Bruce Springsteen Band • Page 73

1. The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle
2. Darkness on the Edge of Town
3. Born to Run
4. Tunnel of Love
5. Born in the USA
6. The River
7. Nebraska
8. Wrecking Ball
9. Magic
10. Greetings
11. The Rising
12. High Hopes
13. Devils and Dust
14. Letter to You
15. Western Stars
16. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
17. Working on a Dream
18. Lucky Town
19. The Ghost of Tom Joad
20. Human Touch
21. Only the Strong Survive
The top 7 are all relatively interchangeable depending on my mood and the season, but it's a thousand degrees outside so wild and innocent it is. Also, I actually really like High Hopes...the Wall, Down in the Hole, American Skin etc.

 

I will forever think Wrecking Ball rules, easily my favorite post "peak" Bruce album

 

Honestly, my biggest gripe with it is that Bruce says “calvary” in “We Take Care of Our Own” when he clearly meant “cavalry.”

 

I am woefully under studied on his post tunnel of love output, but Magic is very good in my opinion. Not as good as anything in the classic run, but it still impresses me that he pulled off an album that late in his career where the only thing that deeply separates it from those records is the feeling of been there, done that. Living in the Future >>

 

Here's mine

1) Born To Run
2) Darkness
3) Born In the USA
4) Tunnel of Love
5) The River
6) The Rising
7) Nebraska
8) Letter To You
9) Wrecking Ball
10) Magic
11) Wild, Innocent
12) Greetings
13) Lucky Town
14) Human Touch
15) Working on A Dream
16) Devils And Dust
17) Western Stars
18) Ghost of Tom Joad
19) High Hopes

I'm not going to rank Seeger or Only the Strong but if I did, Only the Strong would be last and Seeger would be in the bottom 5.

Honorable mention to Tracks, The Promise, Ties That Bind, and all the great great B-sides of those eras.

 

I'll give Magic another try today, it's been a few years since I've given the whole album a spin and I've been working on an "Underrated Springsteen Songs" playlist ahead of Tracks II. (Listened to Devils & Dust this morning -- "Leah" and "All i'm Thinkin' About" were my picks from there.)

I do think the album's good, just his 19th best haha and I haven't given it a shot in a while. All the songs you've mentioned are good to great. That said, I'll never get over how "Radio Nowhere" is just his crowd work call-and-response of "is there anybody alive out there" put to an uninspiring melody and very by-the-numbers instrumentation.

 

1. Born to Run
2. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
3. The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
4. Darkness on the Edge of Town
   
5. Nebraska
   
6. The River
   
7. Born in the USA
   
8. Tunnel of Love
   
9. Letter to You
   
10. The Ghost of Tom Joad
    
11. The Rising
    
12. Western Stars
    
13. Lucky Town / Human Touch
14. We Shall Overcome
15. Wrecking Ball
    
16. Devils & Dust
    
17. Magic
18. Only the Strong Survive
19. Working on a Dream
20. High Hopes

 

Hot take: working on a dream may be a bad album, but it’s a killer late period Bruce single

 

Craig likes "Outlaw Pete", which I consider one of his worst Bruce takes

 

“Outlaw Pete” is solid you may be outnumbered there

 

“Outlaw Pete” is silly, but it’s one of the only songs on that album that has any personality at all. At least it’s swinging for something!

 

Also, since I’m over here catching strays from @Matt Chylak, I will give him a hard time for ranking a live compilation against studio albums…and putting it fifth! Might as well just put the greatest hits on the list too!

 

Haha sorry it's literally what I think of when I think of that song. ("I can't believe that Craig likes this")

Finally someone pushed me on this! Live 1975-85 is a monumental, indelible document of the E Street Band that has 9 songs not on other albums, including two that charted as radio singles. I listen to it as much as almost anything in Bruce's discography and it deserves consideration as an official part of the band's discography as much as Nirvana Unplugged or Frampton Comes Alive or The Last Waltz.

