Human Touch and Lucky Town have aged decently well, they are better than you remember. The band is noticeably missing but at least half of those songs are solid or better.
Setting aside my knee jerk objection to lumping Lucky Town in with Human Touch when LT’s actually way better, yes that’s definitely true
Lucky Town is definitely better, but I think think those albums work better if you just slim them down to a single disc. The emotion of the Lucky Town songs counteracts some of the corniness of the Human Touch material, while the extremely glossy poppiness of the Human Touch stuff adds some nice lightness to Lucky Town. Here's my compilation. Not sorry about the title.
I know it's corny and arguably regressive, but I've always had a soft spot for "Man's Job." "Local Hero" totally works in that slot too, though.
Local Hero was my favorite Springsteen song around the age of 5-6 when I also got a harmonica for a birthday--so I would have to fit it in somewhere
Not to go on a tangent but, in reflecting on that anecdote, I'm not sure I'm a selfless enough parent to purposefully give a young child a fucking harmonica, good lord that must have sucked
Really any instrument. I started playing piano when I was 6 or 7, my brother played drums for a long time, and my sister briefly played trumpet. I'm sure it's great if/when your kids actually get good at music, and I ended up majoring in music so hopefully my mom felt the investment was worthwhile. But man, it's gotta be torture for many, many years.
Hope it includes the electric Nebraska recordings, but I feel like they’d do that as its own release.
A friend of mine who is pretty dialed in to the Springsteen fan community says it's a seven-disc set. Unclear what's on it, but probably heavy on all those shelved albums from the wilderness period.