Bruce Springsteen’s 50 Greatest Songs Ranked

Once you’ve been called Rock’n’roll Future – where do you go? The answer, for Bruce Springsteen, over six decades of singing, shouting, rocking and writing, turned out to be just about anywhere, everywhere. Walking like Elvis, talking like Dylan, rocking like a full-force gale, he revived rock’s golden youth and fused it with a talent for creating worlds that sucked you in: characters that fought, loved, drove, feared and loathed in an America whose sense of self and stark reality collided and combusted. Around, beneath and behind him, most of the time, the E Street Band have stoked his fire, a big group with a juggernaut sound that could play all night, will play all night given half a chance.

And yet Springsteen’s is mostly a personal journey – albeit one that tracks that of his nation, in his lifetime and back through history. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on September 23, 1949, of Dutch, Irish and Italian stock, his dreams of escape fuelled music of romantic aspiration, yet his sense of place remained so strong (his current address in Colts Neck is less than 8 miles from his childhood home) that, barring the disorientating effects of mega-fame in the mid-’80s, he has remained steadfastly grounded.

There were aspirations, too, to write better, and differently, aspirations fulfilled on startling small-scale albums – Nebraska, The Ghost Of Tom Joad – and in a memoir, Born To Run, that cut to the core of what makes him tick. These days, he pens songs and plays shows that burn as intensely as ever, from Broadway to Glastonbury, while he hobnobs with politicians and intellectuals seeking his take on the issues of the day. His country’s conscience? An unlikely outcome for that skinny kid in a singlet with a Fender Esquire slung across his back. Maybe there’s something to that American Dream, after all.

50.

Pink Cadillac

(B-side to Dancing In The Dark, 1984)

Fundamentally it’s Chuck Berry playing Peter Gunn.

The distilled run-off of rockabilly, garnished with a twist of Mancini sax and served with a gunshot snare every second and fourth beat, this stark, unyielding track didn’t make it onto Born In The USA, yet it’s tooled to rev up any jukebox. “My love is bigger than a Honda, it’s bigger than a Subaru,” declares Bruce in a steely, greasy delivery, dripping with slapback echo. “Honey I just wonder what it feels like in the back of your pink Cadillac.” Don’t they all?

49.

The Wrestler

(from Working On A Dream, 2009)

Gut-wrenching bonus track on ugly duckling album.

Working On A Dream was a surprisingly slight, poppy affair, affected by whimsy (Outlaw Pete) and dipped in Beatle-y strings. But this piercing song, written for the Oscar-nominated Mickey Rourke film about a washed-up grappler, and its sparse sounds stood apart. Its lyrical play on singularities — “one-trick pony,” “one-legged dog,” “one-armed man” — hints at our fundamental aloneness, while the refrain of “You’ve seen me” confesses a need for connection. Four decades into his career, The Wrestler reveals Springsteen still working on his craft, honing his mission.

48.

Shenandoah

(from The Seeger Sessions, 2006)

Blissful surrender to the American folk tradition.

Few songs are more heart-achingly beautiful – or more embedded in the American psyche – than the early 19th Century story of a fur trader’s doomed love for the daughter of an Indian chief along the banks of the Missouri. Stripped of its later baggage as a shanty, work song and bar-room singalong, this abandons all guile to the raw, unashamed sentiment at the song’s core. A choked vocal, sublime Patti Scialfa harmonies and Soozie Tyrell’s ghostly violin underpin a restrained Chieftains-esque arrangement. Pete Seeger loved it.

47.

Murder Incorporated

(from Live In New York City, 2001)

Blood meets thunder in a bruising bout between message and medium.

This remixed Born In The USA outtake first released in 1995 can be so ferocious live — on the full-roar Live In New York City video counterpart to the audio-only album, Nils Lofgren, Steve Van Zandt and Springsteen gurningly shred their asses off — that the noise often drowns out the message. Yet unplugged its scathing denunciation of the American “body count” deemed “the price of doing business” lacks heft, as does even the studio original. A gut punch needs heavyweight delivery.

46.

Waitin’ On A Sunny Day

(from The Rising, 2002)

The happiest one of all…

A live mainstay until 2016, this was a burst of untrammelled singalong joy, but regarded with suspicion by the cognoscenti, who winced at its cheesy lyrics (“gonna chase the clouds away”) and relentless smiley optimism. Even Springsteen admitted it was the sort of stomper manager Jon Landau invariably rejects, but the artist was right to prevail. Written before 9/11, the recorded version was a counterweight to the more downbeat musings of The Rising and another welcome showcase for Soozie Tyrell’s violin.

45.

If I Should Fall Behind

(from Lucky Town, 1992)

A wedding ring in song form.

A pledge of – and an appeal for – undying devotion come what may, this was recorded at Springsteen’s Thrill Hill West home-studio shortly after his marriage to second wife Scialfa. No thundering back-beat and no heroics, just a simple side-stick-on-snare country tune acknowledging even true love’s challenges (“Oh, but you and I know / what this world can do”). Gary Mallaber’s on drums, but Bruce handles guitar, keys, bass, harmonica and percussion. A human touch for her indoors, and onstage.

44.

Land Of Hope And Dreams

(from YouTube of Joe Biden’s inauguration)

All aboard the train to glory, via the White House.

