These days you don't wait on Romeos you wait on those BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN POLL RESULTS

the river has the advantage of having more songs

i had tol #1, darkness #2

xxpost Alfred: it's the synthy/fretless-bass sound I think. It just sounds really dated to me. And I guess a lot of that is maybe I don't have any really good nostalgia for other albums that sound like this? Like maybe it's my last frontier music-wise that I have not really reckoned with.

I mean, I dig Paul Simon's Graceland and that's a fretless bass free for all so I know that immediately makes me a hypocrite. I guess with Bruce on TOL, with the exception of Brilliant Disguise, there's no songs that can rise up enough to me lyric-wise to hook me into the music. Or vice versa. I come in lost and and I stay lost.

i have 2 tol tracks in my top 3, 4 on my ballot overall

my #1 is from tol

i guess what i'm saying guys is i like tol

ALOT

@VegemiteGrrl I think Tunnel of Love has some of Springsteen's best lyrics:
It's the same thing night on night
Who's wrong baby who's right
Another fight and I slam the door on
Another battle in our dirty little war
When I look at myself I don't see
The man I wanted to be
Somewhere along the line I slipped off track
I'm caught movin' one step up and two steps back

I had it at #4, although it only slipped a couple of songs onto my ballot.

there's fretless bass on TOL?

Springsteen played most of them on TOL; the only one that stands out is "All That Heaven Will Allow"s and maybe "Valentine Day."

I'm full of shit really is the truth of it.

no! Let's listen to "Two Faces" together. I need the company.

Tunnel Of Love has a pretty garish and dated sound, even just compared to BITUSA, so i can't fault anyone for being turned off by it, even if i think it's rewarding to be able to listen past it.

veg what's yr take on leonard cohen's i'm yr man?

it's kind of a shame that Bruce seems to have mostly done Tunnel himself so a lot of what you hear on the album are first drafts, so that you'll never hear really stark Nebraska-style demos of any of those songs (and i imagine he doesn't revisit them much on acoustic tours) xp

he did quite well on those first drafts though -- they sound like fully fledged songs. To me "dated" means the songs were okay/mediocre/terrible at the time and we've become aware of it thanks to our own age

To my ears on TOL he learned a lot about rhythm, programming, and momentum -- for his solo recordings -- such that the Nebraska tracks are really a grind to listen to.

I guess with Bruce on TOL, with the exception of Brilliant Disguise, there's no songs that can rise up enough to me lyric-wise to hook me into the music. Or vice versa. I come in lost and and I stay lost.

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, February 25, 2013

got to learn to live with what you can't rise above iirc

love 'em both, though sometimes (not often but sometimes) i prefer the trentemoller remix of 'state trooper' to the original

The worst track ("Spare Parts") is the E Street reunion, while the mostly solo "Two Faces" makes its point quickly, sports no cluttered arrangement, and has a couple of interesting ideas, like what sounds like a guitar fed through a keyboard amp and his roller rink organ solo.

i like nebraska fine but i think al said somewhere on ilx that having it as your favorite springsteen album makes it seem like you're not that into the whole springsteen thing, which i think is otm.

i'm into the whole springsteen thing, but with reservations. fave album: nebraska. second fave: born to run.

my reservations are mostly about production and arrangement; he seems to have been working off a fairly narrow palate over the past 25 or so years. a lot of times i don't hear songs; i hear templates. i also hear a lot of fussiness. nebraska is the sound of springsteen songs before he gets around to thinking of any of that. and they're really really good songs. and really great performances.

born to run sounds to me like he's jumping off a 100-story skyscraper full of phil spector brian wilson van morrison animals etc etc albums without a parachute or a net, confident that clarence clemons and roy bittan are standing there on the sidewalk ready to catch him. i love that too.

got to learn to live with what you can't rise above iirc
:D :D :D!!

I'm glad the results have taken so long. Gave me time to simmer down!

Alfred surely you must realize that you are way more attuned to the sound of late '80s gloss than most people -- i like it too, but there was a time when it would've sounded gross to me and i can't really knock people who can't get past it. on a purely sonic level i definitely prefer the '70s records, or even the milder modernization on Born In The USA.

so bummed to learn that horseshoe didn't vote! i was counting on your vote for "Out In The Street"!

late '80s gloss

side note on early '90s gloss: there's a tremendous difference in approach between bootlegs of his solo acoustic benefit shows for the christic institute in 1990, and the studio versions of the many of the same songs that showed up shortly afterward on human touch and lucky town. tapes of the christic shows were widely circulated before the albums came out, and i think they colored a lot of hardcore fans' reaction to the albums.

