I was having a discussion with some people at work during which I expressed my admiration for “Darkness on the Edge of Town” which always resonated more with me than any of his other albums. I was politely told that “Darkness” was inferior in practically every way to “Born to Run.” I’m curious as to what a larger sample size would say.
I’m including all his studio albums (although it would surprise me if more than five actually got any votes), but I’m excluding his live albums / compilations / bootlegs, etc.
I voted for The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. I love that album and always go back to it. Springsteen lost that funky, romantic, operatic vibe over the years. I’d rate my top ten like this:
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
Born to Run
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Tunnel of Love
Born in the USA - didn’t care for the title track, but great overall
Nebraska
The River
Greetings from Asbury Park
The Rising
Human Touch
I’m selling The Rising a little short…a terrific later career album.
Darkness for me. That album just hits so many right spots for me. Candy’s Room is the most overlooked song, IMHO Great lyric, the driving beat of the drums throughout, and that raw guitar at the end. Perfect Bruce song. Short, raw, powerful.
Splitting hairs here, but I went with “Darkness.” The title track, “Badlands,” and “Promised Land” all still hit me hard. Hate to put BTR second, but there you go.
*The River *and *Darkness on the Edge of Town *are both awesome and *The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle *has a lot of heart, but *Born to Run *is the best of Springsteen’s career . Clarence Clemons delivers his best saxophone on “Jungle Town,” and the rest of the song ain’t bad either.
“She’s the One,” “Back Streets,” and the title song are all immensely powerful and I never grow tired of listening to them. “10th Avenue Freeze Out” and “Night” are good time party songs.
“Meeting Across the River” is phenomenal, the type of song you hardly ever hear in pop music. Springsteen gives a truly heart-wrenching vocal performance as a loser out of luck and too stupid to realize this isn’t going to be his big break, it’s going to be his end.
A wonderful album.
Sorry for making two posts, but the fucking computers at work only let us on them for 10 minutes at a time.
Another vote for Darkness here. I love almost everything he’s done ( I’ve even watch XXplugged more than once), but there are more tracks on Darkness that I couldn’t live without than on the others. Sure, Born To Run has the great songs about finding your freedom, but Darkness, especially the title track, has the songs about being trapped where you are, and surviving. Or not…
To me, just more beautiful and powerful.
Darkness. Forever and always. And yes, Candy’s Room is a favorite.
But I so agree about Greetings From Asbury Park being underrated.
First saw Bruce in 1978 at Red, Rocks in Colorado.
I was a Springsteen newbie, and was taken aback when we arrived early and heard all this booing.
As most Springsteen fans know, it was just the crowed cheering Bru–uce as he briefly appeared onstage for the sound check.
Nebraska, easily. I like Born to Run pretty well too, but Springsteen’s usual brand of Broadway rock is just suffocating when it’s not goofy, and his other “solo” albums are heavy-handed and dull.
Voted for Tunnel of Love. This poll isn’t splitting hairs–it’s splitting atoms. You can argue for almost any record on that list, depending upon who you are and when you came into Springsteen fandom (either where you were in your life, or where Bruce was in his career).
I give the nod to ToL for a couple of reasons. It was the first studio album he released after Born in the USA. The contrast in those albums is striking. Springsteen experienced mega-success for the first time with Born in the USA. (He was popular before that, but not ‘filling football stadiums’ popular.) His reaction to that experience was not to repeat it, not to just release another broad, anthemic album built for stadium audiences, but to go completely the other direction and come out with an very different, very intimate album. That decision was a powerful move that shaped a lot of the rest of his career. Really, there’s much more similarity than difference in the sequence from Darkness to The River to Born in the USA than there is between the latter album and ToL. (Nebraska is in that sequence, and anomalous because of it being solo and acoustic, but when you listen to the live, electrified, full-band version of “Atlantic City,” you can hear how Nebraska could have been much closer to the other albums in the sequence.) When you listen to the later Springsteen albums, you still hear him doing what he really started with Tunnel of Love–always searching for something that’s new, but still very much him. It’s a real turning point in his career.
Of course, he made that particular album at that particular time because of the personal stuff he was going through: specifically, the breakup of his first marriage. That personal tumult fuels so much of the emotional depth in every song on Tunnel of Love. And that’s what makes it so real. The songs Springsteen wrote for those earlier albums were great, classic stuff, but most of them were stories. Fiction. Fantasies. With Tunnel of Love, Springsteen got real, and the work resonates with that. It quite an achievement, and worthy of my vote, even if few others agree with me.
My two cents, and vote, which may be valued even less than two cents. I’m just thankful we have all of those albums to listen to, and that we really don’t have to choose any one of them.
Well, maybe not including The Ghost of Tom Joad…I could do without that one. The others? Solid!