This anthem of hard-bitten optimism has usually featured as a barnstorming concert climax. But opening the Biden broadcast in January 2021, Springsteen offered a moving solo acoustic version. The choice was significant – after Barack Obama’s farewell address in 2017 he left the stage to this song. Springsteen takes the train image from the gospel tradition – specifically This Train, first recorded in the ’20s. But whereas its carriages are reserved for the godly, Springsteen  has seats for all: “saints and sinners”, “whores and gamblers”, “losers and winners”.

43.

New York City Serenade

(from MSG 11.07.09, 2020)

A lusty Jersey boy conjures the city of his dreams.

When Springsteen stitched New York Song and Vibes Man together in the summer of 1973, he was a 23-year-old roughneck from central Jersey, 50 miles south of Manhattan, and, from David Sancious’s grand piano prelude on, the result was pure projection. Four decades after its debut on The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, at Madison Square Garden, he and his band had grown into the adult experiences of this “mad dog’s promenade”. From the archive of shows available at live.brucespringsteen.net, no performance better encapsulates Springsteen’s endless intimacy and cinematic spectacle.

42.

Highway Patrolman

(from Nebraska, 1982)

Good cop, bad brother.

This Cain and Abel fable feels like a police report filled out at 3am on a muggy August night. But as flat and stoic as it is on the surface, the undercurrent of conflicted ache in the narrator’s voice can put pimples on your goosebumps. Campfire fingerpicking, distant harmonica, a melody that barely moves – that these ingredients add up to something so devastating is pure songcraft genius. Potent enough to inspire both a Sean Penn movie and a Johnny Cash cover.

41.

Western Stars

(from Western Stars, 2019)

The boss rides off into the sunset? Not so fast...

A grand gesture towards the songs of Jimmy Webb, and particularly Glen Campbell’s masterful interpretations of the late ‘60s, Western Stars, the album, involved a series of character studies: the patched-up thrill-seeker of Drive Fast (The Stuntman), the freewheeling youth thumbing his way around the US in Hitch Hikin’, the regret-filled jobbing songwriter of Somewhere North Of Nashville. But none was more vivid and haunting than the timeworn movie cowboy of the title track.

Over muted acoustic guitar and Marc Muller’s keening lap steel, our protagonist wakes with relief to find that he’s still alive and not under the “whispering grasses” at LA’s cemetery for the stars, Forest Lawn Memorial Park. And yet life’s struggle continues. He arrives on set, feeling old and battered, eschewing a breakfast cocktail of gin and raw eggs. Instead, he necks a Viagra to get his blood pumping.

Springsteen throws himself so deeply into the role that with his dusty vocal, he’s almost unrecognisable, and truly believable as the worn-out actor who at the weekends travels out to the desert to tame wild horses with Mexican charros who “cross the wire and bring the old ways with them”. Back in the city he has few claims to fame – being shot by John Wayne in a late career film (maybe 1976’s Don Siegel-directed The Shootist?); being vaguely recognised by a girl in a bar as someone in “that commercial with a credit card” that he doesn’t confirm was actually him.

Western Stars is not just a depiction of a dying age of Hollywood, but also of what remains wild about Los Angeles, with its coyotes in the hills making off with pet chihuahuas and the Santa Ana desert winds – or “devil winds” said to unsettle Angelenos – blowing through the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. There are also fleeting expressions of deep, human feelings for others: the charros are “our American brothers”, the bar girl is “some lost sheep from Oklahoma”.

Equally sympathetic is the musical arrangement – drummer Matt Chamberlain’s echoes of The Wrecking Crew’s Hal Blaine, Rob Lebret’s Wichita Lineman baritone guitar. In the soaring middle eight repeating the main melodic theme, the screen feels like it stretches out, with the Stone Hills Strings playing as if they’re accompanying the epic conclusion to a John Ford film.

As a defiant celebration of a Hollywood that is dying or, more likely, already gone, our narrator’s big chorus statement – “tonight the Western stars are shining bright again” – is stirring yet filled with pathos. It’s all the more moving for the narrator’s sense of sad acceptance (see Springsteen’s beautifully gutsy-to-tender delivery of the couplet, “Hell, these days there ain’t no more / Now there’s just again”). But for all its resignation, Western Stars is a stunner, brought to you in VistaVision.

40.

Radio Nowhere

(From Magic, 2007)

Communication breakdown drives me insane.

Some tagged Radio Nowhere’s broiling affirmation of rockin’ virtues as a less goofy counterpart to 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), an ageing dude disgruntled by modern ways. Yet the void intimated by its rotary riff progression and Springsteen’s repeated entreaty “Is there anybody alive out there?” is spiritual, a howl against the onrushing technological apocalypse. Connection is found only amid one of the E Street Band’s fiercest performances. Released as a single, Radio Nowhere tanked – a very ironic kind of vindication.

39.

Adam Raised A Cain

(from Darkness On the Edge of Town, 1978)

Let’s just say Bruce has dad issues.

Springsteen’s 4th album starts out pretty angry with Badlands, but the song that followed, with its searing guitar and aggressive vocal, has a Biblical fury and pain all its own. A hard rock song (complete with squealing guitar) about hard truths. “You inherit your sins, you inherit the flames,” he sings in the song inspired in part by John Steinbeck’s East Of Eden – and even more by feelings about the man with “the same hot blood” burning in his veins.

