Bruce Springsteen: his 10 best songs of the eighties
Very few rock stars from the 1970s adapted as effortlessly to the 1980s as Bruce Springsteen. While many of his colleagues in the MTV age had difficulty finding their way around, Springsteen managed to achieve a degree of extreme popularity. A popularity that he probably couldn’t have imagined. Especially during the highlight of Born to run.
Bruce Springsteen began the decade with its first top ten hit “Hungry Heart”. And after he was simple with the critics Nebraska enthusiastically, he published Born in the USA. The songs of this album dominated the rock radio for over a year. They brought his show in football stadiums all over the world.
It was a success that only a few solo stars have ever achieved. His follow -up album Tunnel of Love Was a conscious attempt to dampen the hype.
10. “Out in the Street”
Bruce Springsteen originally intended The River As a single album with mostly dark songs under the title The Ties that Bind to publish. “I didn’t have the feeling that it was big enough,” he said in 2009. “I wanted to capture the topics I was about Darkness [on the Edge of Town] had written. I wanted to keep these characters with me. And at the same time add the music that our live shows made so entertaining and pleasant for our audience. ” With this last point in mind, he wrote “Out in the Street” towards the end of the session. It is a typical Springsteen song about relaxing after a long working day and a highlight of his live shows for 36 years.
9. “One step up “
One of the smartest decisions that Bruce Springsteen made in his entire career was the realization that Born in the USA was not to be surpassed. Any attempt to write “Dancing in the Dark Part II” or “More Glory Days” would have been an absolute disaster. Instead, he took a few years of time. And came with the very introspective Tunnel of Love back. His marriage to actress Julianne Phillips was just two years old. But it didn’t work. He incorporated all his heartache in songs like “One Step Up”. This is anything but a radiohite. But jumping steen had so much residual popularity of Born in the USAthat he actually reached 13th place in the Hot 100.
8. “Hungry Heart”
In March 1979, Bruce Springsteen and Steve van Zandt went to the Fast Lane Club in Asbury Park to see the Ramones. “After the show he came behind,” said Joey Ramone years later. “It was about the time when he gave Patti Smith ‘Because the Night’. I said to him: ‘Would you write us a song?’ He went home and wrote, inspired by us, ‘Hungry Heart’. [Jon] Landau before, and Landau [der seine Provision behalten wollte] told him that he should keep it. I think he owes us something. He was inspired by us, wrote this song and then takes the money and disappears. ” Bruce would probably formulate these events a little differently.
7. “Tunnel of Love”
Bruce Springsteen spent the first days of his musical career hanging around in the spa town of Asbury Park in New Jersey. The place had exceeded its climax as a holiday destination years ago. But in the warm months he was still full of tourists who enjoyed fair games on the promenade. Pictures from this scene flowed into many of his early songs, such as: B. “4th of July (Asbury Park)”.
At the Tunnel of Love However, he went through a personal crisis. And suddenly the tunnel of Love was a threatening place in its idea. “Man meets Woman and they Fall in Love,” he sings in the title track. “But the house is haunted and the ride gets Rough/ and you’ve got to Learn to live with what you can’t rise above if you want to ride on down in through love.” The song contains one of the most memorable guitar parts of Nils Lofgren in the Springsteen catalog, but at that time Springsteen quickly lost interest in the E Street Band. And would drop it after completing the tour.
6. “Born in the USA”
At some point during Bruce Springsteen’s writing sessions for Nebraska, he started singing a melody over a veteran who returns from the war and has no work. “You died in Vietnam, you died in Vietnam,” he sang in the chorus. ‘Boy, you don’t understand, you died in Vietnam.’
The next time he attempted, he decided to turn the whole thing and make “died in Vietnam” ‘”born in the USA”. The dark song did not make it in Nebraska. But became the title song of his next studio publication with the E Street Band. The song was clearly intended as a condemnation of the way America treated the Vietnam veterans. But many only heard the booming chorus and saw it as a patriotic hymn.
Today, alongside “This Land is Your Land” it is one of the most misunderstood songs in American history. Although it is impossible today to overlook its intention when Springsteen sings from full throat: “Forty years burn down the street, nowhere to run there does not mean going anywhere!”
5. “No Surrender”
In the last few days of John Kerry’s unfortunate presidential campaign in 2004, Bruce Springsteen began to perform with the candidate in crucial swing countries in rallies. He always ended his short acoustic set with “No Surrender”. The song “Born in the USA” From 1984 it is about a defiant youth that “learned more from a three -minute record than ever at school”. But in this context, he should show that Kerry would not give up in his endeavor to make George W. Bush a president with just one term. Well, it didn’t work. But four years later, he sang the song with Obama ratings and achieved a better result.
4. “Atlantic City”
On March 15, 1981, the Mafiaboss Philip Testa, based in Philadelphia, was murdered when a rival member of his own gang blew up his house. He worked in a chicken meat (and had terrible windpock scouts on his face), which is why he was known as “chicken man” in the underworld. Springsteen learned of testa’s fate when he was songs for Nebraska wrote. What led to one of the most memorable initial lines in his work: “Well They Blew Up The Chicken Man in Philly Last Night / Now They Blew Up his house too.” The song tells the sad story of a desperate man who is driven to the crime. The song is wonderfully suitable as a solo acoustic number. Or as a rocky performance with the E Street Band. The band also has an excellent cover version on its 1993 LP Jericho recorded.
3. “Brilliant Disguise”
There is probably no topic that Bruce Springsteen wants to talk less publicly than about his short -lived marriage to Julianne Phillips. But after you Tunnel of Love heard You really get a feeling for how he felt when marriage broke.
“We stood in front of the altar,” Springsteen sings in “Brilliant Disguise”. “The Gipsy voices that our future was right/ but when the early morning hours came/ well, maybe, baby, the Gipsy lied.” The song was the first single Tunnel of Love And came to the radio about a week before the album was released. He was advertised by a strong black and white video in which Bruce sings the song in a kitchen. Contrary to the MTV tradition, he sang the vocals live with every recording, which made it even more intimate and more informative.
2. “I’m on fire”
Bruce Springsteen became so incredibly famous in the mid-1980s that he could probably have taken film roles like David Bowie. (Imagine that he would have a sports teacher in the Breakfast Club played. That would have been strange.) In any case, he was smart enough not to take this path. But the video for “I’m on Fire” gives you an idea of what it could have looked like.
He plays a car mechanic who attracts the attention of a wealthy woman who is clearly interested in a kind of secret. He drives to her house, but finally resists the temptation. It is a kind of dark view of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” video. The song was the fourth single off Born in the USA And reached 6th place in the Hot 100. For whatever reason, he rarely plays it at concerts.
1. “The River”
Bruce Springste’s younger sister Virginia was an 18-year-old high school student in 1968 when her friend accidentally pregnant her. They got married and forced to grow up very quickly. A little more than a decade later Bruce employed her emergency than he was the title song The River wrote.
In 1979 he presented it at the No Nukes concert, in which his sister was also sitting in the audience. She had no idea that he had written a song about her. “I am completely exposed here,” she told the writer Peter Ames Carlin. “At the beginning I didn’t like it. But now it’s my favorite song.” Surprisingly, Virginia and her husband Mickey are still happily married after almost 50 years.