I conducted a survey -- margin of error: 100 percent minus three over roughly seven billion -- and everyone agrees: The first song on the second side of Bruce Springsteen's first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is one of only two missteps on an otherwise revelatory debut. A saccharine, meandering ballad, "The Angel" might have caused a few first-time Bruce listeners to question whether the profundity of the album's first side was merely a fluke -- a few good songs honed over a lifetime of otherwise mediocre music-making.
This kind of thinking, even if transient, is apostasy and leads over the short term to humiliation. The faithful, on the other hand, are rewarded; just seconds after the end of "The Angel", "For You" begins and the Boss's essential bossness is established once and for all.
1. Piano-led baroque pop is one thing. Virtuoso cymbal work and twangy acoustic guitar are two others. Interestingly, they can be combined for a powerful effect (cf. "For You").
2. Bruce sings that the titular "you" "did not need my urgency." Regardless, it's precisely that urgency that makes "For You" worth having. Each repetition of the chorus seems more rushed, each follows the last ever more quickly.
3. The literally breathtaking vocal crescendo arguably beginning at 3:35.
Job was rewarded modestly for his faith in the face of God's abandonment, but The Boss, more generous than even the almighty, pays for listeners' patience with riches beyond their imagining. Immediately following "For You": another work of genius.
Is "Spirit in the Night" my favourite Bruce Springsteen song?
1. Dry drums during the chest-wrenching soul of the "Spirit in the night"/"All night" back-and-forth.
2. "Me and Crazy Janey singing our birthday song ... felt so right ... together we moved like spirits in the night"
3. Listen to the saxophone here, a slyly syncopated interlocutor for Bruce's Van-like vocal, and receive an answer to a question that has haunted you since birth: Why was Clarence Clemons the only E-Streeter to appear on the cover of Born to Run alongside his boss, The Boss?
Anyway, it's nearly winter. Many of us will soon be without sunshine and without warmth; there's no reason for any of us to be without Bruce Springsteen.
[Buy]