38.

Downbound Train

(From Born In The USA, 1984)

A Nebraska refugee finds its home on Born In The USA’s dark side.

One of Springsteen’s most perfectly realised dramatic visions, Downbound Train flips the pop song’s traditional deployment of the train as an escape. Narrator Joe has already lost his job when his girl leaves “on the Central Line”, condemning him to haunting by whistle whines as his life descends into an existential shunt between dead ends. We leave him in a railroad gang hammering down cross ties, inevitably “in the rain”, comforted only by the E Street Band’s empathetic trudge into the lonely eternal.

37.

Letter To You

(from Letter To You, 2020)

A thrilling celebration of living life in the moment.

The placing of this song in its album’s tracklisting is crucial. After the muted, sombre opener, One Minute You’re Here, with its musing on mortality and the approach of the metaphorical “big black train”, it bursts in dramatically, a full-band surge of vital energy decorated by Charles Giordano’s Al Kooper-ish organ swirls. Letters have been a perennial subject for tunesmiths, but here Springsteen wants to cram everything – “All the sunshine and rain/ All my happiness and all my pain” – into this missive in song.

36.

Devils & Dust

(from Devils & Dust, 2005)

Dylan’s With God On Our Side, now with less hope!

Written from the perspective of a US soldier in Iraq, this is the Springsteen hero at his most doubt-filled. Bruce’s Gibson J-45 strum and harmonica summon the desolate acoustic landscapes of Nebraska, while French horns and Nashville strings offers an illusion of uplift. None comes. Only a question: “What if what you do to survive, kills the things you love?” and the realisation that Springsteen’s soldier is also a metaphor for his country, post-9/11, God-on-our-side assumptions replaced by a foul accumulation of “devils and dust”.

35.

4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

(from The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, 1973)

The ultimate boardwalk elegy. Watch out for greasers!

If Springsteen’s second album was his Jersey shoreline take on *Astral Weeks, 4th Of July was his Cyprus Avenue; a mythopoetic torrent of imagery that specified and idealised his home turf – the factory girls! The tilt-a-whirls! – even as he sought to transcend it. Danny Federici’s accordion leans hard into the carny romance. But there’s a subtext, too, of an artist keen to escape his backyard while memorialising it in perpetuity: “For me,” as Bruce tells Sandy, “this boardwalk life is through, babe.”

34.

Reason To Believe

(From Nebraska, 1982)

Did you hear the one about the no-show wedding, the funeral and the dead dog?

For some, it’s a chink of hope at the end of Nebraska’s long dark journey into night: that somehow, “at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe”. Springsteen himself, however, contends that this paradoxically upbeat song represents “the bottom”. Audible proof follows verse two’s depiction of Mary Lou hopelessly waiting for mean Johnny to return, with the singer sneering, almost spitting the word “funny”. Life’s a sick joke, and then you’re a dead dog on Highway 31.

33.

Tougher Than The Rest

(from Tunnel Of Love, 1987)

Pick-up lines from inside the mind of a bad man.

It’s Saturday night. We’re in a bar. Our narrator is watching a woman, been watching her a while. An emotionless snare plays over a cold Linn drum sample and the brassy drone of a synth. “Well if you’re looking for love,” sings a weary Springsteen, “Honey I’m tougher than the rest.” Tough means strong, difficult, violent. The song moves through all those meanings until we arrive at an ultimatum: “If you’re rough enough for love… all you got to do is say yes.” Do not say yes.

32.

Prove It All Night

(From Berkeley, July 1, 1978, 2001)

According to Springsteen, how “success requires sacrifice”.

Inspired by a conversation with a cabbie who moaned how he had to prove it all day to his boss and all night to his wife (and the kids at the weekend), this first single off Darkness explores macho bravado, the speed of life and seeking male validation through sexual agency. While the studio version is great, the extended live version from his ’78 tour with _that_blissful, soulful piano/guitar intro is better. Check out his performance at Berkeley Community Theatre from July 1 for proof.

31.

Wreck On The Highway

(from The River, 1980)

The car song to end all car songs.

The automobile looms large in the mythology of rock and roll, and within Springsteen’s oeuvre more than most. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what his music would sound like had the DMV never given him a licence – would Wendy have taken a chance in Thunder Road if they had to take a bus? Loosely based on Dorsey Dickson’s 1930s country song of the same name, Wreck On The Highway, however, is shorn of all glamour as our narrator comes across a wrecked car on the highway late at night and finds the young driver dying by the roadside. The final song on The River, its sombre reflections on mortality feel like a bridge to the bleak, beautiful Nebraska.

30.

State Trooper

(from Nebraska, 1982)

Taxi Driver: The Musical relocated to the highway.

“One of the most amazing records I ever heard,” quoth Bruce on Suicide’s horrifying 1977 tune Frankie Teardrop; seldom has one classic mapped so brilliantly onto another. Where despairing factory worker Frankie shoots his family then himself, Springsteen’s loner heads towards final deliverance down the New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours — a bleakly ironic echo of Chuck Berry’s gallivanting relish. More chilling still, as the song dissolves Bruce echoes the animal yelps of Suicide’s Alan Vega, rockabilly as psychological apocalypse.

