Springsteen

From September 2017 through this past week and weekend, Bryant Burnette (The Truth Inside the Lie, Where No Blog Has Gone Before, You Only Blog Twice) and I did an album by album overview of Bruce Springsteen's discography under the moniker of "Saturday (or Sunday) Night (or Morning) Springsteen." 

With the recent release of Western Stars I figured it was time to get a Table of Contents sort of post up for all our reviews and overviews. Bryant was kind enough to supply all new capsule reviews of each album for this here post. Click on the link of your choice for track-by-track reviews, screencaps galore, and other fine commentaries. 

"Like a river that don't know where it's flowing /

I went out for a ride and I just kept going."

Greetings from Asbury Park (1973)

This sounds today very much like what it is, i.e., a first album by a performer/band still trying to figure out their sound.  But it's better than most such albums, and you'd have to respect it if only for the career(s) it launched.  I think it's got a lot to enjoy in its own right, though; and if I try to astrally project myself back to 1973, I think I have to conclude that from a point of view of that "when," I've never quite heard anything like this album.

The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973)

This is very much a sequel to the first album, but it's a sequel that deviates from its forerunner in sound, scope, and weight.  There are some absolutely killer tracks on here, and for my money, the entirety of Side B is gold.

Born to Run (1975)

I mean, what can you say?  It's not the sound of ALL rock and roll, but it's definitely THE sound of a certain kind of rock and roll, and in that regard it will probably never be topped.  Springsteen, wisely, rarely tried.

Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

(Bryan here: How many times does Bruce make this face in the 70s and 80s? A lot.)

Here's another sequel; this one to Born to Run, and in many ways most of what I said about E Street Shuffle also applies to this one.  Born to Run gets all the glory, but I think this is actually a better album by a marginal degree.  But who's checking margins on these two masterpieces?  (Us, I guess!)

The River (1980)

This two-album set reflects a desire in Springsteen to run away from what he'd created in the foregoing half a decade.  Not with any malice or refutation, but with an acknowledgment: he'd climbed THAT mountain already, and he didn't want to try to better what he'd done, so he'd do something a little different.  Which The River mostly is; not entirely (it's not like you wouldn't recognize this style of music if you bought the album when it came out in October of 1980), but in little ways.  It's a great set of tunes, and in the end, that's probably all that ought to matter.

Nebraska (1982)

Now THIS was a true divergence.  If you bought THIS album on release day (some two years after The River) without knowledge of what you were about to hear, you probably would be a bit rattled.  It's not to everyone's tastes, and it's not even to the tastes of all Springsteen fans.  However, I'd venture a guess: most Springsteen fans who don't dig this album are perhaps fans more of the E Street band than of Springsteen himself.  If so, their ambivalence might make sense: this is Springsteen's core, his essence.  And it's his best album.  With maybe one exception...

Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Rarely has a better collection of tunes been grouped together on a two-sided piece of vinyl.  What's your list of the best rock albums ever recorded?  If it is missing Born in the U.S.A., it's invalid.  I'm not saying it's THE best; but I am saying it better be in the conversation, or it's not a conversation worth having.

(Bryan again: Hear him, hear him.)

Live 1975 - 1985 (1986)

I want to be clear about what I'm about to say.  No misunderstandings, please; I'm glad Bruce Springsteen is still alive.  BUT ... if fate had decreed that he had to die early, I'd say he ought to have died sometime in the early months of 1986, so that this box set could serve as a tombstone, epitaph, and canonization.  Because in a way, it kind of already does.  Again, I'M VERY GLAD it's not in a literal sense.  But if such a thing had had to happen, 1986 would have been the best possible time.  The only good thing to come from it would have been the reverence that would be bestowed upon those years and upon this set, which is so awesome that it almost makes you wish Bruce had gone out in a blaze of some sort of glory.

Tunnel of Love (1987)

And now for something completely different...  Well, look: it's not hard to see why some people might have turned their noses up at this in comparison to what had come before it.  Hell, I'm the guy who just had to dance around not saying that he wishes Springsteen had died at the top of his powers, and thus ascended into the realm of myth and legend.  No myth or legends are apt to come out of Tunnel of Love, which is indeed a completely different thing.  And yet, it's got enough excellence on it that it really does add to both the myths and the legends, provided you are willing to expand your notion of what that means.  Great album; not iconic, maybe, but great all the same.  And, I'd argue, the last great album he'd make for quite a while.

