Bob Seger: The Fire Inside : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Bob Seger's 'Fire Inside' is a characteristically conservative yet touching display of midlife musical resolve. Seger was thirty-one when he realized his rock dream with Live Bullet, from 1976, and never forgot the frustrations of the struggle. So after the commercial harvest of the subsequent Night Moves, he refined a formula that balanced the abandon of the roadhouse rocker with the control of a singer-songwriter and became that rare pontificator who could encore with a convincing Chuck Berry number.

The supporting cast of The Fire Inside mixes L.A. session aces with Bruce Hornsby, members of John Mellencamp's Indiana crew and Seger's own Silver Bullet Band. Seger followed his usual habit by recording some of the album with the soulful Barry Beckett at the board – much of the rest was recorded by Don Was – and the disc would be understood as bullishly American even if it didn't have the Statue of Liberty on the cover. Seger's nationalistic impulses, however, truly flower when he touches upon blues and country.

Seger covers his established styles with "Take a Chance" (floor-pounding rock), "The Fire Inside" (end-of-the-innocence ruminations) and "The Real Love" (earnestly romantic ballads). "The Real Love" is particularly fine, with Seger's sandy voice framed by Mike Campbell's layered guitars and a battery of background singers. "Sightseeing" evokes the rural rock of Mellencamp – and underscores the nature of artistic influences with a lyric about gaining inspiration from looking at great art.

That's why it makes perfect sense that the album's poetic heat comes from two songs by another artist: Tom Waits, one very idiosyncratic singer-songwriter. Seger presents "New Coat of Paint" as a ripe, sexy blues, with his blustery invitation ("We'll laugh at that old bloodshot moon/In that burgundy sky") lubricated by Bill Payne's rippling piano. The other Waits-penned track, "Blind Love," is tethered to the dulcet country whine of Richard Greene's violin.

"Blind Love" should have ended the album. Instead, Seger, as if to touch one last base, cranks out "She Can't Do Anything Wrong," a jailbait rocker by other writers. Two decades ago, Seger might've been forgiven for writing this song; now, sung as a cover by a middle-aged man, he sounds like a dad trying too hard to please the kids.

"She Can't Do Anything Wrong" does not befit the man who wrote "Rock and Roll Never Forgets." Seger shows he hasn't forgotten by growling through the guitars that drone on "Real at the Time" and stomp through "The Mountain." He also remembers plenty on a superb country ballad, "The Long Way Home," in which a beautiful loser shows how, when it comes to rock & roll, soul transcends style.