Bruce Springsteen's 30 best songs ranked

Bruce Springsteen had a habit of writing too many songs to fit onto one album, particularly during the late 1970s. He gave many of these songs away—“Because The Night” went to Patti Smith, “Fire” to the Pointer Sisters—and “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” wound up in the hands of Dave Edmunds, the rock & roll traditionalist who co-led Rockpile with Nick Lowe. Whether in the cover from Edmunds or Springsteen’s outtake from The River, “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” is one of Bruce’s finest story songs: bold, funny, and poignant, delivered with the subtlety of a freight train.

Bruce Springsteen revived the E Street Band for The Rising, a record he wrote as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The album contained plenty of mournful moments but its title track was a stirring call to action, a rousing anthem of solidarity that played to Springsteen’s open-hearted strengths.

Bruce Springsteen centered himself after the sprawl of the twin albums Human Touch and Lucky Town by briefly reuniting with the E Street Band, a success that spurred him to reconnect with the stark folk that fueled Nebraska. Nodding to John Steinbeck by way of Woody Guthrie, Springsteen connects the spirits of the Dust Bowl to modern homelessness, creating a ghostly tune that’s understated in its power. Rage Against Machine brought the simmering rage to the forefront in their 1997 cover, laying the groundwork for Rage’s guitarist Tom Morello to help the E Street Band revise the tune as a muscular anthem years later.

Jonathan Demme gave Bruce Springsteen an edict when he asked him to write a song for Philadelphia, his 1993 drama concerning HIV/AIDS. He told Springsteen “I want it to play in malls,” a directive that didn’t necessarily suit a singer/songwriter who was no stranger to the Top 40 by the early 1990s but wasn’t necessarily a composer for hire. Springsteen wound up with a song that, on first glance, seemed a bit too brooding to play in malls but it’s a deceptive tune, particularly in how it incorporates drum loops and synths. Still, what resonated with “Streets Of Philadelphia” was its bruised introspection, a haunting quality that lingered long after the song finished and was certainly instrumental in it winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1994.

Tossed away as the B-side of “Dancing In The Dark” and turned into a gleaming dance-pop hit by Natalie Cole in 1988, “Pink Cadillac” is one of the purest pieces of rock & roll Bruce Springsteen ever cut. Lean and sleek, “Pink Cadillac” doesn’t bother with purple prose or overheated arrangements: it’s all a lanky rockabilly groove, punched up by the swagger of Clarence Clemons.

Cut from the same cloth as “Born In The USA,” “My Hometown” finds Bruce Springsteen looking around contemporary America and finding things have changed, perhaps irreparably. The nostalgia of the first verse gets tarnished pretty quickly in the song, culminating in a bridge where a “Foreman says, ‘These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back to your hometown.” The song turns into an elegy for a class of vanishing blue-collar workers in the last half of the 20th century.

Inspired by Martin Rev and Alan Vega’s punk outfit Suicide, Bruce Springsteen recast their terrifying “Frankie Teardrop” into “State Trooper.” Where Suicide made their murder plain, bad deeds lurk in the background of “State Trooper,” roiling underneath its skeletal nocturnal rockabilly. The looming threat buried within “State Trooper” is what makes it indelible: there’s a sense that the song’s narrator has long ago accepted his dark fate and is taking everybody else along for the ride.

The simplest, spookiest song on Born In The USA, “I’m On Fire” simmers with desire, and one that’s not necessarily carnal. By the time the song winds to its bridge, the narrator is fixating on how it feels like somebody cut a valley in his skull and feels a “freight train running through the middle of my head”—existential fears soothed by a simple rockabilly arrangement that would’ve sounded natural in the hands of either Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley.

Bruce Springsteen’s first genuine hit single, “Hungry Heart” was originally written with the Ramones in mind and it doesn’t take too much effort to hear how it could’ve fit the kings of New York punk: it draws upon all the pre-Beatles rock & roll the brothers from Queens loved. Springsteen kept the song for himself and accentuated its AM radio thrills, too, placing Danny Federici’s careening organ front and center and bringing in the magnificent Flo & Eddie—aka Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the Turtles—to sing backup vocals. The result is a celebration of the pure pop joys of a seven-inch single.

