My top 20

Anyone who’s not a Bruce Springsteen fan may went to quit reading now.

Backstreets.com, one of the top fan sites, has a message board titled BTX.  A member named Jamesy recently invited others to submit their All Time Bruce Top 20 Songs — from which he will do the analysis and post results in January. I finally submitted my list today:

1. Thunder Road
2. Racing in the Street
3. The River
4. Born to Run
5. Incident on 57th Street
6. Promised Land
7. Rocky Ground
8. Because the Night
9. Death to My Hometown
10. Shut Out the Light
11. Streets of Philadelphia
12. Jungleland
13. Tenth Avenue Freezeout
14. No Surrender
15. Land of Hope and Dreams
16. Ghost of Tom Joad (2012 version)
17. Badlands
18. City of Ruins
19. The Price You Pay
20. Red-Headed Woman

And of course, as soon as I submitted it, I thought oh for heavens sake, why did I put Badlands at number 17 and what about Spirit in the Night, Rosalita, For You, Shackled and Drawn, Wrecking Ball, Tougher Than the Rest, Atlantic City, Brilliant Disguise, Born in the USA, and a dozen more.

Bruce Springsteen has written hundreds of songs over the last ~40 years.  Most of them are in commercially recorded albums (studio and live) but many exist only in bootleg recordings that fans make at concerts.  (This is not illegal, as someone suggested to me recently. Bruce and other musicians don’t discourage bootlegs.  It is a violation of his IP rights to make copies of those commercially recorded albums for other people.  That’s why I have bought six copies of the Wrecking Ball album so far — to give to friends with whom I was going to concerts.)

If you want to take a look at this BTX thread or submit your own top 20 list, here’s the link.  http://tiny.cc/zofymw