29.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

(from Born to Run, 1975)

The E Street Band Origin Story.

The song wasn’t happening in the studio until Miami Steve Van Zandt sang those exuberant horn parts to the session guys. That moxie got him in the band. And forming a band is what this celebrates – the bonding of gypsy running buddies and “professional hitmen”, all mirrored in an elbow-rubbing groove and private lingo lyric. Springsteen called the title “just a cool phrase”, but it conjures up an inaccessible street of dreams for his gang to thaw and conquer. They did that soon enough.

28.

I’m On Fire

(from Born In The USA, 1984)

Declaration of lust swaps stars-and-stripes for a red flag.

John Sayles’s video – Springsteen as flirty mechanic – sold this single as adult rock erotica. Alone in “soaking wet” sheets with its “bad desire”, though, it lands differently. “Hey little girl” might be standard pop idiom, but alongside insistent percussion, violent imagery (a knife, a “freight train running through the middle of my head”), tensed vocals and synths that shade from John Hughes into John Carpenter, it’s less quaint come-on, more stalker’s lament. This burning, suggests Springsteen, ever alert to the damaged, is an infernal flame.

27.

Growin’ Up

(from Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, 1973)

The frustrated smalltown teenage rebel’s tale…

“My biography,” admitted Springsteen, who advised that a song which was part of his Columbia audition is best consumed when the temperature is 95 and the humidity 90. Propelled by David Sancious’s twinkling piano, it combines teenage insecurity with teenage swagger and the need to blend in with the need to stand out. Setting the template for so much of what was to come, Springsteen was as poetic as he was direct. And, of course, a potentially brighter future lies in an “old parked car”.

26.

Hungry Heart

(from Live 1975–85, 1986)

Tennyson + Ramones + chimes? Your first hit.

On the 1980 single that became his first smash, Springsteen sounded a touch short of the grit and longing inside his would-be adulterer’s anthem. But onstage he couldn’t hide his happiness or himself. Here, from the same year, a Nassau Coliseum crowd shouts the first verse before he can, speaking to its universal resonance and elegant simplicity (he wrote it, quickly, for the Ramones). Whether it’s new sex, love, or adventure, we are, as Tennyson offered, “always roaming with a hungry heart.”

25.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

(from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)

What we do in the shadows.

There’s such theatricality in this song’s introduction – strutting piano, shiny tambourine – that it feels like Springsteen bringing up the house lights on the world he’s brought to life. It fits a track so interested in façade and performance, from the woman “with a style she’s trying to maintain” to the insistence that “everybody’s got a secret”. The street-racing narrator is flesh-and-blood solid but there’s a fantastic sense of Springsteen stage-managing his own universe here, prowling a backlit set in a rock’n’roll Our Town.

24.

Girls In Their Summer Clothes

(from Magic, 2007)

Beach Boys go Proust.

It’s Kurt Weill’s September Song repurposed as a Brian Wilson lamentation for lost youth, with requisite 12-string guitars and Jack Nitzsche-style string arrangement. Yet the wry, melancholy note to Springsteen’s delivery (“The girls in their summer clothes… pass me by”) hints at the layered, self-reflexive pop of The Magnetic Fields, and gradually this romantic narrator reveals himself as more bitter than bittersweet, someone who believes the waitress pouring him coffee “went away [and] cut me like a knife”. A cloud moves across the sun.

23.

Meeting Across The River

(from Born To Run, 1975)

It’s a deal.

Not the last time the worlds of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen would collide (they’d share the former’s Jersey Girl). In this island of Porgy & Bess amidst the sturm und drang, our hero is heading for a pow-wow with some made guys, and he needs his pal Eddie to look like he’s packing. Around him swirls Randy Brecker’s bluesy trumpet and Roy Bittan’s solemn piano, telling you what you already know – these doomed small-timers are headed for a dip in the Hudson.

22.

Streets Of Philadelphia

(from Philadelphia OST, 1993)

A Grammy and Oscar winner that’s hardly there.

Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking Philadelphia, in which Hollywood icon Tom Hanks played a gay AIDS patient, required a theme that captured the narrative’s devastating core. The director cried when he first heard Springsteen’s response. Backed only by Tommy Sims’s ethereal backing vocal, Springsteen ghosts in on a drum machine, shaded by synthetic strings, haunted and haunting. He tried a band version but junked it; what we hear is the demo. “I can feel myself fading away,” sings Springsteen. It’s like the music feels the same.

21.

Blinded By The Light

(from Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., 1973)

A ‘new Dylan’ cuts loose like a deuce.

It is the very first song on the very first album to be released by Bruce Springsteen, and that context alone makes it important. That it was also the man’s first single underlines its significance as an introduction to the man, his music, and his world.

And what did Blinded By The Light tell us about Bruce Springsteen? That he’d swallowed a rhyming dictionary? That he was here to be noticed, at any cost? Its ambitious, phonetic jumble dually evoked Subterranean Homesick Blues and My Back Pages and was the sort of thing that tempted record execs to toy with nicknames like ‘the New Dylan’. Yet it’s to record execs that we owe the song’s existence – because Columbia label boss Clive Davis told Springsteen he didn’t hear a hit on the first version of the album, so he came back with Spirit In The Night, and this, and all was forgiven.

