themselves, too. You begin to see that something is broken. It’s not just a matter of being the mythological lone wolf; something is broken. Bruce is very smart. He wanted a family, he wanted a relationship, and he worked really, really, really hard at it––as hard as he works at his music.”

I asked Patti how he finally succeeded. “Obviously, therapy,” she said. “He was able to look at himself and battle it out.” And yet none of this has allowed Springsteen to pronounce himself free and clear. “That didn’t scare me,” Scialfa said. “I suffered from depression myself, so I knew what that was about. Clinical depression—I knew what that was about. I felt very akin to him.”

In their early days as a couple, Bruce and Patti’s idea of a perfect vacation was to get in the car and drive to Death Valley, rent a cheap hotel room with no TV and no phone, and just hang out. Now they are more likely to take a trip with the kids or cruise the Mediterranean on David Geffen’s yacht. “I remember when my family became pretty wealthy, and some people tried to make us feel bad about being wealthy,” she said. “Here’s the bottom line. If your art is intact, your art is intact. Who wrote ‘Anna Karenina’? Tolstoy? He was an aristocrat! Did that make his work any less true? If you are lucky enough to have a real talent and you’ve fed it and mined it and protected it and been vigilant about it, can you lose it? Well, you can lose it by sitting outside and drinking Ripple! It doesn’t have to be the high life.”

As Springsteen sees it, the creative talent has always been nurtured by the darker currents of his psyche, and wealth is no guarantee of bliss. “I’m thirty years in analysis!” he said. “Look, you cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this. You think, I don’t like anything I’m seeing, I don’t like anything I’m doing, but I need to change myself, I need to transform myself. I do not know a single artist who does not run on that fuel. If you are extremely pleased with yourself, nobody would be fucking doing it! Brando would not have acted. Dylan wouldn’t have written ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ James Brown wouldn’t have gone ‘Unh!’ He wouldn’t have searched that one-beat down that was so hard. That’s a motivation, that element of ‘I need to remake myself, my town, my audience’—the desire for renewal.”

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“Wrecking Ball” is as political a record as “What’s Going On?,” “Rage Against the Machine,” or “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” After Springsteen’s political run-ins in the eighties, he grew even more engaged with social issues. He sang of AIDS (“Streets of Philadelphia”), dislocation (“The Ghost of Tom Joad”), abandonment (“Spare Parts”), and Iraq (“Last to Die”). He made speeches from the stage about “rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus.” For his trouble, he was attacked by Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and even a Times columnist, John Tierney, who wrote, “The singer who recorded ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ seems to have made an ideological crossing of the Hudson: ‘Greetings from Central Park West.’ ” In 2004, he campaigned for John Kerry and, in 2008, he was even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama, posting a statement on his Web site saying that Obama “speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit.” At a concert at the Lincoln Memorial before Obama’s inauguration, Springsteen sang “The Rising” with a gospel choir and, with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” including, at Seeger’s suggestion, the two last, “radical” verses. (“There was a great high wall there / that tried to stop me; / A great big sign there / Said private property; / But on the other side / It didn’t say nothing; / That side was made for you and me.”)

The songs on “Wrecking Ball” were written before the Occupy Wall Street movement, but they echo its rage against the lack of accountability. “We Are Alive” draws a line between ghosts of oppressed strikers, civil-rights marchers, and workers, while the chorus is a kind of communion among the dead and a call to the living: “We are alive / And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark / Our spirits rise / To carry the fire and light the spark.” For all that, the political vision—in “Wrecking Ball,” as in its predecessors—isn’t really radical. It’s shot through with a liberal insistence that American patriotism has less to do with the primacy of markets than with a Rooseveltian sense of fairness and a communal sense of belonging.

One night, I asked Springsteen what he hoped his political songs would do for people who come to concerts for a good time. He shook his head and said, “They function at the very edges of politics at best, though they try to administer to its center. You have to be satisfied with that. You have to understand it’s a long road, and there have been people doing some version of what we’re doing on this tour going all the way back, and there will be people doing it after us. I think one thing this record tries to do is to remind people that there is a continuity that is passed on from generation to generation, a set of ideas expressed in myriad different ways: books, protests, essays, songs, around the kitchen table. So these ideas are ever-present. And you are a raindrop.”

Springsteen admires Obama for the health-care bill, for rescuing the automobile industry, for the withdrawal from Iraq, for killing Osama bin Laden; he is disappointed in the failure to close Guantánamo and to appoint more champions of economic fairness, and he sees an unseemly friendliness toward corporations—the usual liberal points of praise and dispraise. He’s wary about joining another campaign. “I did it twice because things were so dire,” he said. “It seemed like if I was ever going to spend whatever small political capital I had, that was the moment to do so. But that capital diminishes the more often you do it. While I’m not saying never, and I still like to support the President, you know, it’s something I didn’t do for a long time, and I don’t have plans to be out there every time.”