If there’s any song in Bruce’s catalog more misunderstood than “Born in the U.S.A.,” it’s this Darkness-era outtake.
Category: Roll of the Dice
The second track on Western Stars is another song with an itinerant hero, one whose freedom came at a price.
It’s one of Joe and Bruce’s best songwriting collaborations and on-stage moments, as fresh today as it was when they wrote it a quarter-century ago.
It’s big and brassy; it swings and it struts. And more than any other song in Bruce’s catalog, no two performances are alike.
It’s one of Bruce’s most audacious songs ever, a ten-minute, waltz-time, post-apocalyptic allegory for the decline of civilization.
Recorded twice, performed dozens of times, yet it still flies under the radar for most fans.
Twelve years later, Bruce revisited his narrator from “Brothers Under the Bridges ’83,” now haunted by the war that awaited him.
Debuted without introduction on the Reunion Tour, “Further On (Up the Road)” marked a turning point in Bruce’s songwriting that continues through “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
Bruce opened his 2009 album-length meditation on aging with an overture every bit as epic and powerful as “Jungleland.” Maybe even more.
Although often attributed to Bruce’s cross-country move, “The Long Goodbye” offers more a more universal theme about relationships that last too long.