Blinded By The Light wasn’t a hit, but it served its purpose, and with saxophonist Clarence Clemons well up in the mix, it may have be the most E Street Band-ish track of the entire LP. Within the nonstop lyrical flow — opening line: “Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat / In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat” — were discernible hints of a reckless, joyous autobiography that we all would watch develop in the years to come. And the payoff offered by the song’s final line – “Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun / Woah but mama that’s where the fun is” – was an impressive jolt of prescience from a 23-year-old just launching his career as the sun blazed overhead.

But wait — not a hit? Don’t tell that to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, who covered Blinded By The Light on their 1976 The Roaring Silence set and, remarkably, gave Bruce Springsteen his first and only Number 1 single as a songwriter on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. As an added bonus, Mann vocalist Chris Thompson seemed to be singing “wrapped up like a douche” (the original lyric is “cut loose like a deuce”), which popularized the song to an entirely new set of sniggering young listeners.

An unexpected bit of closure? Blinded... was performed at the last full gig Clarence Clemons played with the E Street Band before his death in 2011. It was November 22, 2009, in Buffalo, and Springsteen & Co. played the _Greetings_album from start to finish.

“This was the miracle,” Springsteen announced before the band launched into Blinded... “This was the record that took everything from way below zero to… (significant pause)… one. A Big, big, big moment. A big time.”

20.

Brilliant Disguise

(from Tunnel Of Love, 1987)

Doubts and lies combine, beguilingly

Sometimes, when listening to Brilliant Disguise, you find yourself hankering to hear the demo, the version Springsteen recorded at his New Jersey home studio in February 1987. If only we could experience this song of romantic doubt and insecurity as its ‘true’ self, without the deceptive synthetic warmth of that ubiquitous Yamaha DX-7, Roy Bittan’s Roland D-50, or Max Weinberg’s somewhat cheesy maracas and castanets...

But that would be missing the point. Brilliant Disguise is a song about what goes on beneath the surface; the internal monologue of a man already suspicious of the new love he’s found, a suspicion rooted in his own lies and guilt: “I want to know if it’s you I don’t trust / ’Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.” It’s also a song about masks and self-identity, about what hides behind the front we present to the world. As such, it exists both as artifice and truth. Whether intentional or not, its synthetic gilding, that cold-room Bob Clearmountain reverb on Bruce’s voice, is part of its meaning.

Of course, there is more here. Springsteen had recently married the model and actress Julianne Phillips but the two were already experiencing problems in their relationship. Almost simultaneously, he had invited the singer Patti Scialfa into the E Street Band and the two had become close friends. On one level, Brilliant Disguise can be easily read as a song about Phillips and the doubts the singer had had about her ever since their wedding (“Oh, we stood at the altar / The gypsy swore our future was right / But come the wee wee hours / Well maybe, baby, the gypsy lied.”) Yet, as Springsteen himself said in ’05’s VH1 Storytellers—On Stage DVD, “Songs shift their meanings in time [and] with who you sing them with. When you sing this song with somebody you love, it becomes a reaffirmation of the world’s mysteries. Its shadows, our frailties, and the acceptance of those frailties, without which there is no love.”

It’s a great point but Springsteen is too modest to point out that it only works if those ambiguities, those shadows, exist in the song in the first place. As is so often the case with great Boss songs, Brilliant Disguise places its narrator in a mid-point between certainties, that intangible wee-wee-hours landscape he returns to so often, where mystery holds sway. It’s a song that will never be fixed in its meaning because it purposefully resists certainty and resolution. Even its final line is a puzzle, a koan-like statement with no solution, a phrase intended to resist interpretation yet resonate with everyone who hears it: “God have mercy on the man / Who doubts what he’s sure of.”

19.

Backstreets

(from Born To Run, 1975)

Love and betrayal, in sweltering song.

Backstreets is all about delayed gratification: Roy Bittan’s piano intro lasts a full minute, racking up the tension before his organ peals spearhead the band charge. And then the vocal, hot and heavy to match the opening line, “One soft infested summer...” In this tale/trail of broken promises and trust, Springsteen gets so carried away remembering his hurt that he ends up hollering “hiding on the backstreets” a full 26 times at the end, lost and found in the moment.

18.

American Skin (41 Shots)

(from Live In New York City, 2001)

Social commentary of sadly enduring relevance.

When an NYPD union calls for a boycott and refuses to work security at your shows, you know you’ve hit a raw nerve. Written in response to the death at police hands of a young unarmed student – and the subsequent acquittal of four officers accused of his murder – American Skin has proved sadly prescient in the light of subsequent tragedies. Some songs work best live and Springsteen’s simmering rage is the perfect, emotional tone. If music offers a window on society, the view here is intense.

17.

Because The Night

(from Live 1975-1985, 1986)

Because everything seems possible after dark.

