Bob Seger: The Distance : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Despite numerous references to that "lonesome stretch of gray" and heading "down a westbound road" on "my big two-wheeler," The Distance – Bob Seger's fourteenth album and his first studio release since 1980's Against the Wind – is not just about the highway, rock's most used and abused symbol of wanderlust and escape. It's about the lives, mistakes and promises at either end. "Comin' Home," a bittersweet ballad sandwiched between two vintage Seger grinders on side two, is a particularly striking vision of one prodigal son returning home in humiliating defeat: "You'll just tell them what they want to hear/How you took the place by storm/You won't tell them how you lost it all." Another song, "Roll Me Away," heads defiantly in the other direction, its nomadic urgency and wide-open-spaces imagery heightened by Jimmy Iovine's expansive production and the Springsteen-like sweep of the Silver Bullet Band.

Since his late-Seventies platinum explosion with Night Moves and Stranger in Town, Bob Seger has been consumed with reconciling success with his native Detroit instincts, and on The Distance, the road is his lifeline home. Detroit music, from Motown to the Stooges, has always been about breaking out, about surviving hard weather and hard luck, and some of Seger's best records are his Sixties garage-punk sides, like "Heavy Music" and "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man." On The Distance, "Boomtown Blues," with its mean Motor City guitars and ironic lyrical sting ("Look what you win but Look what you lose Stuck here in Heaven With these Boomtown Blues"). vibrates with that same power. So does the high-octane T-Bone Walker-style shuffle "Makin' Thunderbirds." a nostalgic look back at the Detroit auto industry's glory days that is salted with tears not just for the disappearing jobs, but for the fading free spirit those cars symbolized.

The rest of The Distance, including the romantic interludes, is just as exhilarating. In place of the mawkish campfire sentimentality that plagued Against the Wind, Seger and producer Iovine have fashioned a broad, cinematic sound that magnifies the everyday trials and "little victories" of the people in these songs. The interstate romance of "Even Now" is given a dramatic motion by the breezy gallop of the band and bright piano sparkle of E-Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, while Seger's heartily sung chorus amplifies the warming intimacy in the lyric. "Love's the Last to Know" is about a different, sadder distance, the simple ballad arrangement and piano-organ combination giving the song a kind of chamber-soul quality.

The Distance is not a very happy record, but, ultimately, it is an encouraging and, at times, triumphant one. "Every hour you survive will come to be/A little victory," he roars at the end. Though the highway is usually nothing more than an easy way out from having to find yet another way of saying, "Baby, let's make it," Seger treats it like an umbilical cord that can go a hell of a long way but should never be cut. The lesson here is that it's not enough to just go the distance–you also have to be able to come back.