The Bruce Springsteen albums that were absolutely pointless: “Kind of a misfire”
The point behind every Bruce Springsteen album is being able to feel every single word that he is singing.
‘The Boss’ was writing music that was supposed to reflect the everyday people that he saw when he was growing up, and even when he was one of the biggest rockstars on the planet, he never forgot where he came from and did everything he could to try and give people a glimpse at the kind of world that he knew on the streets of New Jersey. But when he stepped too far out of his comfort zone, it didn’t take him long to realise that he had made a huge mistake.
But when you look at the times that Springsteen has gone strange, it normally revolves around one problem: no E Street Band. Even though Springsteen has released many classics with his group, there’s no reason for him to work with them on every single song that he sings. He has the right to do whatever he wants, but there are more than a few times where not having that power behind him has failed him ever so slightly.
Nebraska might be one of the exceptions to the rule, but whenever he quit the band for a brief second, it was always in the service of making the songs sound better. He still cared deeply about every single member that joined the group, but after Born in the USA, there was a certain wilderness period that felt more than a little bit odd coming from someone who looked at his band like they were his brothers.
Tunnel of Love was typically downtempo since he was going through a major divorce at the time, but if a lot of that album was made to sound a bit spare, Human Touch was the moment where everyone began asking questions. Springsteen was still writing good songs, but when he tried to make music with a full band that didn’t have Nils Lofgren, Roy Bittan, and especially no Clarence Clemons, everything just sounded off.
He couldn’t sell these kinds of songs without having the rest of his team beside him, and after a while, Springsteen realised that there was little to no point in trying to make albums like he did in the early 1990s, saying, “I have no idea what we were aiming for in this one outside of some vague sense of ‘hipness’ and an attempt at irony. Never my strong suit, it reads now to me as a break from our usual approach and kind of a playful misfire.”
And while The Ghost of Tom Joad at least got him back to familiar territory by making an acoustic album, it just felt like he was naked onstage when he was first inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by himself. The E Street Band were the ones that helped him make all those records, and seeing people like Lofgren, Stevie Van Zandt, and Clemons in the audience as he accepted the whole thing alone just made everything feel kind of gross.
After going through that wilderness period, though, The Rising was the reminder that he ever needed about why the band was important. The tragedy of 9/11 was still heavy on everyone’s minds, and getting him back in the studio to write songs for us to heal ourselves was a much better route than trying to go the solemn acoustic direction yet again and not give the fans what they wanted.
‘The Boss’ might need to please himself first with his songs, but seeing him playing with a different group of musicians on Human Touch is like watching a man trying and failing to cheat on his wife. He’s well within his rights to do something new, but don’t be surprised when people start asking questions about where your true soulmate is.
