Why Springsteen, and why now?

Sure, he has a surprisingly strong new album, Magic, with the E Street Band, and he's playing the Air Canada Centre on Monday. But in the past five years Springsteen has moved from persona non grata in indie-rock circles to a major influence: you'll find him cited in endless interviews and reviews of Arcade Fire, The Hold Steady, Wolf Parade, The Constantines, The National, Bright Eyes and dozens of others. Even The Killers started growing scruffy facial hair and singing about the open highway.

Fans of all those acts might not necessarily be lining up to buy copies of Magic, but you can bet they all have a few Springsteen albums lying around somewhere. And not just the cliché gateway drug Nebraska, either (his low-key, lo-fi 1982 four-track classic). Just about any album from Springsteen's 12-year golden period (1975-1987) will do. This was unthinkable in the irony-laden '90s, when any serious talk of Springsteen's oh-so-earnest showmanship was usually laughed out of the room.

For the last 20 years, being a Springsteen fan has been a minor chore. Wading through albums that tarnished his towering reputation could be exhausting. The fact that he had laid off his E Street Band in 1989 added salt to those wounds. And it didn't help when the bonus disc of rarities in 2003's Essential Bruce Springsteen collection boasted a wealth of material that superceded anything he'd put out during the creative coma that followed 1987's Tunnel of Love. As far as most people under 30 knew, the only good song he wrote during the '90s was “Streets of Philadelphia.”

That changed in 1998. Not because of his clearing-house box set Tracks, which was greeted with a shrug. But the first clue came in John Waters' 1998 film Pecker – about the co-option of a working-class photographer into New York's pretentious art scene – which closed with an enthusiastic barroom toast to the Death of Irony, a precursor to Vanity Fair's post-9/11 zeitgeist assessment.

Irony, of course, is kryptonite for Springsteen and his followers. The post-ironic age led directly to Springsteen's comeback with the 9/11-themed The Rising. Disappointing though that album was – despite the return of an invisible E Street Band 12 years after he pink-slipped them – it proved he could still connect commercially.

The first clue that Springsteen's reputation was recovering was his cameo in the major music-geekfest film High Fidelity in 2000, where a character who loves Stereolab, Belle and Sebastian and Royal Trux turns to The Boss for relationship advice. At the time, Springsteen's inclusion in the film struck some as a wrong note. For others, it was only the beginning.

Next, Springsteen returned as an acceptable name-drop with Toronto's Constantines, whose career launched in 2001 when this paper's own Stuart Berman compared them to both Springsteen and Fugazi. Soon enough, every rock critic in North America used the exact same points of reference.

Constantines lead singer Bry Webb says that when the band formed, Springsteen was one of two artists that they all agreed on. The other was The Clash – a pairing that Arcade Fire's Win Butler echoes. “I always saw a real similarity between Bruce and The Clash,” says Butler, who was once embarrassed to discover that he was misquoted as calling Springsteen “a poor man's Dylan.”

“Obviously, I first heard both of their catalogues years after they were out,” he says, “but there is a certain energy and heart and social conscience that I always related to.”

Butler and his bandmates once met Springsteen at a post-Grammy party; they said it was the only reason worth attending the awards at all, with Springsteen standing out like the only honest man in a room full of fools. With them was their label boss, Mac McCaughan of Merge Records, who has been a fan since his parents took him to see the No Nukes concert movie in 1980.

Though McCaughan has covered Springsteen songs in his band Portastatic (as have fellow Merge artists Crooked Fingers) he says he's a bit baffled as to Springsteen's current renaissance, “because to me he was equally relevant five or 10 years ago. The kind of themes he's talking about, bringing this dark element to pop music without it being dour, is something that [Arcade Fire's] Neon Bible does. There are depressing themes there, but the overall feeling of the record is not: ‘You should just kill yourself now.' Springsteen does the same thing.”

Even when delivering his bleakest songs, Springsteen thinks the audience should feel better about themselves, not worse. He can deal with darkness head-on, while other performers either wallow in it or pretend it doesn't exist. He doesn't want us to feel his own pain; he wants to present us with pain that we all feel and put it in the context of a celebration where we're all going to get through it together.

And that, ultimately, is what makes his songs so universal all these years later. Although he's back on track with a hat trick – 2005's sparse Devils and Dust, 2006's folkie barnburner We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and now the raucous Magic – it's the dichotomies of his earlier work that still engages the most.

The side of Springsteen best known to his new disciples – many of whom were toddlers when Born in the USA came out – is the '70s performer who co-wrote with Patti Smith, covered Tom Waits and Suicide (something he's been doing again lately), appeared on Lou Reed's “Street Hassle” and originally wrote “Hungry Heart” for the Ramones. They don't know the ubiquitous MTV star. They don't know how horribly misinterpreted the song “Born in the USA” was at the time, most famously by Ronald Reagan.

“I think people gloss over the disturbing side of him,” says the Constantines' Bry Webb. “When I look back at his older music, he does seem more countercultural than his image now would suggest. His persona is so iconic that people don't notice the strangeness behind some of what he does. Covering Suicide's ‘Dream Baby Dream' [which Springsteen resumed doing in 2005] is a great example of that. There's a mischief behind a lot of his songs and his persona.”

But academic attempts at reconstructing his cool factor are futile next to the visceral pleasure of the music itself. “Production values aside,” says McCaughan, “Springsteen songs were timeless even when he was making them. Listen to his records from the '70s: he was putting out '60s-style productions of rock and pop and soul and R&B at a time when the two biggest things going were disco and punk rock. He was such a throwback at a time when people did not want throwbacks – they wanted the future, whether that was punk or disco.

“It's not the kind of thing that will go out of fashion, because it is what it is,” McCaughan concludes.

Now that he once again has our full attention, even Springsteen himself won't take it for granted. “My love will not let you down,” he promised when the E Street Band got back together in 1999, and on the new album he still promises: “I'll work for your love.” We know his love is wild; we know his love is real. So is our own.