THE 50 GREATEST BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONGS

30 STATE TROOPER

(from Nebraska, 1982)

Taxi Driver: The Musical relocated to the highway.

“One of the most amazing records I ever heard,” quoth Bruce on Suicide’s horrifying 1977 tune Frankie Teardrop; seldom has one classic mapped so brilliantly onto another. Where despairing factory worker Frankie shoots his family then himself, Springsteen’s loner heads towards final deliverance down the New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours – a bleakly ironic echo of Chuck Berry’s gallivanting relish. More chilling still, as the song dissolves, Bruce echoes the animal yelps of Suicide’s Alan Vega, rockabilly as psychological apocalypse. MS

29 TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT

(from Born To Run, 1975)

The E Street Band Origin Story. The song wasn’t happening in the studio until Miami Steve Van Zandt sang those exuberant horn parts to the session guys. That moxie got him in the band. And forming a band is what this celebrates – the bonding of gypsy running buddies and “professional hitmen”, all mirrored in an elbow-rubbing groove and private lingo lyric. Springsteen called the title “just a cool phrase”, but it conjures up an inaccessible street of dreams for his gang to thaw and conquer. They did that soon enough. BM

28 I’M ON FIRE

(from Born In The USA, 1984) Declaration of lust swaps starsand-stripes for a red flag.

John Sayles’s video – Springsteen as flirty mechanic – sold this single as adult rock erotica. Alone in “soaking wet” sheets with its “bad desire”, though, it lands differently. “Hey little girl” might be standard pop idiom, but alongside insistent percussion, violent imagery (a knife, a “freight train running through the middle of my head”), tensed vocals and synths that shade from John Hughes into John Carpenter, it’s less quaint come-on, more stalker’s lament. This burning, suggests Springsteen, ever alert to the damaged, is an infernal flame. VS

27 GROWIN’ UP

(from Greetings From Asbury Park,

NJ, 1973)

The frustrated smalltown teenage rebel’s tale…

“My biography,” admitted Springsteen, who advised that a song which was part of his Columbia audition is best consumed when the temperature is 95 and the humidity 90. Propelled by David Sancious’s twinkling piano, it combines teenage insecurity with teenage swagger and the need to blend in with the need to stand out. Setting the template for so much of what was to come, Springsteen was as poetic as he was direct. And, of course, a potentially brighter future lies in an “old parked car”. JA

26 HUNGRY HEART

(from Live/1975–85, 1986) Tennyson + Ramones + chimes? Your first hit.

On the 1980 single that became his first smash, Springsteen sounded a touch short of the grit and longing inside his would-be adulterer’s anthem. But on-stage he couldn’t hide his happiness or himself. Here, from the same year, a Nassau Coliseum crowd shouts the first verse before he can, speaking to its universal resonance and elegant simplicity (he wrote it, quickly, for the Ramones). Whether it’s new sex, love, or adventure, we are, as Tennyson offered, “always roaming with a hungry heart”. GHC

25 DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

(from Darkness On The Edge Of

Town, 1978)

What we do in the shadows.

There’s such theatricality in this song’s introduction – strutting piano, shiny tambourine – that it feels like Springsteen bringing up the house lights on the world he’s brought to life. It fits a track so interested in façade and performance, from the woman “with a style she’s trying to maintain” to the insistence that “everybody’s got a secret”. The street-racing narrator is flesh-and-blood solid but there’s a fantastic sense of Springsteen stage-managing his own universe here, prowling a backlit set in a rock’n’roll Our Town. VS

24 GIRLS IN THEIR SUMMER CLOTHES

(from Magic, 2007)

Beach Boys go Proust.

It’s Kurt Weill’s September Song re-purposed as a Brian Wilson lamentation for lost youth, with requisite 12-string guitars and Jack Nitzschestyle string arrangement. Yet the wry, melancholy note to Springsteen’s delivery (“The girls in their summer clothes… pass me by”) hints at the layered, self-reflexive pop of The Magnetic Fields, and gradually this romantic narrator reveals himself as more bitter than bittersweet, someone who believes the waitress pouring him coffee “went away [and] cut me like a knife”. A cloud moves across the sun. AM

23 MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER

(from Born To Run, 1975)

It’s a deal.

Not the last time the worlds of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen would collide (they’d share the former’s Jersey Girl). In this island of Porgy & Bess amidst the sturm und drang, our hero is heading for a pow-wow with some made guys, and he needs his pal Eddie to look like he’s packing heat. Around him swirls Randy Brecker’s bluesy trumpet and Roy Bittan’s solemn piano, telling you what you already know – these doomed small-timers are headed for a dip in the Hudson. DE

22 STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA

(from Philadelphia OST, 1993) A Grammy and Oscar winner that’s hardly there.

Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking Philadelphia, in which Hollywood icon Tom Hanks played a gay AIDS patient, required a theme that captured the narrative’s devastating core. The director cried when he first heard Springsteen’s response. Backed only by Tommy Sims’s ethereal backing vocal, Springsteen ghosts in on a drum machine, shaded by synthetic strings, haunted and haunting. He tried a band version but junked it; what we hear is the demo. “I can feel myself fading away,” sings Springsteen. It’s like the music feels the same. MA

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