The Top 5 Bruce Springsteen Albums

As Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's 2007-2008 world tour comes to a close, this seems like a good time to look back over Bruce's 35-year career and pick my Top 5 Springsteen albums. As with the list of the Top 15 Springsteen songs I wrote last year, there might be a few different albums listed if I wrote this six months from now, and I understand at the outset that my choices will likely be debated by hardcore fans. One man's coffee....

His newest CD, Magic, was not considered when making this list because it hasn't really been out long enough to look at it objectively. But Bruce himself may have shown his own feelings about Magic as the tour has progressed: at the start of the tour eight songs in the live set were from Magic; by last night's show in Spain, that number had dropped to four. I have also excluded CD collections like Tracks even though there was much new material on them.

Long introduction aside, here are my Top 5 Springsteen albums of all time:

1. Born to Run. Anyone who would argue with the selection of Born to Run as Springsteen's best album is, frankly, an idiot. At 25 years old, he not only recorded his best album, but one of the Top 5 albums ever. Try as he might, Bruce has never been able to replicate the interconnectedness of the eight songs, and four of the tracks ("Thunder Road," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," and "Jungleland") are classics by themselves. The way the mood actually moves from morning at the start of "Thunder Road" to night by "Jungleland" is a feeling I've never experienced with any other CD by any other artist.

2. Nebraska. This was Bruce's big risk, especially following the huge success of The River. It's a unique style of folk/rock that really doesn't fit in either genre. This disc, with just Bruce and his guitar recorded in his kitchen, paved the way for his later Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust, neither of which comes close to the power of the songs on Nebraska. From "Johnny 99" to "Open All Night" to the title track, Bruce simply opens a vein and lets the pain, anger, frustration, and ultimately hope run out onto the album. This one's not for the shallow or faint of heart.