Bruce Springsteen

Best Of

SONY MUSIC Demand for The Boss is seemingly inexhaustible.

According to Wiki, 20 studio albums, 77 singles, eight EPs, 23 live albums, seven box sets, eight compilation albums… the first artist to have a US Top 5 album in six consecutive decades. If you’re a Bruce fan, you’re hardly going to be disappointed with a new collection titled Best Of, are you? You know exactly what you’re going to get.

All that’s left to argue over is the inclusions or omissions. Of course, Born To Run, the Rightbaiting Born In The USA, the chest-baring Thunder Road and the unstoppable groove of

Hungry Heart are here. So too are

Badlands, the career-reinventing

Streets Of Philadelphia, the deep soul of The Ghost Of Tom Joad, the moments for quiet and a sort of mournful desperation in between early crowd-pleasers like 1973’s Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) and 1984’s era-defining

Dancing In The Dark. And of course there are a couple of mandatory newer tracks: Hello Sunshine (from 2019’s Western Stars) and the epic Letter To You (2020). Nothing wrong with that. Bruce needs to feel he can stay fresh and relevant among all the tumultuous singalongs and anthemic posing and celebrity sightings.

If you’re a Bruce fan, you can’t go wrong really with this collection: 18 tracks on a twoLP/single-CD set, 31 on the digital deluxe set (which seems strangely weighted), pure Boss adrenaline from beginning to end, and if a couple of the final tracks seem to grate a little

(Girls In Their Summer Clothes – really?) so what? There’s more than enough magic here to keep the blood pumping.