FEATURE:
Glory Days
Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. at Forty
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ONE of the biggest and most important albums ever…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen performs on 24th July, 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebet Roberts/Redferns
Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. turns forty on 4th June. A 1984 commercial success that soon became a classic, Springsteen recorded Born in the U.S.A. with his E Street Band. He worked alongside producers Chuck Plotkin and Jon Landau. Compared to albums like 1982’s Nebraska – which Springsteen was recording at points during the same time as Born in the U.S.A.-, his seventh studio album contains more uplifting, brighter, Pop-focused songs. The synthesizer very much at the fore. In terms of its themes and inspirations, Born in the U.S.A deals more with topics like working-class struggles, disillusionment and patriotism. The iconic album cover was taken by legendary photographer, taken by Annie Leibovitz. Born in the U.S.A. has often been selected as one of the best albums ever. Topping the charts in nine countries when it was released in 1984, it has sold over thirty million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums in history. Even though Bruce Springsteen has released other classic albums – such as 1975’s Born to Run -, nothing quite compares with Born in the U.S.A. Some may disagree. I think, it terms of its depth, impact and accessibility, Born in the U.S.A. is his pinnacle. It is surprising there have not been more features written about the album. More podcasts and documentaries about it released. As it is approaching its fortieth anniversary, I wanted to spend time with it.
I will come to a couple of detailed reviews. As you can imagine, the reviews in 1984 were hugely positive. It has only got even more praise and platforming in the years since. As Born in the U.S.A. has impacted and influenced other artists and made its way into popular culture and the wider landscape. Stereogum saluted this work of brilliance back in 2014. Marking thirty years of Born in the U.S.A. I hope there is more celebration to mark forty years of a gigantic album:
“For you to remember the first time you heard Born In The U.S.A., you have to be above a certain age. It’s just one of those albums. Once it was out there, it was ubiquitous. That tends to happen when you produce seven top ten singles from one album, or when a record goes platinum, let alone fifteen times over. The latter distinction means that Born In The U.S.A. sold about 15 million copies in America, a number that seems like total and complete fantasy compared to the anemic record industry of today, and one that ranks it within the top twenty or so highest selling albums, ever, in this country. This is not the kind of situation where you are still able to hear a record entirely on its own original terms, with remotely fresh ears. Even if you somehow all your life avoided hearing its title track, or “Dancing In The Dark,” or “Glory Days,” Born In The U.S.A. is the sort of work that, by virtue of its sheer magnitude and inevitable overexposure, comes with a whole lot of years of baggage down the line.
As of today, that would be thirty years of baggage, to be exact. Three decades on, Born In The U.S.A. has a shifting and at times conflicted legacy. In pop history, it’s simple enough — it’s one of the defining records of the ’80s, the one that jettisoned Springsteen to true superstar status. It’s one of those albums that’s never hard to find on a rack at Target or whatever, next to Thriller or Dark Side Of The Moon or Metallica. Those albums that I guess somebody somewhere will always feel like buying, the sort of stuff that’s never really out of style because it’s at such a level as to be beyond trends altogether. In Springsteen terms, it gets a little more complicated. Born In The U.S.A. is the Springsteen album for a certain generation of fans, and something else for those who came before or after. Every now and then I’ll talk to an older fan who still grimaces at memories of Born In The U.S.A. as the album where Bruce got too big, too pop, perhaps even sold out — if that’s still a thing you can really do when you were already on the covers of Newsweek and Time in the same week a decade prior. They’ll value the preceding six albums in a different way, maybe considering them more authentic. With a career as long and varied as Springsteen’s you’re bound to get those sorts of divides in a fanbase. Even something as widely beloved as “Backstreets” has been played frequently enough at Springsteen’s shows that it’s someone’s holy moment and someone else’s cue to go buy another beer. The dividing line always struck me as a bit more severe with Born In The U.S.A. tracks, though. Maybe you’re enraptured when “Dancing In The Dark” inevitably pops up in the encore, maybe you head to the parking lot early. (But if you’re the latter, I’m not sure we can be friends.)
