Springsteen Challenge Day 7: Favorite Bruce Album (Live)

Throughout this process, I have consistently interpreted the prompts to better suit my writing style.  In this instance, I don’t need to.  This is fairly straightforward in terms of my favorite Bruce live album.  There aren’t nearly as many Bruce live albums as there are bootlegs. I am, however, not including bootlegs.  The “favorite bootleg” is a category all its own.  Thus, this will be an official released album – not DVDs, unless there was an audio version released in support.  This significantly narrows the options.

Springsteen Challenge Day 6: Favorite Bruce Album (Studio)

If picking my favorite Lyric was tough, this is the exact opposite.  As is the case with all of these writing prompts, I’m going to go ahead and interpret the rules in such a way that allows me to write a bit more.  Otherwise, here’s what this post would look like:

“Springsteen Challenge Day 6: Favorite Bruce Album (Studio): Born to Run.  Moving on.”

Springsteen Challenge Day 5: Favorite Bruce Photo

It’s day five, and today’s Bruce challenge prompt is: your favorite Bruce photo.

This is another prompt that I’m going to choose to define on my own.  I’ve been to more than a dozen Bruce shows in my lifetime.  I’ve been up against the stage, I’ve been in what I assume to be the furthest possible seat from the stage at Madison Square Garden, I’ve been three rows from the top of the Gund Arena in Cleveland, and I’ve been front and center on the Oval at Ohio State as Bruce was introduced by former Senator and Astronaut John Glenn.  I’ve seen Bruce close up and far away enough that I’ve got some phone pictures.  In fact, there is one phone picture that, when I sent it to my wife, who was working for the newsmedia in New York at the time, she had a friend make a comment “My friend may actually kill himself if he sees that photo.  Let me send it to him.”  But, that’s a story for another prompt.

Springsteen Challenge Day 4: Song that Cheers You Up

There are obvious contenders for this – I mentioned earlier how I used to listen to Thunder Road on the days where I came out on the losing end.  But, that was more a “I want something to remind me I can do this.”  It wasn’t a cheering up, so much as a reassurance.  I may be splitting hairs here to not duplicate prior posts, but I can only write from my thoughts, and I promise, I’m not trying to cheat on the Bruce Challenge.

Springsteen Challenge Day 3: Song that Makes You Sad

This is a prompt that I considered for a few minutes, because it made me think two things in response:

A)   What kind of sad? I mean, you can talk to me about the holocaust, or suicide, or hunger and malnourishment, and I become extremely sad about our world. But I can shake that off if need be. I can paste a smile over it, and it goes away by sheer force of will.

B)   This prompt very quickly becomes a literary trope.  I’ll explain momentarily.