I should note, this says “least favorite” – I don’t hate any Bruce album. But I do have a least favorite. Obviously, Born to Run, Darkness, Nebraska, The Rising – these are all pantheon albums. I love them all, start to finish. What’s interesting is, there are albums that Bruce Fans do not like. Devils and Dust, the Other Band albums, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and The Seeger Sessions seem to have an at best mixed following. My least favorite album is among these I’ve listed. This is kind of like a really boring game of Clue where no one cares who the killer is, and Tim Curry won’t leave you alone.
Let’s start with the Ghost of Tom Joad, because it has more songs I don’t listen to than any album on this list, other than my least favorite. I don’t dislike them, I just don’t really listen to them. From this album, I love the title track (strangely enough, though I’ve never been a fan of the Radiohead version, I love the version with Bruce and Tom Morello from the Magic tour…), and one of my favorite songs off of this album is Straight Time, which is a song that doesn’t get its due. Many Springsteen fans hate it, but I think it’s great, and it has one of my favorite lyrics in it: “Kitchen floor in the evenin’, tossin’ my little babies high. Mary smilin’, but she’s watchin’ me out the corner of her eye. Seems you can’t get anymore than half free. Step out on to the front porch, suck the cold air deep inside of me.” This is the other reference to coldness. He’s going back to a life of crime. The coldness is in him, and it’s his half-freedom that did it to him. He’s sick of doing straight time. I also like Highway 21, Sinaloa Cowboys, and The Line. Some of the other songs are just eh. None of them rate 3 stars, I just kind of don’t regard them – not bad, not good. Meh.
One that surprised me to hear people say was a bad album is Devils and Dust. I never understood this. It’s a different album, in that it often gets lumped in with Nebraska and Tom Joad, even though it’s not like them. It’s a character driven album, but it’s not solo. And it’s that bleakness in spirit and in leadership of a time during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars where we were adrift as a nation. We had weak leadership, divisive infighting, and a sense that it wasn’t turning around. This has some of Bruce’s strongest imagery, and best characters. I like it quite a bit, save for “Silver Palomino” and “All I’m Thinkin’ About.”
The Seeger Sessions, aside from “How Can I Keep From Singing?” is a great album all the way through. This is the first on this list that features a band other than the E Street Band. The Seeger Sessions was an album that Bruce first got the idea for in the early 1990s. He wanted to play some of the great folk songs from the early years. I like to say that, at times, Bruce is a simple man. In the 80s, he played a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” on the Live 1975-1985 album, and then covered Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” for a 12” EP featuring, among other things, “Be True,” “Tougher Than The Rest,” and “Born to Run” all performed live, and “Born to Run” being a solo, acoustic version with a very different feel to it. Drinking this in, he became interested in folk music. He got sidetracked with his growing family, as Evan, Sam, and Jessie Springsteen came along. But, he never lost his interest in releasing a folk album, and eventually got his group of musicians together to record the American Folk Songbook, delving deep to record Slave spirituals, Saloon songs, and folk protest songs. A few years later, Bruce played on a tribute album to Ennio Morricone, the composer who created the iconic score to “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” – this sank in, and Bruce decided to write a mini-western in song form. On his next studio release, we had “Outlaw Pete.” He is a man who gets interested in things, to say the least.
Which leaves me with the “other band” albums – Lucky Town and Human Touch. Any Springsteen fan worth his salt knows which one is my least favorite. I like Lucky Town from start to finish. I like each and every song on it. I wish he had recorded it with the E Street Band, and I still do not understand the need to break them up. But, I’m still grateful that we have Lucky Town. Human touch, on the other hand? Well… let’s just say I’m glad these were released as two separate albums, because I’d hate to have everything I love about Lucky Town lumped in with everything I dislike about Human Touch.
So, what do I dislike about Human Touch? Well, I LIKE the title track. I like it a lot actually, and I like the album version, not the greatest hits version, which lops off a minute twenty-one. I like “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” and “I Wish I Were Blind.” Hell, I even kind of like “Man’s Job.” “With Every Wish,” “All or Nothin’ At All,” and “Real World” are blah. The rest, I really haven’t listened to outside of the five or six times I tried to force myself. In fact, my iTunes, which has the same play count since 2004, when I switched over to iTunes, says I’ve listened to “Pony Boy” and “Real Man” 3 times each. I just don’t really think about this album that much. It has a better half, and I’d rather listen to Lucky Town than Human Touch. What’s funny about Human Touch is that all the songs feel oddly disjointed, disconnected, and not like Bruce. It’s almost like, for an album called Human Touch, recorded at the same time as Lucky Town, there’s very little humanity or touch to the record. Bruce used up all his efforts on the first album – an album about his growing to understand married life, family, the blessings, challenges, and trappings of life, and the difference between being a son and a father – being a part of a family, and having a family. And I got it. Like I said, I can’t fully appreciate “Living Proof” until I have children, but when that day comes, I’ll get it. But I’ll never get “Gloria’s Eyes.”
Tomorrow’s Bruce Challenge Topic: Favorite Live Cover Performed By Bruce
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