Jimmy Iovine persuaded Springsteen to gift Patti Smith the work in progress he’d first titled The Night Belongs To Lovers. How best to respond to her more graceful and incantatory take, a stunning UK Number 5 in 1978? This gnarly 1980 Nassau Coliseum instance opts for pooled E Street muscle, the night a crucible of desperate passions as (forbidden?) lovers loose the chains of work and duty. It ain’t subtle and Bruce retires Smith’s refinements to his lyrics, but the stakes feel thrillingly high.

16.

Atlantic City

(from Nebraska, 1982)

The rot of Jersey’s Las Vegas as metaphor.

Fans of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire won’t need telling of Atlantic City’s history as a mobbed-up resort made by Prohibition. Here, Springsteen reads more recent crime stats – “They blew up the chicken man in Philly last night” refers to the gang murder of Phil “The Chicken Man” Testa in 1981 – and turns Atlantic City into any place the spectres of hope still whisper, even now “our luck may have died and our love may be cold”. His scratchy mandolin provides the death rattle.

15.

Candy’s Room

(from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)

A lifelong romantic’s priapic sprint. “Baby if you want to be wild…”

A widescreen blockbuster in domestic miniature, a five-minute epic squeezed into 2:46, Candy’s Room is Springsteen on fast-forward and in tight-focus. The subject is frenzied carnal satisfaction, a boilerplate rites-of-passage-with-prostitute vignette that Springsteen elevates with his customary gravitas. But it’s the E Street Band’s gallop, as much as the singer’s Roy Orbison melodrama, that makes the song so extraordinary: starting with Max Weinberg’s pulse-quickening cymbals; peaking like a punk velocity Spector production. On this occasion, overdriven pace enhances rather than defuses the passion.

14.

Dancing In The Dark

(from Born In The USA, 1984)

A song about lost spark, that started a fire.

Having listened to what would become Born In The USA, Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau felt it lacked it a hit and instructed his charge to deliver one. Worn down after writing 80-plus-songs already, Springsteen dashed Dancing In The Dark off overnight (“man I’m just tired and bored with myself”).  Yet with its uplifting melody that hinted at the glory of early Bruce and polished to radiance with some 80s synths, it became his biggest ever hit and his first Grammy winner.

13.

The Promised Land

(from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)

The boss sounding anything but like a boss.

“Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” sings The Boss, sounding every bit the put-upon employee. The Springsteen captured on The Promised Land is working in his father’s garage and wishing he was just about anywhere else. A feeling of frustration that echoed where he was in real life: tied up in legal red tape and unable to record. The song glistens with hope, though, Highway 61 Revisited-like organ and wheezing harmonica adding to it magnificently.

12.

The Ghost Of Tom Joad

(from The Ghost Of Tom Joad, 1995)

His most powerful of many invocations of Steinbeck.

The heroic protagonist of The Grapes Of Wrath was first celebrated musically in Woody Guthrie’s Tom Joad Parts 1 & 2. Forty-five years later, Springsteen invoked Joad again, with a vision of contemporary American taken straight from Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl classic – Hooverville-style camps, preachers vainly quoting Matthew 19, the myth of a Promised Land. If Nebraska was bleak, this solemnly intoned album leitmotif is bleaker still: for America’s poorest, nothing has – or will – ever change, and you can almost taste Springsteen’s bitter helplessness.

11.

Jungleland

(from Born To Run, 1975)

Bruce’s Baba O’Riley.

Epic in ambition, duration and production — 19 months from first recorded rehearsal to completion, with Clarence Clemons’s celebrated sax solo requiring 16 hours of takes before Springsteen was satisfied — Jungleland is a nine-minute slogfest between starry-eyed Broadway romanticism and The Who’s grandstanding defiance. (Praising Pete Townshend for making rock’n’roll “spiritual, a quest”, Springsteen has described Jungleland as “all night, the city and spiritual  battleground”.) Guaranteed to bring the house down on stage, every live version is terrific too.

10.

Born In The U.S.A.

(from Born in the U.S.A., 1984)

Easily misinterpreted? Only if you’re not listening.

In 1968, when Bruce Springsteen dropped out of Ocean County community college, he almost dropped directly into the draft and the jungles of Vietnam. Student deferment had not only kept the teenage longhair at home but also enabled him to spend late nights in clubs, galvanizing his guitar chops. When his notice to show in Newark for potential service arrived, Springsteen – who had already lost friends in the war – resolved to dodge. He played crazy, played up wounds from a motorcycle crash, and, deemed ineligible for service, continued to play his songs. As the war ground into disaster, killing millions, Springsteen crept toward stardom.

But survivor’s guilt has a long tail, and caught up with the singer at the dawn of the ’80s. A string of activists, authors, and survivors enlisted him in the fight for veterans’ rights and respect. “Unless we can look into the eyes of those men and women,” he said during a 1981 benefit, “we’re never gonna get home.” Written and first recorded during the same rush of down-and-out character studies that yielded Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. charts the course of those waylaid veterans, trying to get back to a home he had never left.

Despite a refrain that Republican President Ronald Reagan tried to make a campaign rallying cry, Born In The U.S.A. proffers a sexless, hopeless, futureless void, a Springsteen anomaly. Raised in a deindustrialized and crumbling country, its soldier only finds work in the killing fields; back stateside, he finds home only in the prison where he presumably dies, dreams burning like the toxic “gas fires of the refinery” next door. With its war-holler chorus and sunburst keyboards, the five-minute E Street version sounds every second like a hero’s theme; its brilliance is the human wreckage buried beneath that glittering façade. Springsteen dodged the draft, but he would not dodge what his country had done to its sons and daughters, his brothers and sisters.

