Among rock music's most iconic figures, Bruce Springsteen often feels like the one who loves and believes in rock & roll the most, eager to re-create the breathless emotions it brings out in him. Embracing the pleasures of the sounds of AM radio in the 1950s and '60s (garage rock, British Invasion, R&B, blue-eyed soul, emotional teen pop) with the literacy of the singer/songwriter movement and a fierce desire to document the lives of the blue-collar world in which he grew up, Springsteen's music was always a grand, ambitious amalgam. (He once said he dreamed of making an album...