Top 25 Bruce Springsteen Songs: The Top 5
My all-time top five favorite songs by the Boss, which means we're talking about five songs I think are amongst the best in the history of popular music.
All right, we’ve made it to the end. We’re at the final five songs in my countdown of my Top 25 Favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. These are my five all-time favorite Springsteen songs. Since Springsteen is my favorite musician, these are some of the greatest songs in the history of popular music.
This is… the rarest of airs to be in. Were a musician to write one of these songs, it would be enough to make an entire career. The fact that I can identify five songs of this caliber by one artist tells you just how great he is.
It’s time I stop this introduction and get us out on the highway heading towards five of the greatest songs in Springsteen’s catalogue.
“The Promised Land”
On an album like Darkness on the Edge of Town, which features some great songs, “Promised Land” is my favorite and probably the track I listen to the most. I love it as a song about hope and belief (“I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man. And I believe in a promised land”), which stands out amidst the darkness of… Darkness. A key idea I’ll return to in all these songs is longing and “Promised Land” has it. The belief that there’s something more, something that is worth risking… everything for. “Promised Land” articulates that and on an album like Darkness you need that.
It also has one of my favorite Clarence Clemons saxophone solos. It’s not as flashy as “Jungleland.” But even as it’s more concise, it still has that same sonic punch especially when performed in concert.
I love the live versions of this song from the 1999-2000 reunion tour because that instrumental break sounds especially good with Garry Tallant’s bass, Steven Van Zandt’s and Nils Lofgren’s guitar and then Clarence’s saxophone. I particularly enjoy this version performed after Springsteen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
“Thunder Road”
The opening song on Born to Run sets the mood for the journey that comes with this album. It is the opening credits song, the overture.
Longing for escape, the desire for redemption, aspiring for something greater, this is the introductory paragraph with the thesis statement. It sets you up for what’s going to come and identifies the main point. Springsteen may have “learned more from a three-minute record” than anything in school, but he’s doing a good job setting up an album like a strong academic essay.
Though there are many lines in “Thunder Road” that stay with me, one of my favorites is perhaps easy to overlook:
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again
That feeling of not wanting to go home because you can’t deal with being alone… that’s a very specific and powerful feeling (if you know it, you know it). I love that Springsteen articulated that particular kind of pain so well in song.
But it’s hard to top “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night” and “Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk. And my car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk.” And then there’s… “We got one last chance to make it real to trade in these wings on some wheels” and “We're riding out tonight to case the promised land.”
I think you get the point. It’s got some great, great lyrics.
While the album version is great, I’ve always had a soft spot for the live version from the Born to Run tour of 1975, which featured just piano and glockenspiel backing Bruce.
I don’t always like the more stripped-down versions of Bruce’s songs. When you take away the E Street band and what they can do to support Springsteen, I feel like a little of that magic is lost. I also think some of the grandiosity Springsteen is deliberately bringing into his songs is lost in those stripped-down versions too.
But what I love so much about this version of “Thunder Road” is that it’s in this stripped down, more solemn form and yet it still maintains all of the majesty and triumph encoded in the song. You don’t need the guitar and the saxophone, it’s all there even when it’s not.
“Incident on 57th Street”
I took guitar and drum lessons when I was in high school and, something that was incredibly cool for young me, I learned by playing popular songs. My teacher would put the songs on a tape (I know this 100% dates me) with which I would practice. One of those songs I learned to play was “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” Because my teacher was taping the song off of a vinyl LP, it picked up a little of the track that came before “Rosalita,” which was “Incident on 57th Street.”
The tape recorded those final notes of the song; specifically, that piano that sounds like it came from a music box. It was a sound, even in just a short snippet, that was filled with such sadness and beauty that it totally captivated me. Needless to say, I got out my copy of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and listened to the song in its entirety and was completely blown away.
A lot of Springsteen’s lyrics sound like West Side Story for the rock-and-roll generation, but that’s especially true of “Incident.” There’s obviously the reference to “cool Romeo” and “late Juliet.” But I hear the final verse of the song with Spanish Johnny going out and leaving Puerto Rican Jane to go out and “make a little easy money” and I think about Tony leaving Maria to try and stop the rumble in that moment just before everything falls apart and takes the turn. That moment, to me, is the most West Side Story-esque. I also love the line “upstairs the band was playin’ and the singer was singin’ something about goin’ home.”
The side 2 of The Wild, The Innocent, with “Incident” and “Rosalita” and “New York City Serenade” is really where Springsteen starts to become what he will be going forward.
If I was to use a sports analogy, it’s like when the great player has. their first deep postseason run the season or two before they win the championship (I think about Steph Curry and the Warriors’ 2013 playoff run, when they made it to the West semifinals and seemingly announced they were here as a top team). There was still some stuff he would need to shed and do differently, but you could see how he was going to become… who he would be for the rest of his career.