Before we get too far down this rabbithole, it might be necessary to issue a disclaimer. I’m already on record, in a few places, about the extent of my Springsteen fandom, and the resulting amount of thought I put into his music. It’s only in the last year or two, however, where I’ve begun to listen to Born In The U.S.A. more than any of this other work. I don’t know what would be in second place, but it isn’t close. There are days when it’s my favorite Springsteen album. There are days when I think it’s a perfect album, and other days when I’m a bit more sensible and realize that if “My Love Will Not Let You Down” had taken the place of “Cover Me,” and if “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart” had replaced “Glory Days,” then it would’ve been perfect. (And, still, there are other days where I realize those maybe still wouldn’t fit, even if they’re brilliant.) And then, just about everyday, “Dancing In The Dark” is pretty much my favorite song ever. What I’m getting at here is that we’re dealing with a bias on my part.
But, more importantly, I’m also getting at the fact that I’m one of those Springsteen fans who grew up with Born In The U.S.A. as something that was just in the air, the most ever-present material from an ever-present artist, and it’s only in recent years where I’ve started to get truly obsessed with the thing, where I’ve learned to find personal resonance in an album that’s too easy to take for granted due to its inherent ubiquity. The weird thing about an album so readily ranked in the “Classic” category by every other rock retrospective of one form or another, is that people can just start to think of it as This Thing That Happened, a piece of work from some distant time and place that has little meaning to them. This is the territory in which an album like Born In The U.S.A., against most logical expectations, could become underrated.
Back around the time Springsteen released Magic in 2007, he was well into a career resurgence following a mixed bag of a decade in the ’90s. There were many factors to this, but one of them was that he’d attained a certain hipness in the ’00s; as Stephen M. Deusner put it in his review of Magic, Springsteen had replaced Brian Wilson as the “indie ideal.”
Bands like the Gaslight Anthem, the Hold Steady, and the Killers bore the influence sonically, where others like the National and the Arcade Fire were perhaps more so thematic descendants. Without fail, when people talk about Springsteen’s influence on pockets of this century’s generation of indie-rock, it’s easiest to draw the line back to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Nebraska (especially in the case of Dirty Beaches).
Born In The U.S.A. gets a little less credit, but at times it feels like perhaps the most important Springsteen record when it comes to newer artists being influenced by his work. Given the age of some of these musicians, this is the one that would’ve been new when they were kids, just getting into music; chances are, it was the formative one. They would’ve been the young fans for whom this was their Springsteen album. Before they went all Sandinista! on Reflektor, Arcade Fire’s anthemic qualities seemed more in the lineage of Born In The U.S.A.-era Bruce, the themes of The Suburbs a mash-up of stuff like “My Hometown” and “Downbound Train” with Darkness and The River. Tellingly, when Win Butler chose his fourteen favorite Springsteen songs for Rolling Stone in 2010, most of them were from the ’80s. Butler might’ve gone onstage to play Nebraska’s “State Trooper” with the man himself, but when it came time for Arcade Fire to cover the Boss, they chose “Born In The U.S.A..” At this point, “I’m On Fire” seems destined to live on as a standard of sorts. You’ve got everyone from Mumford & Sons to Chromatics covering it. Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, long the Springsteen acolyte, has been known to perform it solo, while his band’s own “High Lonesome” quotes/references the song”.
I am going to round off with a couple of the reviews for Born in the U.S.A. It is a shame there have not been more deep dives into the album. Anyway. This is what Pitchfork wrote when they reviewed Born in the U.S.A. in 2021. They show the appreciation of a bold, brilliant Rock blockbuster from Bruce Springsteen. An album that arrived at the apex of his career. An imperial phase as they put it. Although misunderstood by some – the title track was famously misinterpreted by so many people –, it caught fired and stole people’s hearts and minds. It still does to this day:
“As the release of Born in the U.S.A. approached in spring 1984—and with it, one of the greatest commercial ascents in the history of popular music—Bruce Springsteen was feeling apprehensive. It wasn’t because of “Dancing in the Dark,” which he added last-minute after his manager convinced him to write one more surefire attempt at a hit. It wasn’t because of the title track, a booming anthem whose chorus could be misinterpreted as a rallying cry for Reagan-era jingoism. And it wasn’t because of the cover art, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that could be mistaken for a man urinating on an American flag. It was because of a song called “No Surrender,” and, in particular, its final verse:
Something felt off as he sang these words. Who could be so blindly optimistic? During the tour for Born in the U.S.A., which spanned 16 months and brought the E Street Band to the biggest audiences they had ever played, Springsteen tried retooling the driving arrangement as a tender acoustic ballad; he rewrote the verse and changed his delivery. By the end of the run, it only appeared sporadically in setlists. “It was a song I was uncomfortable with,” he wrote years later. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life. You compromise, you suffer defeat; you slip into life’s gray areas.”
