David Remnick's portrait in the current New Yorker.
"Springsteen continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, 'Wrecking Ball,' is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls 'the distance between the American reality and the American dream.' .... In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/30/120730fa_fact_remnick