#381

The opening of this gig in Paris from a few years back is great - solo Incident on 57th Street, into full-band Reason to Believe:

#382

Let’s see how we score Nebraska then…

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#383

Again, another amazing record. I do think the first half is a lot stronger then the 2nd, but still overall a 9/10.

As others have said, such a change of pace and showed everyone the depth that he has. Also can’t think of a 2 album run with more whiplash from this to his next one.

Atlantic City is Top 10 Bruce.

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#384

Was going to highlight this when we got to the Seeger Sessions week. One of greatest live reinventions of any song ever. 8 minutes of pure unbridled breathless joy. Really makes me wish I’d caught this tour (it was the one before I started going to see him every time he tours Europe).

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#385

Nebraska was the album that got me into Springsteen. I owned Greatest Hits as a teenager, but didn’t investigate any further until I borrowed and copied Nebraska on CD from a roommate at uni. Honestly think I listened to it in repeat for a week.

It’s so sparse and bleak in parts, you can tell Bruce’s head was in a pretty dark place. I don’t even think he was 30 when he wrote the album, but the narrator in every track seems like he’s done with the world around him. I absolutely love the lyrics to every verse in Reason to Believe, and I struggled to pick my 2 favourite tracks, bit I went with Nebraska and Atlantic City.

Third 10 in the past 4 weeks. The run he was on from 1975-85 was a triumph.

Seen a man standing over a dead dog
Lying by the highway in a ditch
He’s looking down kinda puzzled
Poking that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open
He’s standing out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough
That dog’d get up and run

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#386

A big 10, easily my favourite Springsteen album, although I’ll admit there are a lot I haven’t heard

#387

Never quite been able to work out what Springsteen is trying to say in Reason To Believe. Initially I thought it was a song of hope at the end of a pretty bleak album, saying that even though bad things happen to people you can’t crush the human spirit and people still find things to believe in. But after properly reading the lyrics I think he could be saying that life is just a torturous ordeal until you die and people are kidding themselves that things can get better

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#388

Yip - my reading is the latter as well.

#389

Good to see some love for Reason to Believe, favourite of mine. The perfect album closer and, like many of Bruce’s best songs, open to interpretation between quite contrasting meanings. He has sometime performed a very striking version live with vocals through a highly distorted bullet mic, which I think points towards the more pessimistic reading of the lyrics.

Atlantic City is one of my favorite songs of all time. The line ‘last night I met this guy, and I’m gonna do a little favour for him’ is a perfect example of how Bruce is able to convey so much with such economy. In that one line you understand exactly what is going going happen, and you can see the next days, weeks, months and years of the narrator’s life unfolding clearly in your mind’s eye, all following on from that one single sparse line in the song. Incredible.

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#390

A total masterpiece, all the more so for being almost an accident in how it came to be. It’s quite a significant artistic decision to leave your road-hardened band out of it and just release your naked demos as your new album. Must have felt like quite a risk at the time, and good on him for taking that risk.

I came to it with the reputation that it was super bleak and grey, but that’s not really true: there’s so much life and humanity to these songs and stories. He’s such a good storyteller, and if you compare this to the first few albums you see how effective and efficient his writing has become, he can suggest whole lives with just a line or two, delivered just right.

It’s all great, but Atlantic City in particular is a real piece of magic.

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#391

If anything even more of a risk than it would have been a few years later - while he was obviously a big deal by '82, he wasn’t quite at superstardom yet (we’ll get to that tomorrow). To take that left turn without being fully certain the world will still be interested when you get back to the day job of writing hits must have raised eyebrows in the band, as much as anything.

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#392

Bit of both? Seems to me to be about highlighting the absurdity in the human spirit to believe in something when there is no tangible cause to while also marvelling slightly at that capacity. Is belief in itself good? Well, no, Mary Lou shows where belief becomes delusion but while belief may be blind it’s not always unrewarded. Who knows, maybe the bride turned up late, unobserved and flustered having had a shit of a day and as for that dog, maybe everything that dies someday comes back?

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#393

Wow, hadn’t even considered the zombie dog angle…

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#394

Confession - the lyrics of Reason to Believe might have went completely over my head on this one. Admire the album even more now. Those are some nihilistic lyrics.

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#395

Yeah they really are - no hope at all in them

#396

Been loving this listening club! Smashed out the first 4 albums and the live album (Nebraska was thrown in the mix as well) over a 5000 mile road trip to Yellowstone and back. I’ve concluded this the best way to listen to The Boss :wink:

Nebraska is one of my favourite albums, it was my gateway into Springsteen. The exact moment was when Arcade Fire covered State Trooper at Ally Pally in 2007. I had no idea what I was hearing was a Springsteen song. Nebraska was a huge discovery for me and came in to my life at just the right time… started dating Mrs PeB around the same time too.

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#397

Onwards to the mid-80s now, and where else to go but synths, stadiums, sleeveless tees and singles singles singles…

$_3
$_3555×720 47.4 KB

Born in the U.S.A.

(June 4th 1984)

Born in the U.S.A.
Cover Me
Darlington County
Working on the Highway
Downbound Train
I’m On Fire
No Surrender
Bobby Jean
I’m Goin’ Down
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
My Hometown

image

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#398

I’ve never previously heard this album :open_mouth:

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#399

Not a comment about Bruce but it’s kind of insane that period in the 80s (90s too maybe?) when big albums would get promoted for years and have 6 or 7 single releases.

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#400

I’ll get into the album later but, yeah, you’re right about the number of singles at the time. Guess this was the dawn of MTV.

Certainly worked for Bruce though. For one brief moment, he was the biggest artist in the world alongside Madonna and Prince!

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