So how did it wind up on the album? It wasn’t for a lack of material. Most casual fans know that as Springsteen was in the process of piecing together this full-band masterpiece, he first recorded an entirely different one: 1982’s solo acoustic Nebraska, originally intended as demos for the follow-up to 1980’s The River. But there was more where that came from. Before he landed on the dozen songs that would comprise his bestselling album, Springsteen continued down Nebraska’s folky path with story-song outtakes like “Shut Out the Light”; he worked with the band on epics like “This Hard Land” and straight-ahead rockers like “Murder Incorporated.” He wrote a goofy song about having his story told in a TV movie and a strange, apocalyptic one about the KKK. He is estimated to have recorded somewhere between 50 and 100 songs, hoping to amass enough material for one cohesive record
IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen on stage in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: The Picture Collection LLC
In his early 30s, and a decade into his recording career, this was a period of introspection and desperate searching. For the first time after an album release, Springsteen didn’t go on tour for Nebraska. Instead, he went on vacation, taking a cross-country road trip with a friend. The type of open-road escape he sang about so convincingly, however, ended up being an emotional breaking point. As the trip took him from Jersey, through the South, and eventually to a new home he had purchased in the Hollywood Hills, Springsteen found himself crushed by waves of hopelessness and debilitating depression: collapsing in tears, feeling isolated, losing touch with whatever momentum had kept him burning down the road all this time.
The culture around Springsteen’s music was also shifting. MTV had evolved into a legitimate arm of the music industry, and Springsteen’s new look helped him gain traction in an image-centric medium. Meanwhile, vinyl had given way to cassettes, which were now ceding to compact discs. (Upon release, Born in the U.S.A. was advertised as the first CD manufactured in the United States; previous releases were mostly Japanese imports.) Adapting to the new technology, pop radio gravitated toward electronic strands of dance music, an innovation that Springsteen found inspiring. One song on the album, “Cover Me,” was something he originally wrote for Donna Summer, and you can hear her influence in his fiery, percussive delivery. (“She could really sing,” he wrote, “and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement.”)
Because of its monocultural success, the ’80s gloss of Born in the U.S.A. can be somewhat overstated. It is a pristine and precise record whose synth pads, massive drums, and front-and-center vocals represent the defining qualities of the decade’s mainstream rock production. But listening to it now, I am struck by how physical, how alive the music sounds. Most of the songs were recorded live by the band in just a few takes, with Springsteen shouting cues, whooping and hollering off mic. And the writing, which blends the detailed narratives of Nebraska with the tighter pop structures of The River, is as thoughtful and emotional as any of his less polished material.
It is the sound of the E Street Band, then, that makes this feel uniquely like pop music. Roy Bittan’s synth is particularly effective—a thick humidity against the train-track momentum of “I’m on Fire,” and a taught fuse serving as a secondary bass line in “Dancing in the Dark.” Drummer Max Weinberg often takes center stage, calling the shots during the turnarounds in “Glory Days” and the title track with snare hits that match the energy of Springsteen’s prolonged runner’s high. He leads the band with such a locked-in sense of motion that, in the fadeout codas to songs like “Cover Me” and “Dancing in the Dark,” their backing tracks can feel a little like electronic music. It’s a sound that 21st-century bands like the War on Drugs would reinterpret as a kind of psychedelia, and that dance producer Arthur Baker capitalized on at the time with a fascinating series of club remixes.
