Every harried mother and every wife must experience nostalgia for a time when she was regarded on her own terms and not in relation to someone else, even if that means revisiting the uncertainty of solitude. Scialfa's experience is just writ very, very large: live alone and struggle for 15 years; fall in love with the most famous and successful rock musician in the world; live through his agonizing marriage to another woman; become his wife and mother to his three kids and live in a gigantic house in your home state close to your entire extended family with gobs of money and a life where you get to perform for hundreds of thousands of ecstatic fans; look back fondly on the days when you were lonely and struggling.

It may be brave of Scialfa to sing about the pre-Bruce days, offering Springsteen fans precious few voyeuristic crumbs on which to feed. But it's also very smart. When asked on CBS why she doesn't write about her kids and marriage, she replied that she "finds contentment and happiness not to be a great field to work in as far as things that hold my interest." That's fair, but what she's not saying is that even if her lyrics rely on themes of hope and faith, trains, diamond snakes, and a gypsy woman who has been well employed by this couple over the years -- they do not tread on territory that Springsteen has already covered. For one thing, who would want to compete with a description of a marriage that has already been lovingly rendered in Springsteen's "Better Days?" ("Now my ass was draggin'/ When from a passin' gypsy wagon/ Your heart like a diamond shone ...") Not Scialfa. She has instead thrown her voice behind one of the only populations that Springsteen has somehow neglected to represent over the years -- my own.

Yes, he's sung about his own youthful forays into Manhattan. He talked it real loud and walked it real proud, and strutted and burst like a supernova. Springsteen's songs of his New York City days are jubilant and intense and gloriously cocky but not exactly reflective. But Scialfa's done more than get serious about singlehood -- she's winnowed out one of the few voices that Springsteen has never deployed himself. Springsteen has told the stories of immigrants, factory workers, troubadours, beach bums, police and firemen, overwrought fathers, conflicted sons, despondent husbands. And it's not as though he's been reluctant to tackle a female perspective: He's given voice to 9/11 widows on "The Rising" and to a worried black mother in "American Skin (41 Shots)." But Springsteen's young women ... well, they have generally been limited to the variety eager to strap their hands across his engines.

Fair enough. Who doesn't want to strap her hands across his engines?

But listening to Scialfa's CD made me realize that her husband -- whose music has provided a core that I've drawn on politically, intellectually, romantically and spiritually since I was a child -- has never sung songs that reflect much about the realities of my adult life. That's fine -- and a lesson in the limits of self-absorption: Happily, we love art that has nothing to do with us. I'm not suggesting that Scialfa's music is any sort of fill-in for Springsteen's; it's not supposed to be. All the same, I found myself charmed and moved by the neatness of her trick. Here was a woman about whom I've thought a lot over the years -- cheering her, envying her, wondering how she got so thin, how she got so lucky -- stepping up to the plate and pitching one straight at me.

It's a nice retort to all the Springsteen fans who have pigeonholed her in a million ways over the years, always in relation to their hero. She was a mistress; she was a Jersey girl. She was the "right wife," taking the place of the "wrong wife." She was also the woman with whom Springsteen moved to Beverly Hills after firing his beloved band. On "23rd Street Lullaby," she's simply the person she was before she started to mean so much.

Let's not pretend there aren't perks in being married to a man who eclipses you completely. It's not every 50-year-old broad who releases her first album in 11 years and gets to promote it on Letterman, Conan, "The View," "Today," the "Early Show" and "CBS Sunday Morning."

But it's not every Arkansas lawyer who gets to be the junior senator from New York, and not every fictional New Jersey housewife who has $600,000 to throw at a piece of land. That doesn't mean that Hillary Clinton isn't a good senator, that Carmela Soprano won't be a gifted developer, or that Scialfa's album doesn't merit all the attention and praise -- four stars from Rolling Stone -- that it's getting. It just means that if you're going to live in the inescapable orbit of an enormous sun, you might as well benefit from whatever heat it offers.

And as far as that burning sun goes, Scialfa's album contains what feels like a valuable lesson. "Once I watched you walk on water," she sings on the album's beautiful final song, "Young in the City." "Now I watch you walk across the room." If she's singing about her husband -- and for my purposes, she is -- then the rich suburban lady across the river has something important to say to those of us still struggling with bills we can't pay and worrying about boys we can't have. Whatever it is that shimmers in the distance for us -- that thing we long to grasp but fear we never will -- may not only find its way into our lives, but someday become mundane.

Unless, of course, that thing we long to grasp is Springsteen himself. He's already taken.

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