The singer has often suggested he got the song wrong, that the hit single’s hyper-charged ambiguity made it vulnerable to appropriation. The lugubrious acoustic original should have been on Nebraska, he said; a subsequent solo harmonica-and-stompbox rendition on tour suggested he was auditioning for Swans. No to all that. More powerful than Max Weinberg’s gated snares, Roy Bittan’s magnetic keys, and even that Pentecostal refrain are the questions the classic implies: What lies are you telling yourself to live? What is the cost of your freedom? And just what is that freedom, anyway?

Born in the U.S.A. imagines a patriotism without facile jingoism or belligerent nationalism, a forever-probing state of mind where you can venerate overarching ideals while mourning the rot within. This paradox is more striking now even than then, an unshakable reminder that your city on a hill often rests on a pile of corpses.

9.

The Rising

(from The Rising, 2002)

The finest 9/11 song.

It wasn’t a surprise that nobody articulated America’s post 9/11 with as sure and tender touch as Springsteen, but his unblinking portrayal of a firefighter in the twin towers was both balm and horror. Infused with Biblical and Shakespearean imagery, it begins with our hero disorientated in the darkness and ends with his apocalyptic final visions and the prospect of rebirth. It could have been a ballad, but instead the E Street Band kicked up a claustrophobic cacophony which still feels right, 20 years later.

8.

Badlands

(From Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)

He wants the world and he wants it now.

On the lead track to Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Springsteen channels his adoration for The Animals – the sedition of It’s My Life with the riff from Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood – to produce a rebel tale full of hard living and blue collar struggle. It’s a proper rock’n’roll anthem and a blueprint for what The Clash did next with Springsteen bellowing lines borrowed from Elvis: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king” before Clarence Clemons’s triumphant, even heroic sax blowing solo.

7.

Nebraska

(from Nebraska, 1982)

The Banality Of Evil.

The story of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather’s 1958 killing spree is vividly caught on this solo acoustic demo with harmonica blowing across the bleak landscape like a chill wind. The numbed, matter-of-fact narrative heightens the protagonist’s sense of disconnection from his actions and makes his announcement that he will die at “Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest”, even more shocking. Previous Springsteen anti-heroes had been romantic fictions; here was stark reality.

6.

Thunder Road

(from Born To Run, 1975)

Fanfare for the common man (and woman).

A novel’s worth of narrative crammed into just under five minutes (indeed, we’re given half of Wendy’s story within the first 70 seconds), Born To Run’s opener burns with the promise of youth, romance and life’s infinite highway stretching out ahead. All she needs to do is take a chance on this dreamer with little more than a clapped out automobile to his name. Plus, it includes the best dammed with faint praise lyric ever: “You ain’t a beauty, but, hey you’re alright.”

5.

The Promise

(from The Promise, 2010)

Darkness On The Edge Of Town holdover fine-tunes the tao of Bruce.

Written circa 1976, The Promise’s “Johnny works in a factory…” wasn’t Bruce’s freshest opening gambit even then, but with its references to Thunder Road and some profound lyric-sheet reveals further in, it played the long game. Epic via stealth and ennobled by a masterful, reined-in feel that perhaps only E Street could muster, its also in the perfect key for Springsteen’s solemn lead-vocal. Glockenspiel glints, stately piano and Ken Ascher’s 2010-recorded string arrangement further elevate.

4.

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

(from The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, 1973)

Let the best times roll, with Jack The Rabbit, Weak Knee Willie, Sloppy Sue, Big Bone Billy et al.

The first great E Street showstopper was also an epitaph of sorts for the band’s early lineup. By Born To Run, keyboardist/arranger David Sancious and drummer Vini ‘Mad Dog’ Lopez had left the ranks, but here they’re critical to the band’s joyous flex: scrappier, jazzier than what came next (great Byrdsy intro, too). Did Bruce ever write more explicitly about his own naked ambition? Rosalita, remember, reaches its ecstatic highpoint at 5:10, when the singer flaunts his record company advance at her dad.

3.

The River

(from The River, 1980)

Current affair: man hands on misery to man.

“That’s my life,” said Springsteen’s sister Virginia on first hearing this Hank Williams-inspired tale of teen pregnancy and mid-life despair. Opening with a ship’s horn blast of harmonica, The River bends its ancient symbolism towards modern hopelessness, as high-school sweethearts (their marriage ceremony the bleakest outside $1000 Dollar Wedding) watch their dreams silt up. It’s the flashes of something better, though – the undammed piano, green fields, a girl’s “body tan and wet” – that turn this song from heartbreaking commentary to heroic mythmaking.

2.

Born to Run

(from Born to Run, 1975)

The Asbury Park Kid’s shot at the title.

The snare-pummeling fill. The turbo blast of sax, orchestra bells and surf-twang guitar. Within seconds, it’s clear this record means business. It’s both a brass ring grabber and “last chance power drive” for a Springsteen on the brink of being dropped. With nowhere to go but up, he keeps ratcheting the sweat and adrenaline, until he's like ’68 Comeback Elvis vaulting over Spector’s Wall. “It’s a 24-year old kid aiming at the greatest rock’n’ roll record ever,” he said. Certainly, it’s close.

