Bruce Springsteen: favorite songs from each album

JOEL BERNSTEIN

Bruce Springsteen in Asbury Park, 1979.

In honor of Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming 75th birthday (Sept. 23) — and as I’ve done before for Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan — I am currently sharing a song a day, on Facebook, from each Bruce Springsteen album. I will include all the studio albums, most of the anthologies and widely released live albums, some EPs, and a few of the soundtracks and compilations he contributed to. But not the 93 albums in the “Bruce Springsteen Archives” series — I may be crazy, but I’m not that crazy.

I will be compiling the videos here, adding each one after it is posted online.

I am not making the argument that each selection is the “best” song from that album; it’s just my favorite, or something that I felt like sharing that day. I also won’t allow myself to choose a song twice, so if I have already chosen a song, it will be out of contention if it reappears in the same or different form on another album.

The Brucebase website was an invaluable resource for this project.

Here are the videos, with a Spotify playlist embedded at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
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I’ll begin with “Lost in the Flood” from 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. It’s not the best-known song on the album. But it is the one, I think, that provides the best glimpse, at this early stage of Springsteen’s career, of his ambition as an artist, and his scope as a poet.

From The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, there are many strong choices, including “Rosalita” and “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” But I’ll go with the vividly cinematic story song “Incident on 57th Street,” in which Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane find each other, but face an uncertain future. “We may find it out on the street tonight, baby/Or we may walk until the daylight, maybe,” Springsteen sings at the song’s explosive peak.

You can’t go wrong with any track from Born to Run, my favorite of all The Boss’ albums, but I’ll go with the titanic title track, if for no other reason than that was the first song of his I ever heard — on the radio in 1975, when I was 14 — and the one that started me on the path of lifelong Springsteen fandom.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is, of course, full of absolutely essential Springsteen songs (“Badlands,” “The Promised Land,” “Prove It All Night,” the title track), but I’ll share what I consider its most underrated song, the brooding but ultimately cathartic “Something in the Night.” Of the 10 Darkness songs, only “Streets of Fire” has been played less frequently by Springsteen in concert.

On No Nukes, the three-LP, multi-artist set that was recorded in September 1979 at Madison Square Garden and released in November of that year, Springsteen and the E Street Band were represented by fun oldies covers “Detroit Medley” and “Stay.” Here is “Stay,” featuring Jackson Browne (who had released his own version of the 1960 Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs hit on his 1977 album Running on Empty) and Rosemary Butler.

Three of my five selections so far (“Down in the Flood,” “Incident on 57th Street,” “Something in the Night”) have a moody but majestic, late-night vibe. It must be something in my DNA, but I’m going in the same direction for The River. The title track is quite powerful, of course, and “Hungry Heart” is undeniably catchy, and “Sherry Darling” is a lot of fun. But the song that gets to me most deeply, nearly 45 years after the album’s release, is “Stolen Car.”

In 1981, Springsteen’s buoyant cover of the holiday standard “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (somewhat similar to The Crystals’ version on 1963’s “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector” album and recorded live in 1975, at C. W. Post College in Brookville, New York) came out on a record for the first time, on the In Harmony 2 compilation album, benefiting various children’s causes. Four years later, it became the B-side to the “My Hometown” single as well. Somewhere along the way, it began getting major radio play during the holiday season, and to this day, you are guaranteed to hear it at least a few times every year, then.

Today we come to Nebraska, and I’ll go with the devastating “State Trooper.” As I wrote in this article: “I am not really a Jersey Shore guy. Sure, my family took occasional trips to Atlantic City (in its pre-casino days) when I was a kid, and I’ve been to Asbury Park and other Shore towns lots of times, mostly reviewing concerts. But I grew up in New York City and northern New Jersey, and have lived in northern New Jersey for my entire adult life.

“So in a way, ‘State Trooper,’ from 1982’s Nebraska, is the Bruce Springsteen song that’s most evocative of New Jersey, for me. I am very well acquainted, after all, with that spooky northern stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike ‘ ‘neath the refinery’s glow,’ as Springsteen sings, and ‘State Trooper’ — even more so than its more upbeat and more detailed sister songs ‘Open All Night’ and ‘Living on the Edge of the World,’ with which it shares some lyrics — brings you there immediately.”