I also love Springsteen’s description of the song:
“‘Incident’ featured a theme I’d return to often in the future: the search for redemption. Over the next 20 years I’d work this one like only a good Catholic boy could.”
While the album version of the song was the one that hooked me, the live version from the 1975 show at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, PA is otherworldly.
It’s somewhat like that live version of “Thunder Road” from 1975 that’s stripped down and yet maintains the grandiosity. Though it’s just Bruce on the piano and the violin, you still feel the grand scope of the song even without the instrumentation. That’s how you know something is a great song. You can perform it in these different contexts and forms and that still comes through.
“Walk Like a Man”
Of my final Top 5, this is probably the one most readers didn’t see coming. But amidst some of the stone-cold classics that Springsteen has produced over his career, this is one I listen return to and think is an under-appreciated triumph.
While the Boss gets cast as this figure of a kind of retrograde, automobile-centric masculinity, the reality is that what he espouses and dramatizes is more nuanced than that. Not surprisingly, in a song called “Walk Like a Man,” he engages with masculinity. It’s not a song about being “tough” in the way we think men have to be. There’s tenderness, there’s anxiety and worry from not knowing what the future holds and being scared of that.
There’s the worry that comes with seeing your father age (“I was young and I didn't know what to do when I saw your best steps stolen away from you”). It’s not a song that is setting up the father figure to be this hero, but it’s trying to understand and not just expressing frustration and pain. Springsteen’s relationship with his father has led to some great songs in his back catalogue (“Adam Raised a Cain,” “Independence Day") but this is probably my favorite of them all.
Also, as one who is profoundly interested in the influence of Catholicism on Springsteen’s songwriting (this was, essentially, what my dissertation was about), there’s a lot of it here starting with the reference to the St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Freehold, NJ and seeing the people getting married there.
There’s part of that second verse that has always stayed with me:
Well, would they ever look so happy again
The handsome groom and his bride
As they stepped into that long black limousine
For their mystery ride
Not knowing if that happiness will last, or if it will ever return, and the idea of the “mystery ride” is some of Springsteen’s best songwriting.
Sadly, after the Tunnel of Love Tour, this hasn’t been a song Springsteen has played live. If I were one of those fans at the Springsteen concert with a song title written on a piece of poster board to try to request, “Walk Like a Man” would probably be my pick.
Of the versions of this he played during that Tunnel of Love tour, I really love this one because of that beautiful instrumental introduction.
“Born to Run”
This is a pretty obvious choice, but… it’s Springsteen’s greatest song. It cannot be denied. It’s what he titled his autobiography. It’s the mission statement.
It is, for my money, the greatest record of all-time, by which I mean it uses everything that goes into record production (the songwriting, the musical performances, the production). How could it not be the choice here?
Brian Wilson said, when he was writing Smile, that he was trying to write a “teenage symphony to God" but I think that perfectly describes “Born to Run.”
There’s so much to say about this one song that I don’t even know where to begin or what to say.
Of the many things it does well, “Born to Run” builds and builds and builds until there’s this powerful emotional release in the third verse (which is, not surprisingly, my favorite section of the song). The organ and glockenspiel and strings are more present in the mix, which makes it clear this is the moment of escape.
You also have my favorite line in the song:
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
What makes that line extra powerful is the way Springsteen delivers it. Other performers might hit it with an exclamation point. Make it loud. When Springsteen sings it, it’s almost subdued and thus you feel it all the more. The love he feels and the madness that’s there, this is very real and powerful. You don’t need theatrics or over-emphasis to get that across.
“Born to Run” features some of my favorite lyrics and lines in Springsteen’s catalogue, (“Will you walk with me out on the wire?`Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider”; The amusement park rises bold and stark, kids are huddled on the beach in a mist. I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss”), but that line about “all the madness in my soul” is easily my favorite.
It also features a strong sax solo by the Big Man, Ernest Carter’s great work on the drums (his only appearance with Springsteen as Max Weinberg would take over as the E Street Band’s drummer after him), and the best use of the studio as a kind of instrument. What Springsteen was able to capture in “Born to Run” is how an artist could use everything available to them in the recording studio to craft a great record. It’s also why I’m not as crazy about the live versions of the track. I think part of the song is what the studio and the production can do and thus that album version is the ideal.
Robert Christgau describes how the song “is the fulfillment of everything ‘Be My Baby’ was about and lots more.” It is the song that sees what pop/rock/however you want to label it can do, it fulfills that longing. In that way, not only is it Springsteen’s greatest song, but it has to be up there in the greatest songs in the history of popular music.
Well we did it—we’ve reached the end of this journey through my 25 favorite songs by the Boss. What did I miss? What did I forget?