1.

Racing In The Street

(from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978)

Some things hurt more, much more, than cars and girls.

In the three years that separated Born To Run from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Bruce Springsteen became America’s new rock’n’roll star and its anointed saviour. He also got locked out of the recording studio by a contractual dispute with his manager Mike Appel that went to court and got ugly. Springsteen’s response to this new status and its consequences was to dig deep beneath the surface and tend to his working-class roots. “I had a reaction to my own good fortune,” he later reflected. “I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I’d grown up alongside.”

If Born To Run was the American dream – the offer of escape, the possibility of renewal, unlimited abundance of freedom – then what came next was a harsh dose of American reality. Adam Raised A Cain, Streets Of Fire, Factory, Darkness On The Edge Of Town: tough songs for tough times that spoke of a nation’s collective disillusionment as the ’60s’ brave new future unravelled into the ’70s’ political scandals and economic recession following defeat in the Vietnam War. Springsteen realised that freedom comes with consequences, and no matter how far you run you can’t escape yourself or where you’re from. August 1977 saw the death of Springsteen’s hero Elvis Presley and punk rock rattling the old order while the E Street Band hunkered down in New York’s Atlantic Studios, pointedly stripping away their music’s neon stardust.

No song better calibrated the distance between the dream and the reality than Racing In The Street. Here, Bruce revisits the young lovers he had dispatched down Thunder Road “to case the Promised Land” flying on the notion that “these two lanes can take us anywhere”. He finds them chastened and broken (“There’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes”). They’re either back in the same “town full of losers” they’d left, or stuck in a different one. Where Thunder Road was giddy and hopeful, Racing In The Street reeks of dearth and despondency.

Over the weary piano motif that carries the whole song, we meet the main protagonist reciting the specifications of his customised car, any sense of thrill long gone: “I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396/Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor…” To his chagrin Springsteen was soon made aware that the car was a technical impossibility, because Chevrolet’s 396 cubic-inch engine obviated the need for fuel injection. Yet he stuck with it, perhaps pleased at the irony of a song about thwarted dreams opening with a vehicle that couldn’t actually exist.

We hear tales of drag race glory: the driver and his pal Sonny ride “from town to town”, challenging rivals across the northeast states (“We shut ’em up and then we shut ’em down”), but there’s no light in his voice. The lyric’s repeated quotation of Martha And The Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street suggests the previous decade’s euphoric promise is no longer sufficient to sustain these people, while the instrumental bridge ruefully references The Beach Boys’ Don’t Worry Baby, a car song from more innocent times. (At a solo 2005 show, Springsteen prefaced Racing In The Street by mentioning its similarity to Two-Lane Blacktop, the 1971 existential road movie starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson.)

On an album where the performances are predominantly defined by white-heat muscularity, Racing In The Street is a masterclass in restraint, from singer and band alike. There’s barely any guitar, and no part at all for Clarence Clemons’s saxophone, the E Street Band’s totemic lifeforce. Springsteen’s exclusion of his soul brother was justified: live performances of the song from the ’78 Darkness tour feature Clemons honking superfluously during the bridge. Those same shows, however, especially July 7 at The Roxy in Los Angeles (released in 2018 as part of Springsteen’s Live Archive Series), underscore pianist Roy Bittan’s pre-eminence, every note an intimation of our hero’s fate. Danny Federici is equally vital, his organ shadowing Bittan like a troubled conscience. “Some guys, they just give up living,” the narrator says, whereas others “come home from work… wash up and go racin’ in the street”.

Only after the bridge do we eventually learn that Springsteen’s racer has another love: “I met her on the strip three years ago/In a Camaro with this dude from LA”. He shut down the Camaro and drove off with the girl, but three years on, “all her pretty dreams are torn/She stares off alone into the night/With the eyes of one who hates for just being born.” The band drops to a hush, only Bittan and a single-note, funereal chant. In the final verse, Springsteen extends a promise, or maybe a prayer, to “all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels”: the racer and his girl will “ride to the sea – and wash these sins off our hands”.

For its final two minutes, Racing In The Street turns into one long fade, as Bittan and Federici wrap around each other like a disappearing road on a map, Max Weinberg’s drum sticks marking each white line along the way. We’re right there alongside the couple on their baptismal exit, wondering where they’ll go afterwards – or indeed, whether they’ll get to the ocean at all. Just before he cedes the spotlight to his keysmen, Springsteen sings one last “summer’s here and the time is right”, noting also: “Tonight, tonight the highway’s bright”. It’s hope against hope. In this case, at the end of maybe his greatest song, that’s as good as things get.

Compiled by: John Aizlewood, Martin Aston, Mike Barnes, John Bungey, Keith Cameron, Grayson Haver Currin, Bill DeMain, Dave DiMartino, Tom Doyle, Danny Eccleston, Pat Gilbert, Jim Irvin, Colin Irwin, Andrew Male, James McNair, John Mulvey, Chris Nelson, Victoria Segal, Michael Simmons, Mat Snow, Lois Wilson

Photo: Michael Ochs/Getty