These days you can almost always hear the lump in Bruce Springsteen’s throat when he sings. If, at the end of his 16th album, he were to offer it up for inspection, you suspect it would reveal sentiments made explicit in the acoustic Tomorrow Never Knows. Time is running out.

It doesn’t take a crack gumshoe to work out why that might be. The heartfelt dedication to his departed keyboard player Danny Federici finds a more poetic outlet on The Last Carnival, an acoustic fever-dream of circus imagery that somehow echoes the senselessness of loss. On an album comprised mostly of straightforward love songs, albeit informally amplified and roughed up by the E Street Band, the song’s subject matter isn’t typical, but the mood is.

Anyone hankering for a return to the starlit high emotion of The River will surely hit repeat on Queen of the Supermarket, a bold fantasy of longing played out amid pristine aisles and shopping carts. At first you wonder if Springsteen has bitten too much off his conceptual Snickers, but after the holy shiver of the pay-off — “I turn around and catch a smile that blows this whole f***ing place apart” — you just want to hear it again.

As though allowing us to gaze at two petting lovers through God’s great microscope, the little intimacies of This Life achieve a Spectoresque grandeur. If, here and on the autumnal Kingdom of Days, real people populate the album’s emotional centre, mythical ones inhabit its spiritual centre. Inspired by the Bush Administration, whose demise Springsteen so publicly relished, Outlaw Pete compresses its protagonist’s lifetime into eight minutes of galloping cinematic narrative and thick portentous strings — its lesson, as Springsteen recently put it, that you had “better learn the story that [your sins] are telling you. Because they’re whispering your future in your ear.”

It’s a moral that applies just as easily to rock stars as it does to American presidents. At 59, the key to Springsteen’s continuing connection with his audience is his resistance to the perpetual state of arrested development that some of his peers think comes with the job. A long time ago, he seemed to work out that great art is something that happens because of everyday life, not in place of it. That’s why his fans continue to use his records as co-ordinates to chart the ups and downs of their lives. Because at some level, it’s clear that he’s doing the same thing.

(Columbia, TS £12.72)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010