After the willfully unmarketable Nebraska, Springsteen’s commercial reinvention thrilled the label executives, who are reported to have risen from their seats to dance during the playback sessions. (One said—upon hearing single after single, each better than the last and all mixed by Bob Clearmountain to sound tailor-made for radio—he might have actually pissed his pants.) It was also a windfall for Jon Landau, the music critic-turned-manager whose career-long belief in the life-saving power of rock music was gratified by these aspirational songs, some of which were actually about the life-saving power of rock music. Springsteen himself, already viewing his career with the analytic lens of a critic, couldn’t help but notice what this shift represented. “I was fascinated by people who had become a voice for their moment,” he would later say. “I don’t know if I felt I had a capacity for it or just willed my way in that direction, but it was something I was interested in.”
There was one person who wasn’t so interested. It was E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, a man with rare access to the inner workings of the artist’s brain. The pair united as like-minded outcasts growing up in New Jersey, where they bonded at battles of the bands and spent countless nights in each other’s homes, side-stepping their intimidating fathers and evangelizing the records they loved. As they embarked on their careers together, Van Zandt is often credited with helping his pal lighten up a little: arranging the ecstatic horn parts on Born to Run, suggesting the title track’s iconic riff be transposed into a major key, and helming the party-in-my-garage production on The River.
A co-producer on Born in the U.S.A., Van Zandt brings the same sense of uplift to these songs. The most joyful moment comes in “Darlington County.” When Van Zandt honks his way through the vocal harmonies—“He don’t work and he don’t get paid”—Springsteen starts to laugh: Boy, does that sound ugly, you hear him think, it’s perfect. Same goes for the mandolin part in “Glory Days,” which Van Zandt recorded impromptu into a vocal mic so that it couldn’t be edited out without scrapping the entire take.
Fitting for an album that buries its anxiety beneath a bright veneer, these moments coincided with a new tension between the two. Recording under the name Little Steven, Van Zandt was completing his own album, ambitiously titled Voice of America, and its raw sound and spirit of protest felt at odds with the commercial intent of Springsteen’s latest music. Van Zandt floated the idea of promoting their albums together on a joint tour—I love imagining the response to this proposition—and confessed to feeling a bit undervalued. Sensing a crossroads, and by now well-acquainted with his friend’s stubborn self-reliance, Van Zandt quit the band.
While Springsteen stood his ground, he wasn’t as confident as he might have seemed. With an overabundance of material, he extended his creative process beyond the inner circle, inviting friends into his home to pore over the multitude of tapes and piece together a tracklist while he went out for runs or waited patiently at the kitchen table. His engineer, Chuck Plotkin, went so far as to present an acetate copy of the record he envisioned. Landau wrote a five-page letter justifying his preferred sequence. Eventually, Springsteen took some of their advice, ignored a lot of it, and turned in his completed album.
He played it for Van Zandt, who was not a fan of “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics—so self-conscious, so vulnerable—were anathema to his image of rock’n’roll heaven, where everyone’s young and beautiful, forever strutting. And don’t get him started on the production. Still, his main concern was “No Surrender,” his favorite song, which was nowhere to be found. The hope, the romance, the guitars—that’s the whole point of what we do! At the eleventh hour, Springsteen slotted the song back into the tracklist, right at the start of Side B.
If this operation sounds haphazard for a noted perfectionist like Springsteen, it kind of was. To this day, he speaks about Born in the U.S.A. with a sense of discomfort. The bookending songs—the title track and “My Hometown,” the only explicitly political material that made the cut—are what he’s proudest of. “The rest of the album,” he writes, “contains a group of songs about which I’ve always had some ambivalence…. [It] really didn’t flesh out like I had hoped it would.”
But while the recordings span several years of sessions, plagued with interpersonal struggle and self-doubt, bouncing between genre and mood, built on creative compromise and commercial aspiration, overexposed and eternally misunderstood, there’s really not a dull moment. With its grab-bag nature, the whole thing explodes like an encore run—when the lights are up and there’s nothing left to play but the hits; when fatigue converts into a kind of euphoria and the energy builds until it seems a little dangerous.
