Tag Archives: Bruce Springsteen

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Song of the Day #1,230: ‘Born to Run’ – Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums were critical smashes but they didn’t reach a mainstream audience. Even ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),’ which has become a concert and classic rock radio staple, was ignored at the time.

But in 1975, all that changed with the release of Born to Run. Springsteen’s third album put him on the map, reaching #3 on the Billboard charts and quickly going Gold (it has since sold more than 6 million copies). Columbia Records promoted Springsteen and the album heavily, calling him “the future of rock-n-roll,” much to his chagrin.

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Song of the Day #1,229: ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’ – Bruce Springsteen

My renewed interest in Bruce Springsteen dates back to that trip to the Spec’s used bins that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The fourth album I bought (for less than $5) was Springsteen’s sophomore release, The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle. I’ve been addicted to it ever since.

The album was released in 1973 just eight months after Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ. Imagine hearing those two bursts of creative genius from a new artist in the same year. Makes me wish I hadn’t been less than a year old at the time.

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Song of the Day #1,228: ‘Growin’ Up’ – Bruce Springsteen

I enjoyed my three-week dive into Tom Petty’s discography so much that I’ve decided to give it another shot with an American rocker whose star shines even brighter — Mr. Bruce Springsteen. As with Petty, I’ll dedicate a week at a time to The Boss with unrelated weeks in-between.

I’ve never been as big a Bruce Springsteen fan as I feel I should be, if that makes any sense. I love everything of his that I own and quite a bit that I don’t own as well, and by all rights he should be up there with the Elvis Costellos of the world in my estimation. The reason he isn’t — or at least isn’t yet — is that I’ve never taken the time to really explore his early work.

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Song of the Day #922: ‘Queen of the Supermarket’ – Bruce Springsteen

I suppose when you’ve had a career as long, varied and successful as that of Bruce Springsteen, there comes a time when you feel like you can do anything you want.

And in Bruce’s case, on his 2009 album Working On a Dream, he decided what he wanted to do was write a song about falling in love with a supermarket checkout girl.

Being Bruce Springsteen, he wrote the most poetic song about falling in love with a supermarket checkout girl that you can imagine. He has made a living telling the tales of regular folks in florid language more worthy of a short story than a song, and this track is no exception.

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Song of the Day #717: ‘Highway Patrolman’ – Bruce Springsteen

While I’ve always been aware of Bruce Springsteen and his importance to popular music, I didn’t have a strong connection to any of his albums that I’d heard. That changed, however, when I picked up Nebraska, Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic release.

Nebraska was originally recorded at Springsteen’s home as a demo on 4-track cassette and later embellished with the full E-Street Band in the studio. But Bruce decided that the demo versions brought the haunting songs to life more effectively than his work with the band, so they were mastered and released as the full album.

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