Omg we have a Bruce Springsteen thread?!!
The only songs of his I listen to regularly are the singles from Born In The USA, and Hello Sunshine recently. I want to get more into him so I think I'll listen to his albums in order.
Did you ever get around to this? His consistency through the 70s and 80s was remarkable so it's hard to go wrong with such a strategy. The two
Born albums hoover up all the attention - and they're both great, esp
Born to Run, so that's not a huge issue for me - but my personal faves are the acoustic heartache of
Nebraska (one of the greatest records ever tbh) and the blue-collar anxieties of
Darkness on the Edge of Town. I love the wild, Dylan-on-acid storytelling of early Bruce too. Fuck, I love everything about him. A musical titan who's always given voice to the tramps, the screwballs, and the oppressed; who consistently tears apart the myth of US exceptionalism while simultaneously recognising the transmutative allure of the American Dream. I also can't think of anyone else who has a song to match
every single feeling on my crazed emotional spectrum.
Things have been more inconsistent since the 90s, but that's true for every artist with so lengthy a career (and none of those that are living can match Springsteen's highs). There's stuff to cherish on
almost every album imo. If you listen to nothing else from the later years, at least listen to 'Moonlight Motel' which does things to my withering heart and malleable tear ducts that I cannot adequately put into words. Honestly, I'd play an album of his bathroom farts I love him so damn much.
That said, I'm not sure what to think about this tendency among artists to open up EVERYTHING from the vaults. Quality over quantity and all that. My time is a finite, stretched resource and I'm looking at
Tracks II's 83(!!)-song tracklist with mild concern. I suppose the original
Tracks gave me one of my fave Springsteen songs (his reinterpretation of the mythical-amongst-fans 'The Promise', which assumes infinitely more gravitas when delivered in middle age) and had plenty of other very worthy cuts. Let's see if round two can approach that kind of strike rate.