That’s how “No Surrender” earns its place; the optimism is hard-won, doomed to be short-lived. “You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes,” he sings against the rhythm, “and follow your dreams down.” But down where? If you were to place a compass in the wide open country of this album, down is where the arrow would constantly point. It’s in the opening lyric (“Born down in a dead man’s town”), and it’s the next move for the couple in the closing “My Hometown,” who plan on packing up the family, “maybe heading south.” It’s where all the signposts of security—work, marriage, community—send the narrator of “Downbound Train,” and it’s a syllable that gets stretched into a slapstick, rockabilly hiccup in the chorus of “I’m Goin’ Down.” For many of the characters in these songs, down becomes homebase: the direction you’re cautioned to ignore when you’re at the top; the inevitable crash after any high.
The momentary bliss of “No Surrender” is followed on the tracklist by “Bobby Jean,” and while Springsteen has never explicitly confirmed its inspiration, fans have long seen it as his farewell to Van Zandt. Like all his writing about friendship, “Bobby Jean” flirts with the language of love songs—the gender is intentionally ambiguous—and, paired with a bittersweet piano melody, the sentiment is so heartbroken and earnest that it feels almost childlike. The crucial lyric arrives just before the last verse, and it’s a simple but effective choice of words: “Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, nohow/Gonna ever understand me the way you did.” Not love me, not know me, but understand me. It’s a rare quality in a companion—especially in adulthood—and it’s a hard thing to let go of when you find it”.
I am going to round up shortly. Before that, Rolling Stone’s five-star review from 1984 is well worth illuminating. In a year when there were plenty of classic albums – Madonna’s Like a Virgin among them -, Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece stands alongside the best of them. Recorded between Power Station and Hit Factory in New York City, we are going to be discussing and dissecting this album for generations to come. Such is its importance:
“THOUGH IT LOOKS at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the U.S.A, Bruce Springsteen‘s seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in “Darlington County,” but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.
He’s set songs as well drawn as those on his bleak acoustic album, Nebraska, to music that incorporates new electronic textures while keeping as its heart all of the American rock & roll from the early Sixties. Like the guys in the songs, the music was born in the U.S.A.: Springsteen ignored the British Invasion and embraced instead the legacy of Phil Spector’s releases, the sort of soul that was coming from Atlantic Records and especially the garage bands that had anomalous radio hits. He’s always chased the utopian feeling of that music, and here he catches it with a sophisticated production and a subtle change in surroundings — the E Street Band cools it with the saxophone solos and piano arpeggios — from song to song.
The people who hang out in the new songs dread getting stuck in the small towns they grew up in almost as much as they worry that the big world outside holds no possibilities — a familiar theme in Springsteen’s work. But they wind up back at home, where you can practically see the roaches scurrying around the empty Twinkie packages in the linoleum kitchen. In the first line of the first song, Springsteen croaks, “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground.” His characters are born with their broken hearts, and the only thing that keeps them going is imagining that, as another line in another song goes, “There’s something happening somewhere.”
Though the characters are dying of longing for some sort of payoff from the American dream, Springsteen’s exuberant voice and the swell of the music clues you that they haven’t given up. In “No Surrender,” a song that has the uplifting sweep of his early anthem “Thunder Road,” he sings, “We made a promise we swore we’d always remember” no retreat, no surrender.” His music usually carries a motto like that. He writes a heartbreaking message called “Bobby Jean,” apparently to his longtime guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, who’s just left his band — “Maybe you’ll be out there on that road somewhere . . . in some motel room there’ll be a radio playing and you’ll hear me sing this son/Well, if you do, you’ll know I’m thinking of you and all the miles in between” — but he gives the song a wall of sound with a soaring saxophone solo. That’s classic Springsteen: the lyrics may put a lump in your throat, but the music says, Walk tall or don’t walk at all.