 

It just feels so vital and immediate and passionate to me in a way that even excellent stuff like Letter to You and Western Stars doesn't quite. Plus, I think if you asked me his 3 best songs since Tunnel of Love, I'd probably tell you "Wrecking Ball", "Death to My Hometown" and "Land of Hope and Dreams"

 

Working on a Dream doesn't work as a whole (and I have still not come around on "Outlaw Pete") but I feel like I grow to really like a new song on it every year or two. I really like "Life Itself" and "Kingdom of Days" especially.

 

It’s a good defense of your stance, but worth noting that this compilation also includes 31 songs that ARE on other albums, including a veritable greatest hits of song selections. IMO, there is no fair way to measure that against any of his studio albums. They are two different mediums doing two different things.

 

I mean……”Queen of the Supermarket” definitely has a personality lol. It’s just a really really awful one; the kind of personality you don’t invite back to a party. But @cshadows2887 and I have had this discussion at least 2-3x before over the last 15 years in various threads haha so I won’t belabor the point. Probably remains my least favorite Bruce song though.

 

agreed, but who said anything about fairness? it's all subjective anyway! by that same line of thinking, why are we talking about Tracks or High Hopes or either of the covers albums? one can't possibly fairly compare them to his carefully thought over full album statements.

this is why Im a big fan of tiers when we do this exercise. I put it at the top of the second-highest tier and that's as high as I'll allow it to go since it's not an official studio album.

 

You absolutely cannot include a live album ha ha ha

 

Correct me if wrong but I believe the only Bruce original (non cover) in that set which doesn’t have a corresponding studio released version is Seeds ?

 

I definitely hear that vitality in Letter to You. Tracking that album live with the whole band, journeying back in time to dig up those old songs, Bruce grappling more and more with mortality...I find the entire thing to be so emotionally hard-hitting. But Wrecking Ball definitely has a lot of punch too. I remember listening for the first time and being kind of taken aback at the way he sounded on "Easy Money," because it had been years at that point since we'd heard him sound that hungry.

As for best songs post-Tunnel, that would be an interesting exercise. I can tell you that "Moonlight Motel" would absolutely be my number 1.

That song is so funny to me. This part always makes me wonder: was he being serious?

As I lift my groceries into my car
I turn back for a moment and catch a smile
That blows this whole fuckin' place apart

I felt a little weird about including the covers albums, too, but they're at least album-length statements that he made in the studio and presented as entries in his catalog, which I don't think is the same thing as a career-spanning live compilation with dozens of songs recorded across a bunch of different shows. I did not include Tracks, either, for a lot of the same reasons.

The Promise and The Ties That Bind are murkier, as far as my taxonomy goes, but I left them off in part because they're a mix of old recordings and stuff that he went back and finished up years later. Neither feels like a cohesive "thing" to me, in part because you can go from '70s or '80s Bruce voice on one song to 2010s Bruce voice on the next.

As for High Hopes, that is 100 percent an album, regardless of the odds-and-sods nature of it. It's not actually that much different than any of his post-2010 albums (or even, for that matter, Devils & Dust), all of which include some or lots of old songs that he reached back into his archive for. The weirdest thing about it and it's albumness is the re-recording of "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

The most interesting test of my system will actually be Tracks II, since it seems like those are actually fully realized albums that could feasibly ranked, one by one, as part of the studio album oeuvre.

 

I think the Tracks 2 albums will need to count as albums. Just my 2 cents

and agree and had all same thoughts as you regarding Tracks and The Promise, etc

 

Because I’m nuts, I actually made albums out of each era of B-sides

so all the Darkness B-Sides are in one place and includes The Promise, Tracks songs from that album, etc

did the same with River/Ties That Bind. All the B-sides together

and this may blow your mind - also have all the BITUSA b-sides together like an album. That’s a great one! 25+ songs

 

Correction. 23 songs

 

Yeah I get that on Letter to You as well, but I guess there are some more songs on that I haven't quite locked in with than with Wrecking Ball. It's all varying degrees of excellence.

"Moonlight Motel" is absolutely top 5 in that window. Then probably something from "Lonesome Day", "My City of Ruins", "I'll Work for Your Love" and "American Land"

Btw I think that line is the best example for the case I've always made: that song is meant as a very light parody of what he's famous for. When you make a big movie moment out of your whole life but you're not 18 and racing cars or running the streets anymore, you romanticize...the supermarket.