I grew into a music fan, really, at the time of mid-to-late 80s production techniques and trends, went through a looooong period of time where I couldn't revisit that stuff, then finally re-embraced it with open arms about a decade ago. Now, Tunnel of Love sounds magnificent to me, but I can totally understand the pov who haven't reconnected yet.

haha most times i listen to bitusa nowadays the gloss is a problem for me (excepting the more directly synth ones for some reason).

I understand I've more sympathy for the eighties soundz but my ears don't hear the demerits that would have elevated "Thunder Road" or "Rosalita" over "Tunnel of Love" and "Tougher Than The Rest." Arguing that the first pair are better songs is another matter entirely.

on the other hand I've observed how ill-suited Brendan O'Brien and Springsteen were: his murky mixes, the way his drum recordings sound even more synthetic than gated drums. I'm willing to admit my biases but these biases dovetail with the periods when Springsteen was still writing good song after song -- and the O'Brien period wasn't one of them.

btw I bought TOL in early '95 when I was 20, shortly before Greatest Hits -- and loved it. Can't imagine a more jarring time to fall in love with TOL. The only song I knew was "Brilliant Disguise."

"Tunnel of Love" was the first Bruce song i can remember hearing, besides maybe "Born In The USA" -- also the only Bruce album that was definitely in my parents' collection during my adolescence after they made the switch to CD

In the wrong mood, I find the overcrowded Spectorisms of Born to Run way harder to take than the gloss of ToL. (I said, in the wrong mood -- in the right mood, it's Wall of Sound take me away!)

I think sound-wise, Nebraska's easy to overlook. There's a lot of depth and color to the palate there, a whole wide range of dark tones.

And god yes Brendan O'Brien murdered the E Street Band. Max sounded like he was at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

i'm sure i'd heard 'hungry heart' and whatever before but the first time i can remember being conscious of bruce springsteen is when 'dancing in the dark' had just came out and my dad and my aunt and uncle talking about 'woah, the boss made a video'.

lol i really hope that's a direct quote

The overcrowded Spectorisms of Born To Run are never welcome in my house.

the tempo of tol songs is as big a thing as its synths, I think

I played "walk like a man" the night before I got married, in the late 90s; my friends didn't get it

When it came out i was already a BitUSA fan, but Tunnel of Love accompanied me into the dark heart of puberty. I wore my tour tshirt to death under my school uniform.

I've thanked my parents multiple times for taking me to the show to get the tshirt, so don't think I was a brat abt it.

Didn't see the show, but my brother did, and he got me a shirt, which I still have somewhere:
http://candysroom.freeservers.com/tunnel24.jpg

Ghost of Tom Joad was my teenage Bruce album; I know lirs thinkits really samey and kinda overwrought, but the storytelling was like miles above most novels I was reading. It was kind of like reading my first Vertigo comic

Wow, lirs = lots

Hah, I had a tape with Tunnel of Love on one side and Graceland on the other.

There was definitely a time and place where "I don't like Bruce (though I may appreciate the irony of Born* being songs that people think are more triumphant than they are) but I like Tunnel of Love" was a respectable opinion.

ToL was my #1, I do have a problem with a lot of late-'80s rock/pop production but none of the things that bother me are really present on that album, I think it's nice and restrained for the most part.

I went the 'I don't really like Springsteen but I'll give this Nebraska thing a go' route into Bruce but that one didn't actually click with me until much later on when I'd come around to the '70s stuff and BitUSA.

60. Highway Patrolman from Nebraska (1982)
69 points, 4 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-wPDmQEy2Y

yay! I'm happy to get it in, I voted it really high, makes me cry every damn time

59. New York City Serenade from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973)
70 points, 4 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA82phRQ0vI

"NYC Serenade" > "Jungleland"

I've just realised I'll know about 10% of this countdown

that explains why you didn't vote for highway patrolman. man, just the phrasing on "Perrineville barracks number 8"...

Ooh wee! Glad my vote helped NYC Serenade squeak in.

Clarence's family suing his doctors for malpractice.

tol is the new nebraska tho I don't think very many people say "I don't like springsteen but I like tol"

― iatee, Monday, February 25, 2013 6:11 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh this is mostly me. i like nebraska quite a bit, and then out of nowhere i started listening to tunnel of love obsessively, over the last year. that's my favorite now. "brilliant disguise" was the way in, but almost the entire album is very good. i do like a few other springsteen songs (no one is going to deny something like 'dancing in the dark') but in general i like when the e street band is either not there or they tone it down a little

I would like to distance myself from
the 2013 VG who all but dismissed Tunnel of Love in its entirety

https://tenor.com/wq8K.gif

i am here to say that i have revisited TOL since that time and love it start to finish. My ears, they seem to work now

https://media1.tenor.com/images/4c7118532426337f032fe0750baa43cb/tenor.gif

welcome to the fold

<3

Hooray!