A great dancer himself, Springsteen puts an infectious beat under his songs. In the wonderfully exuberant “I’m Goin’ Down,” a hilarious song that gets its revenge, he makes a giddy run of nonsense syllables out of the chorus while drummer Max Weinberg whams out a huge backbeat. And “Working on the Highway,” whips into an ecstatic rocker that tells a funny story, hand-claps keeping the time about crime and punishment. Shifting the sound slightly, the band finds the right feeling of paranoia for “Cover Me,” the lone song to resurrect that shrieking, “Badlands”-style guitar, and the right ironic fervor for the Vietnam vet’s yelping about the dead ends of being “Born in the U.S.A.” Though there’s no big difference between these and some of the songs on Springsteen’s last rock LP, The River, these feel more delightfully offhanded.
The album finds its center in those cheering rock songs, but four tracks – the last two on either side — give the album an extraordinary depth. Springsteen has always been able to tell a story better than he can write a hook, and these lyrics are way beyond anything anybody else is writing. They’re sung in such an unaffected way that the starkness stabs you. In “My Hometown,” the singer, remembers sitting on his father’s lap and steering the family Buick as they drove proudly through town; but the boy grows up, and the final scene has him putting his own son on his lap for a last drive down a street that’s become a row of vacant buildings. “Take a good look around,” he tells his boy, repeating what his father told him, “this is your hometown.”
The tight-lipped character who sings “I’m On Fire” practically whispers about the desire that’s eating him up. “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull,” he rasps. The way the band’s turned down to just a light rattle of drums, faint organ and quiet, staccato guitar notes makes his lust seem ominous: you picture some pock-marked Harry Dean Stanton type, lying, too wired to sleep, in a motel room.
That you get such a vivid sense of these characters is because Springsteen gives them voices a playwright would be proud of. In “Working on the Highway,: all he says is “One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back” to let us know the guy’s in love. And in the saddest song he’s ever written, “Downbound Train,” a man who’s lost everything pours his story, while, behind him, long, sorry notes on a synthesizer sound just like heartache. “I had a job, I had a girl,” he begins, then explains how everything’s changed: “Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does its rain.” It’s a line Sam Shepard could’ve written: so pathetic and so funny, you don’t know how to react.
The biggest departure from any familiar Springsteen sound is the breathtaking first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” with its modern synths, played by E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, and thundering bass and drums. The kid who dances in the darkness here is practically choking on the self-consciousness of being sixteen. “I check my look in the mirror/I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face,” he sings. “Man, I ain’t getting nowhere just living in a dump like this.” He turns out the lights not to set some drippy romantic mood but to escape in the fantasy of the music on the radio. In the dark, he finds a release from all the limitations he was born into. In the dark, like all the guys trapped in Springsteen’s songs, he’s just a spirit in the night”.
I will leave it there. On 4th June, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. turns forty. If you are a fan of the album, it is worth reading up about it. In terms of its legacy, background and recording. Wikipedia has some good information. A fortieth anniversary edition of the album is coming out on 14th June. I would very much everyone to order it:
“Sony Music will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s history-making “Born In The U.S.A.” on June 14, with a special-edition release featuring new colored vinyl and expanded packaging. Arriving via translucent red LP, this anniversary edition of “Born In The U.S.A.” will feature a gatefold sleeve and exclusive booklet with archival material from the era, new liner notes penned by Erik Flannigan and a four-color lithograph. Released on June 4, 1984, “Born In The U.S.A.” had an unprecedented seven top 10 singles on its tracklist, has sold approximately 25 million copies to date and captured the pop culture zeitgeist with once-in-a-generation impact. Springsteen and The E Street Band’s accompanying Born In The U.S.A. tour included 156 sold-out performances across the globe, while tracks like “Dancing In The Dark,” “No Surrender” and “Glory Days” remain staples of their live show to this day”.
I am excited looking ahead to the fortieth anniversary of Born in the U.S.A. On 4th June, there will be a new wave of affection and interest in this album. Bruce Springsteen’s next studio album would be 1987’s excellent Tunnel of Love. A very different-sounding album, it was another huge commercial and critical success. Even though The Boss has released quite a few world-class and timeless albums, I don’t think he soared as high and punched as hard as he did…
ON the magnificent Born in the U.S.A.