He's almost his own natural phenomenon, Bruce Springsteen. Thirty-six years after his first album, decades on the road, and he's still burning up the atmosphere with his incandescent intensity and ceaseless search for the American Dream, at the end of the street or just over the horizon.

It's not just that he can play for three hours, as he and the E Street Band did at the BankAtlantic Center on Sunday night, but that playing at such full-stream intensity seems as natural and necessary as breathing to him. He turns 60 next week, and yet he just doesn't stop.

What Springsteen's passion means by now is hard to say. The sold-out audience at the BAC was largely middle-aged, well-fed and comfortable, a long way from the roaring, despair-driven dreams of Born to Run, or the working-class despair of Seeds, whose protagonist doesn't know where he's going to sleep.

Yet, whether they're responding to sheer energy and nostalgia, or because Springsteen brings rare meaning to rock-'n'-roll release, or both, the audience roared ardently along on songs like Promised Land and when Springsteen asked ``Can you feel the sacred fire? We're gonna build a house out of music and out of spirit and out of noise!'' On Sunday night, Springsteen carved a masterful path through longing and exuberance and rage, out to a dimly understood but powerful faith in life.

JOY AND ENERGY

It's been said many times, but you have to admire Springsteen and the E Street Band's joy and energy and musical communion in performance, the wild life inside their expert execution. (The core group was the same as it has been for decades: Roy Bittan on piano, Clarence Clemons on saxophone, Nils Lofgren and Steven Van Zandt on guitar, Garry Tallent on bass and Max Weinberg on drums, plus an ebullient Soozie Tyrell on violin and acoustic guitar, Charles Giordano on organ, and two back-up singers.)

Springsteen wore his standard uniform of jeans, black shirt and vest, a slightly receding hairline and craggier face the only signs of age.

He's not afraid to have fun -- twice he brought kids up onstage, an awestruck boy to sing Waitin' On a Sunny Day, and four ecstatic children to boogie with him for Dancing In the Dark. The band even performed requests, which Springsteen picked from a pile of hand-lettered signs that he gathered from the crowd -- obscure, feel-good songs like Be True and So Young and In Love. And for the first encore, a beaming version of The Crystals' shimmering '60s classic, Then He Kissed Me, which Springsteen made as innocent and happily romantic as the song deserved.

If Springsteen mostly stayed away from overt politics (he made one plea for contributions to the nonprofit Cooperative Feeding Program, and for ``healthcare for every American''), many of his songs have renewed resonance in a time of lost homes and jobs. Lines like ``they're gonna take my house away'' and the gritty, grinding blues despair of ``I don't know where I'm going to sleep tonight'' leaped out, as did the passionate hope for better days in the gospel-tinged traditional Hard Times.

GOING DEEP

Yet Springsteen's power comes from somewhere deeper than either rock energy or even a passion for justice.

On Outlaw Pete, from his latest album, Working On a Dream, he summoned up a mythical American outsider, with a yearning that felt much more genuine live than on record.

When he sang The Rising, his tribute to the victims of 9/11, he brought the crowd almost to tears with a vision of life that was both fragile and indomitable -- then blasted into Born to Run, the lights on full, tearing out of the darkness into full-tilt brilliance.

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