4 Unheralded Bruce Springsteen Albums That Are Just As Great as His Classics

Bruce Springsteen’s catalog of studio albums stands out for its amazing consistency. But a few of those albums have stepped to the front of the line when it comes to recognition and popularity. We’re thinking of classics like Born To Run, Nebraska, Born In The U.S.A., The Rising, and others of that ilk that are extremely well-known to music fans.

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But what about those Boss albums that haven’t received the same praise or earned the same level of popularity? These four unheralded Springsteen LPs deserve the notoriety of the classics.

‘The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle’ (1973)

The casual Springsteen fan might know “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” from this album. It has taken its place as one of his most crowd-pleasing live songs. But The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, as a whole, deserves credit as one of his most ambitious albums. Just about every one of the seven songs featured Springsteen taking a big swing at a showstopper. And he really doesn’t miss. This was still a point in his career where he was on the verbose side. But you can’t listen to tracks like “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”, “Incident On 57th Street”, or the aforementioned “Rosalita” and think they’re overstuffed. If anything, every musical flourish and clever turn of phrase feels warranted. Especially when you consider the larger-than-life stories he’s telling.

‘Lucky Town’ (1992)

Let’s not paint Lucky Town with a critical brush just because of the company it kept. We get it. Nobody showed much fondness for Human Touch, released on the same day as Lucky Town in 1992. Time hasn’t even been kind to the former album, which featured Bruce Springsteen trying for muscular R&B with a bunch of studio pros at his side. On Lucky Town, he scaled things back. He plays most of the instruments himself. The Boss writes throughout in a fearlessly confessional fashion. The album does a nice job of balancing the tougher moments (the title track, “The Big Muddy”) with the tender ones (“Book Of Dreams”, “My Beautiful Reward”). Had this been the only album he released that fateful day, his 90s reputation would be much stronger today.

‘Working On A Dream’ (2009)

It’s hard to understand why this album, released in 2009, didn’t catch on like other late-period Bruce Springsteen albums. Bruce didn’t help by playing the Super Bowl right around the record’s release. That overwhelmed the marketing efforts for Working On A Dream. A lot of folks simply can’t stand the atypical opening track “Outlaw Pete” (although we kind of dig the derring-do of it all). Maybe people weren’t ready to hear Springsteen singing about getting older on tracks like the gorgeous “Kingdom Of Days”. All we hear is Springsteen’s songwriting at its most accessible and pop-friendly. And music that makes better use of the E Street Band than anything else he’s released since the 80s.

‘Western Stars’ (2019)

To be fair, Western Stars received a lot of critical love upon its release in 2019. But it doesn’t feel like the excellent songs that he wrote for the project have quite caught on amongst his faithful fans. It did kind of get squashed a bit between projects, coming not long after his Broadway stint and just a year before A Letter To You, which received hype as an E Street Band album. Western Stars relies on musical references from a very specific era and genre: 60s countrypolitan, a la Glen Campbell singing Jimmy Webb songs. That style allows for some of Bruce Springsteen’s most introspective, penetrating writing. Tracks like “Moonlight Motel” and “Somewhere North Of Nashville” display as much heart and craft as anything he’s ever done.

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