Born in the USA (1984), of course, has the most hit singles of any Springsteen album. And while I was tempted to pick the always affecting “My Hometown,” I’m going with “Dancing in the Dark.” Its hooks grab me every time I hear it, and it captures something — feeling you’re at a dead end in your life, and yearning to break free — as perfectly as such a thing can be captured in a four-minute pop-rock song. Forty years after its release, it still amazes me.

Springsteen didn’t just sing on the all-star 1985 charity single “We Are the World.” He also donated a track to the album built around it: a live version of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped,” recorded the previous year at The Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford. (He had been performing the song since 1981). Cliff had brought a much lighter touch to it, and Springsteen really transformed it, upping the tension-and-release so much that it came across as an intensely personal, anguished statement. Springsteen later released the track on the limited-edition bonus CD of his 2003 Essential Bruce Springsteen compilation.

Riding high after Born in the USA, Springsteen, understandably, thought it would be a good time to release a live album, and he made it an extravaganza: Live 1975/85 (available as 5-LP, 3-cassette or 3-CD sets and released in November 1986), included 40 songs — eight of them not previously released in any form on his previous albums. Most of the recordings came from the tours that followed the releases of his Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River and Born in the USA albums. The opening track, though, is the only one from 1975, and it’s a stunner: a slow, haunting version of “Thunder Road,” recorded at The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California, and featuring just Springsteen’s voice and harmonica, Roy Bittan’s elegant piano playing, and Danny Federici’s magical keyboard glockenspiel.

Of all of the thorny love songs on 1987’s Tunnel of Love, the one that gets to me the most is “One Step Up,” a song of sad, clear-eyed self-examination (“When I look at myself I don’t see/The man I wanted to be”) set to subtly insistent music that suggests the inexorable forces that keep this guy from rising above his limitations.

Released a week after Tunnel of Love, the A Very Special Christmas multi-artist compilation album, benefiting The Special Olympics, had a Springsteen track that showed off one of his other, more fun-loving sides: His high-spirited concert version of “Merry Christmas Baby,” a song that had been a 1947 hit for Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers (featuring Charles Brown) and had also been covered by many other artists. This recording came from Springsteen’s New Year’s Eve 1980 concert at The Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, and had also been featured as the B-side of his 1986 “War” single.

Chimes of Freedom (1988) was a four-song EP featuring a cover of that Bob Dylan classic and three of Springsteen’s own songs; all four tracks were live versions recorded earlier in 1988. I’ll go with the rousing anthem “Be True,” a song that had been recorded for the album The River but had been inexplicably left off, though it was used for the B-side of “Fade Away” in 1981.

1988’s Folkways: A Vision Shared – A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly included two Guthrie songs by Springsteen: “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Vigilante Man.” The latter song, scarily intense and featuring a searing guitar solo, is so different from Guthrie’s original, in terms of both lyrics and melody, that you wouldn’t be wrong to think of it as a Guthrie-influenced Springsteen song, and not a cover.

The Last Temptation of Elvis, a 1990 multi-artist compilation of covers of songs from Elvis Presley’s movies (benefiting Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy), included the first release of Springsteen’s cover of the rollicking “Viva Las Vegas,” recorded in 1989 with studio musicians in place of the temporarily disbanded E Street Band. It later came out, as well, on the 2003 Essential Bruce Springsteen collection, and on the soundtrack of the 2008 documentary “Elvis: Viva Las Vegas.”

In 1987, Springsteen sang Harry Chapin’s “Remember When the Music” at a Carnegie Hall concert paying tribute to Chapin, who had died in 1981. An album featuring songs from that concert, Harry Chapin Tribute, was released in 1990. It’s a wistful, hopeful song, about the power of music to unite us: “Remember when the music brought us all together to stand inside the rain/And as we’d join hands we’d meet in the refrain/With dreams to live, and hope to give,” Chapin wrote, and Springsteen sang. (This was the only time Springsteen performed this song in concert.)

