They call him The Boss for a reason. Bruce Springsteen may be a stranger to the 9-to-5 workday—”I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life,” he admitted during the first minute of his Tony Award-winning stage show, Springsteen On Broadway—but if working-class rock ‘n’ roll is an industry, he’s definitely in upper management.
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A road warrior for more than half a century, Springsteen has built a legacy not only onstage, but also in the recording studio. His albums are landmarks of modern American music, filled with flawed characters searching for romance, redemption, or maybe just a ride out of town. Below, we’ve rounded up six of his most essential releases, from studio masterpieces to concert chronicles.
1. Born to Run
Born to Run‘s big, bombastic sound nodded to Phil Spector’s pop masterpieces from the 1960s, and Springsteen balanced that nostalgia by filling the track list with contemporary anthems about losers, leavers, lovers, and the long stretch of blacktop leading out of town. Lesser songs might’ve stumbled beneath the album’s layers of keyboard, guitar, horns, strings, glockenspiel, and percussion. Classics like “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and the titular “Born to Run” are sturdy songs built for momentum, though, and Springsteen sings them like a bar-band Roy Orbison, crooning one minute and barking the next.
Released during the heyday of 1970s arena rock, Born to Run was something else entirely: a heart-on-sleeve record rooted in melody, muscle, and melodrama, created by a man who was bold enough to believe in the redemptive power of rock ‘n’ roll.
2. Born in the U.S.A.
One of the best-selling albums of all time, Born in the U.S.A. found Springsteen making room for the pop trends of the mid-1980s. At its core is a story of embittered Americans: the Vietnam vet facing economic hardship (“Born in the U.S.A.”), the small-town loyalist driven from his birthplace by rising crime rates and decreasing jobs (“My Hometown”), the grownup who can’t stop replaying the highlights reel of his youth (“Glory Days”).
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Many of the album’s best songs temper that frustration with celebration, though. “Glory Days” isn’t a lament; it’s a rowdy celebration of our past selves. “No Surrender” isn’t a bittersweet look at childhood; it’s a tribute to friendships forged when we’re young. “Dancing in the Dark” isn’t just a moan of exasperation from a songwriter attempting to write another hit; it’s a battlecry from an artist who’s dedicated to his craft, even if no one’s listening.
People did listen, though, and Born in the U.S.A. wound up selling 30 million copies. That popularity had a lot to do with the album’s commercial sound, which made room for synthesizers and electronic textures. There are genuine songs beneath all that gloss, though, and Born in the U.S.A.‘s songs shine through the production.
3. Live/1975–85
Springsteen’s live shows aren’t exactly known for their brevity, and neither is this exhaustive collection of concert highlights from his first decade in the mainstream. With a 40-song track list and a running time of three and a half hours, Live/1975–85 is roughly the same length as a Springsteen gig. Fittingly, it offers a concert-friendly assortment of classics, deep cuts, acoustic moments, and amplified anthems.
Bruce’s stripped-down performance of “No Surrender” is stunning, as is the extended version of “The River.” The song list reaches as far back as Springsteen’s 1973 debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., but focuses most heavily on material from Born in the U.S.A., whose songs were still dominating the Billboard charts when Live/1975–85 hit stores in 1986. Decades later, these performances still hold up. For listeners who don’t have time to sort through a half-century of bootlegged material, this collection is the next best thing to catching The Boss in concert.
4. Nebraska
Two months after wrapping up The River Tour in Cincinnati, Springsteen began recording Nebraska at his home in New Jersey. The original plan was to create a number of acoustic demos on his 4-track cassette recorder, then rerecord the material with the E Street Band.
What emerged from those homemade tracking sessions, though, was a collection of rough, ragged folk songs that seemed to thrive in their own sparseness. Springsteen chose to release the music as-is, without help from his bandmates. As a result, Nebraska is his first genuine folk album, followed years later by rootsy records like 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and 2019’s Western Stars.
5. Darkness on the Edge of Town
Released in 1978, Darkness on the Edge of Town traded the optimism of its predecessor, Born to Run, for a hard rock sound that was stark and sometimes savage. Springsteen’s characters were no longer starry-eyed hopefuls, dreaming of the escape that lay beyond their hometown’s city limits. Instead, they were grownups grappling with the hard realities of adult life while clinging to hope.
The album’s performances packed a rousing punch, thanks in large part to an extended Born to Run tour that found the E Street Band building their chemistry over 2010. You can hear that camaraderie in the ferocious “Adam Raised a Cain,” which examines the strained bonds between father and son, and “Badlands,” which bottles desperation, wanderlust, and a killer chorus into four epic minutes.
6. The Rising
The Rising arrived during the summer of 2002, marking Springsteen’s first album to feature the E Street Band since 1984’s Born in the U.S.A. Partially written in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the record was hailed as a love letter to a country still reeling from the loss of 2,977 lives. Like U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, it became one of the era’s most treasured releases, filled with timely songs of hope, heroism, and heartbreak. Heartland rock anthems like “Lonesome Day” and “The Rising” became radio hits, but the album’s highlight is “My City of Ruins,” a gorgeous gospel song about rebirth.
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