Human Touch and Lucky Town (1992)

A weird idea, putting out two albums on the same day.  Doing that kind of denies them their own identity, and you wonder why it wasn't just a double-disc release under a single title.  But the albums do have their own identity, provided you are interested enough to look for it.  In the case of Human Touch, it's ... uh ... well, I don't know, but I know it when I hear it.  If that's an anticlimactic pronouncement, well, it's an anticlimactic album.  It makes for interesting supplemental material to a biography, but the tunes themselves are mostly not great.  Some aren't even good.

Springsteen and his new band sound more engaged with the material on Lucky Town, but in all honesty, it's six versus half-a-dozen; the distinction doesn't make all that much difference.

MTV Plugged / In Concert (1992)

This is the sound of a guy trying to keep up his awesome live presence with a different cast of musicians.  And it's not a bad try!  You can tell that Springsteen is going to put on a great show no matter who is on stage with him; give him a microphone, a guitar, and a bunch of ferrets in tutus, and it would probably still be fun.  This is better than that.

Greatest Hits and more (1995)

A good sampling, and a few good "new" tracks, but there's no excuse for this not having been two discs.

The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)

Springsteen delivers a book of mediocre poetry and does so in musical format.  I love a couple of the songs; the rest, I can't even remember.  It's not that they're bad; they're just so ephemeral that the wind takes them and they go someplace I can't mentally access them.

Tracks (1998) and 18 Tracks (1999):
Pt. 1 and Pt. 2

A hell of a collection of tunes, most of which will never be heard by a mass audience.  If somebody had been a bit more mercenary, there are probably three or four top-ten albums that could have been made from all this at the height of Springsteen's powers.  But hey, so be it; the hardcore fans know what's up.

Live from New York City (2001)

We've yet to see Jesus return on HBO, but we did see The E Street Band return, and if Jesus returning can be better than that then we've all really got something to look forward to. 

The Rising (2002)

A strong collection of tunes, done absolutely no justice by paltry ideas about what "Bruce Springsteen" should sound like.  Hey, look, I get it; it wasn't 1979 anymore.  Maybe trying to sound like it was wouldn't have worked.  But in trying to sound like 2002, they managed only to sound like 1979 trying to sound like 2002 Man, be what you ARE...!

The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003)

(Bryan here: Kind of weird of Bruce to put out another retrospective so soon after Greatest Hits isn't it? This one is a better selection of songs for my money.)

Devils and Dust (2005)

Scroll up to my comments about The Ghost of Tom Joad.  Same for this one.

We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions (2006)

This is Bruce's only post-eighties album that actually satisfies me.  All the others have a few good songs at a minimum (and most have a few greats), so you'll never catch me wishing they didn't exist.  But whatever happened on this album didn't happen on the others; this is the sound of inspiration striking.

Hammersmith Odeon London '75 (2006)

(Bryan here: I guess I don't have any summary remarks from Bryant on this one, probably because he was really not feeling this one on our listenthrough. Click the link for all the grumpiness, as well as links galore to vintage E Street sound and mayhem.)

Live in Dublin (2007)

Springsteen live albums tend to be pretty glorious, don't they?  This one is no exception.

Magic (2007)

Boy am I glad we did this series of posts!  Thanks to that process, I now know that I can blame some of my dissatisfaction with new-millennium Springsteen albums on piss-poor production.  This album wasn't the first to have lousy sound, but it might be the lousiest-sounding of them all.  It sounds fake.  It sounds like a computer simulation of "Bruce Springsteen."

Working on a Dream (2009)

Not a whit better than Magic in the sound department.  Some decent songs, though.  

The Promise (2010)

How is it even possible that after Tracks, there can be this much great stuff still lying around?  Other bands must hear this and begin weeping.

Wrecking Ball (2012)

I don't LOVE this album, but it's a step up from the previous couple, and it sounds like Springsteen is still very much engaged with the process of writing songs.  He's trying new things, he's not simply copying and pasting his old style.  Still, I think he needs to find a producer who really understands his career; that hasn't happened in a good long while, even if they all swear they do.

High Hopes (2014)

This isn't great or anything, but it's fundamentally solid.  If Springsteen puts out albums "only" as good as this and Wrecking Ball for the rest of his career, then he's still doing alright in my book.  I'll be there for every bit of it I can get!

Chapter and Verse (2016)

 
I'd happily have listened to a full two-disc set of stuff from this era. And you just KNOW such a thing could have been done. (This one also reviews The Ties That Bind.) 

Springsteen on Broadway (2018)

Coming soon.

Western Stars (2019)

The best album of new material he'd put out since The Rising, if not Tunnel of Love. I think this is rather a triumph; maybe just a low-key one, but when you've had a career like the career this dude has had, that's saying something.

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