Springsteen became a father for the first time in 1990 and, perhaps not coincidentally, released his first children’s song in 1991: the goofy “Chicken Lips and Lizard Hips,” co-written by John and Nancy Cassidy and originally recorded by Nancy Cassidy. Springsteen’s solo version came out on Every Child Deserves a Lifetime: Songs From the “For Our Children” Series, benefiting the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

In March 1992 — four and a half years after Tunnel of Love, and with the E Street Band temporarily disbanded — Springsteen released two albums simultaneously: Human Touch and Lucky Town. E Streeters Roy Bittan and Patti Scialfa participated in the sessions, as did former E Streeter David Sancious, but most of the instrumental work was done by Springsteen himself, and various session musicians. The results often seemed more workmanlike than remarkable and, sonically, more generic than distinctive. But there were some gems here, including the title track of Human Touch, which, despite its slick production, came across as a very … well, human plea for love and connection.

I’ve previously argued that the beautiful and profound “If I Should Fall Behind” is Springsteen’s greatest song, period, post-Tunnel of Love. So, for Lucky Town … I’m going with “If I Should Fall Behind.”

1993’s In Concert/MTV Plugged — filmed for MTV’s “Unplugged” series but featuring full electric instrumentation — showcased Springsteen and his new touring band, which didn’t really try to put its own stamp on his older material, but sounded fine on the new stuff, including the rapturous Lucky Town ode to fatherhood, “Living Proof.”

The somber, AIDS-themed “Streets of Philadelphia,” from the soundtrack of the 1993 film “Philadelphia,” may not have seemed, at first, like something with a lot of commercial potential. But it ended up being Springsteen’s last Top 10 hit in the United States, as well as the winner of The Grammys’ Song of the Year and The Oscars’ Best Original Song awards. “You do your best work,” he said at The Oscars,” and you hope that it pulls out the best in your audience and some piece of it spills over into the real world and into people´s everyday lives. And it takes the edge off fear and allows us to recognize each other through our veil of differences.”

Curtis Mayfield became paralyzed in an onstage accident in 1990 and, in 1994, artists including Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton and Springsteen performed his songs on the A Tribute to Curtis Mayfield album, with Mayfield receiving the proceeds to help with his medical bills. Springsteen contributed a richly atmospheric version of “Gypsy Woman,” which had been a 1961 hit for Mayfield’s group of that time, The Impressions.

Four of the tracks on Springsteen’s 1995 Greatest Hits album were actually previously unreleased. Three were new recordings but the taut, urgent “Murder Incorporated” dated all the way back to 1982. It had been considered for the “Born in the USA” album but left off, perhaps — just guessing here — because it was too similar, in feel, to the title track.

The acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad album (1995) is full of understated story songs, but “Youngstown” is something else entirely — a devastating cry of anguish from a steelworker devastated by the collapse of the steel industry in his Ohio hometown.

Springsteen wrote “Dead Man Walkin’ “ for the soundtrack of the slightly differently spelled 1995 movie “Dead Man Walking” and, two years after “Streets of Philadelphia,” received his second Academy Awards nomination for it. Like “Streets of Philadelphia,” it’s an atmospheric ballad that feels mournful at times, but offers some soulful uplift, too, as Springsteen’s character, a convict facing the death penalty, accepts his fate as a “new day comin.’ ”

Springsteen first released “Blood Brothers” — a song that, I think it’s safe to say, most fans regard as being about his family-like relationship with the E Street Band — on his 1995 Greatest Hits album, and it sounded gentle and reflective then. But he made an alternate version of it the title track of his 1996 Blood Brothers EP (accompanying a short film documenting the Greatest Hits recording sessions). This was a stormy rock ‘n’ roll take, evoking the hard times the bandmates had been through together, as well as the ties that bind.

Springsteen’s four-CD Tracks compilation, in 1998, was an odd-and-ends boxed set, with recording session outtakes, demos, B-sides and alternate versions of songs. It also proved how much top-quality material Springsteen had left on the cutting room floor, for one mysterious reason or another. Case in point: “The Wish,” a deeply affecting ode to his mother that had been recorded in 1987.

