At first blush, today’s Montauk Madness matchup has a student vs. master dynamic. Early in his career, John Cougar was viewed as a poor man’s Bruce Springsteen.
But John Mellencamp has carved out quite the career in the four decades since his debut. In fact, he’s released five more albums than Springsteen in three fewer years, and spanned a variety of styles along the way.
Here’s a sweet, sexy little track from Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball, made even more sexy by its accompanying video, which features a lingerie-clad model working a stripper pole.
I don’t know if this is the official video or some expertly crafted fan video. It does feature Springsteen himself toward the end. Quality entertainment.
I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s The River nearly five years ago finished my blog post by stating “I’ve read enough about The River to know that I have to hear it in full.”
That never happened, and I sit here now writing about this celebrated 1980 album with the same thought running through my head. The River was Springsteen’s fifth album, sandwiched between Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska. It marries the somberness of those records with a pop sensibility that would show up again four years later on Born in the USA.
Today’s random selection comes from Bruce Springsteen’s 2002 album, The Rising. This album was written and recorded following the 9/11 attacks and many of its tracks are directly or indirectly about that tragic day.
This one, however, is a pretty straight-forward relationship song. If it has a connection to 9/11, it’s in these lines from the chorus: “Don’t know when this chance might come again, good times got a way of coming to an end.”
Though 2002 was the year following the most devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil, very few of the memorable albums from that year directly address 9/11.
Of the albums I’ve featured so far, only Eminem’s The Eminem Show tackles the topic. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was an eerily appropriate release, but it was recorded before the attacks.
Meet Me In Montauk 