18 Tracks (1999) came out five months after the Tracks boxed set, repackaging 15 of those songs with three previously unreleased ones: “The Fever,” “Trouble River” and “The Promise.” This last song had made its first concert appearance all the way back in 1976, but this was a new solo-piano studio version. It’s, I think, an essential Springsteen song, and as sad as anything he has ever recorded. Rarely has he sounded so resigned to despair, rather than committed to fighting against it. “When the promise is broken you go on living, but it steals something from down in your soul/Like when the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference, something in your heart runs cold,” he sings.

On 2000’s ‘Til We Outnumber ‘Em, a concert album documenting a September 1996 Woody Guthrie tribute at Severance Hall in Cleveland. Springsteen is represented by two of the Guthrie-written songs in his 10-song set that day: the playful “Riding in My Car” and the soulful protest song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which sounds like it could have come off his The Ghost of Tom Joad album (released less than a year earlier).

“My Love Will Not Let You Down” was originally recorded in 1982 and finally released on Tracks in 1998. It was one of the Tracks songs most frequently played by Springsteen and the E Street Band on their 1999-2000 reunion tour and, with its propulsive, irresistible energy, often was made the show-opener. The Live in New York City double album (released in conjunction with an HBO film that also came out on DVD) documented the last two shows of the tour, at Madison Square Garden, and though “My Love Will Not Let You Down” was not performed at the first show and came second at the second (after “Code of Silence”), it worked well in the opening slot of the film and the double album.

Springsteen wrote his gospel hymn “My City of Ruins,” thinking about Asbury Park, in 2000, and first performed it in concert there, that year. But after 9/11, when asked to perform — along with artists such as U2, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel — at the Sept. 21 “America: A Tribute to Heroes” TV concert that raised money for The United Way’s 9/11 fund, he realized it would be fitting for the occasion, and performed a very moving version of it, with just his guitar and harmonica, and a mini-choir composed of Stevie Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa, Clarence Clemons, Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Dee Holmes and Layonne Holmes. He introduced it as “a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters.” A release of the show later in 2001, as a double CD and a DVD, raised more money for the cause.

The post-9/11 album The Rising is, obviously, full of big, powerful anthems like “Into the Fire” and the title track, and bursts of joys like “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” and “Mary’s Place.” But don’t overlook the heartbreaking “You’re Missing,” in which someone who left for work in the morning hasn’t come back, and perhaps never will. “Your house is waiting for you to walk in … but you’re missing,” Springsteen sings.

Springsteen taped his version of Johnny Cash’s 1957 hit “Give My Love to Rose” for a 1999 televised tribute to Cash, but it was not released on an album until it came out on 2002’s Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash. In it, the narrator encounters a dying ex-prisoner who asks him to get a message to his wife and child. Introducing the song on the TV tribute, Springsteen said that Cash “kind of took the social consciousness from folk music and the gravity and humor from country music and the rebellion out of rock ‘n’ roll and taught all us young guys that not only was it all right to tear up all those lines and boundaries, but it was important.”

2003’s two-CD The Essential Bruce Springsteen anthology offered a more extensive overview than the 1995 one-CD Greatest Hits, plus some more recent tracks and, on a limited-edition bonus CD, an assortment of B-sides and previously unreleased tracks, including the high-energy, Chuck Berry-esque “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come),” recorded in 1979 but inexplicably left off of The River, Tracks and 18 Tracks (though Dave Edmunds’ cover did become a minor hit in 1982).

Warren Zevon died on Sept. 7, 2003, and three days later, Springsteen opened his concert at The SkyDome in Toronto with “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of Zevon’s 2002 album (co-written by Zevon and Paul Muldoon). Eerily, the title phrase is a metaphor for death, though the song was written and released soon before Zevon was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. Springsteen’s live version was released on the 2004 multi-artist tribute album, “Enjoy Every Sandwich”: The Songs of Warren Zevon.

“Long Time Comin’,” from Devils & Dust (2005), is, simply, one of Springsteen’s most powerful songs about two of his favorite topics: rebirth (“Tonight I’m gonna get birth naked and bury my old soul, and dance on its grave”) and fatherhood (“I reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly/And feel another one kickin’ inside/And I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time”).

Recorded in November 1975 but not released in album form until February 2006, Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 captures Springsteen and the E Street Band in great form on their first European tour, ever, and ends with this manic (in a good way) take on Gary U.S. Bonds’ 1961 party anthem, “Quarter to Three.”

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006) was a real change of pace: an album of folk songs, recorded not with the E Street Band, but with the Seeger Sessions Band: a large and sometimes boisterous group featuring acoustic guitar and bass, banjo, fiddle, horns, accordion and more. They sound like they’re having a tremendous amount of fun on the wryly humorous “My Oklahoma Home.” “All around the world, wherever dust is whirled/There’s some from my Oklahoma home,” Springsteen sings.

Live in Dublin, recorded in 2006 and released in 2007, documented Springsteen’s tour with the large, acoustic Seeger Sessions Band. Most of the material came from the We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album, but Springsteen drew from elsewhere, too, transforming, for instance, the Nebraska track “Open All Night” into a high-energy, swinging showstopper.

For Sowing the Seeds, a 2007 double album celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Appleseed Recordings label, Springsteen— in a different kind of Seeger session — re-recorded “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with Pete Seeger himself, then 88. Seeger’s vocal delivery, evoking the wisdom of the elders and a firm commitment to social justice, helps make the song, then only 12 years old, sound like it could have been around forever.

“Long Walk Home,” from Magic (2007), is one of his most profound political songs; indeed, on his current tour, he is introducing it as “a prayer for my country.” The “long walk home” is a symbol for a hoped-for return to the ideals that the narrator saw his country representing, when he was young. So is the flag flying over his hometown’s courthouse. It “means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t,” Springsteen sings.

Give US Your Poor, a 2007 multi-artist benefit album fighting homelessness, featured Springsteen on a tender version of the folk standard “Hobo’s Lullaby,” recorded with the Seeger Sessions Band a decade earlier (but previously unreleased). Banjo playing and backing vocals by Pete Seeger were added to the original recording in 2006.

2008’s Magic Tour Highlights EP collected four notable performances from that tour, including collaborations with Tom Morello, Roger McGuinn and Alejandro Escovedo, and “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” from the March 2008 Indianapolis show that marked Danny Federici’s last appearance with the band. (Federici died in April 2008.)

“My Lucky Day,” from 2009’s Working on a Dream, is a pretty straightforward love song. But working in the studio, Springsteen, The E Street Band and producer Brendan O’Brien do a good job of capturing the brawn and the drive of the band’s concert sound at the time.

The digital-only Hope for Haiti album (2010) included performances from an earthquake-relief telethon featuring Stevie Wonder, Jay-Z, Bono, Wyclef Jean, Neil Young and many others. Springsteen was represented by his solemn “We Shall Overcome,” featuring Charlie Giordano on accordion, Curt Ramm on trumpet, and Patti Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell, Curtis King and Cindy Mizelle on backing vocals.

Music from the “25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concerts” — which took place over two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York in late 2009 — was released the next year in DVD and CD form. Springsteen & the E Street Band performed with Billy Joel, Darlene Love, John Fogerty, Sam Moore and Tom Morello, and Springsteen also joined U2 for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and U2, Patti Smith and Roy Bittan for a once-in-a-lifetime version of “Because the Night,” his great songwriting collaboration with Smith.

The 2-CD 2010 album The Promise (also available as part of the 3-CD, 3-DVD boxed set The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story) collected outtakes from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions. One of the biggest treats was Springsteen’s reclamation of his hard-driving, immensely catchy “Talk to Me.” He had written this song in the ’70s, then given it to Southside Johnny, who did a great job with it on his Hearts of Stone album” (with Steven Van Zandt producing, and using the E Street Band’s basic tracks). For the Promise version, Springsteen used those same tracks and his original demo vocals, with new horn playing by Jukes members.

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