Urged by his manager Jon Landau to write a single to stick on Born In The USA, Bruce Springsteen was initially irked but he buckled down and wrote what became the album’s first hit: “Dancing In The Dark.” Propelled by a synth riff from Roy Bittan that made it ripe for play on contemporary radio in 1984, Springsteen also deigned to film his first video for the song, enlisting Brian De Palma to film a couple of performances to cobble together into a video; future friend Courtney Cox played a key part toward the end of the clip. Underneath the synths and the insistent rhythms, the song doesn’t disguise its melancholic undercurrents, a sentiment Springsteen highlights with his delivery of “c’mon baby, the laugh’s on me” at the conclusion of the tune’s bridge.

One of the hardest-rocking numbers on The River, “Cadillac Ranch” seems to be a simple celebration of cars and rock & roll—two themes at the core of Bruce Springsteen’s catalog. Underneath all the racket, it’s haunted by death: the notion that even the biggest, fanciest cars are inevitably headed on a one-way trip to the graveyard. Springsteen may be creating a great ruckus as he fights against the dying of the light but he can’t shake the notion that the end will eventually come for him.

The first song on the first Bruce Springsteen album—it also doubled as his first single—“Blinded By The Light” is a joyous onslaught of sing-song rhymes, neighborhood nicknames, and all manners of eccentrics. Springsteen spits out these entangled words with a barely suppressed smile, goosed by the saxophone and shouts of Clarence Clemons, who helps make this seem like a party. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band streamlined the arrangement without sacrificing the song’s essential weirdness in their 1976 cover, which became Springsteen’s first number-one hit as a songwriter.

Much of Tunnel Of Love lurks in the shadows but its title track is strangely one of the more hopeful numbers on the conflicted album. Painting romantic relationships as a carnival ride, Springsteen decides to take his chances on the rollercoaster, coming to the conclusion that “you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above.” Nils Lofgren’s searing guitar lines mimic the screaming thrills of a roller coaster.

Continuing the self-mythologization began with The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Bruce Springsteen swaggers through the jazzy swing of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” sounding giddy with its big, brassy stabs of horns. Fittingly for a song that places such an emphasis on horns, the tune reaches its climax with the line “when the change was made uptown and the Big Man joined the band,” a nod to Springsteen finding a musical soulmate in saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

A sign that Bruce Springsteen was laboring to trim some of the excesses in his writing, “Prove It All Night” is a plea of romantic devotion given muscle by the E Street Band. There’s little fat to be found on the lyrics or the structure—Springsteen takes no picturesque detours on the bridge—but the band’s sense of urgency gives the song a punchy potency.

A portrait of the New Jersey Boardwalk coached as a love song, “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is an unabashedly romantic song but one where Bruce Springsteen seems as besotted with the eccentrics roaming the Jersey Shore as he is of his paramour. The song’s folky sprawl owes a debt to Van Morrison but Springsteen’s characterizations are vividly American, brought to life by Danny Federici’s accordion and keyboards of David Sancious.

The cornerstone of the stark, haunted Nebraska, “Atlantic City” concerns a narrator who has “the kind of debts that no honest man can pay,” so he fixates his hopes on getting lucky in Atlantic City—a shoreside town in a state of disrepair in the early 1980s. The black-and-white acoustic arrangement and the haunted harmonies illustrate how this scheme is doomed from the start, yet the desperation in Springsteen’s voice suggests why this dream took root anyway.

Bringing Born To Run to a fittingly epic conclusion, “Jungleland” is essentially the album in microcosm: it opens quietly yet dramatically, building to a cathartic crescendo fueled by hopes of deliverance, all before returning to where it started. What distinguishes “Jungleland” is its scale: running over nine minutes, it has time to open into cinematic instrumental sections that give the song a sense of operatic grandeur.

A crucial moment in the evolution of Bruce Springsteen’s career, “Incident On 57th Street” is a cinematic epic, as dramatic in its music as in its lyrics. Fading into view through sparkling, majestic guitars and pianos, “Incident on 57th Street” is brought back to earth through Springsteen’s operatic tale of Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane, a pair of characters we follow through a series of interwoven verses whose progression suggests other worlds opening. He’d soon learn to harness this power on Born To Run but here, he sounds intoxicated by his own sense of discovery.

Cars play a central role in many of Bruce Springsteen’s key songs, often conveying a sense of liberation. That’s not quite the case with “Racing In The Street.” A deliberate ballad that brings the first side of Darkness On The Edge Of Town to its conclusion, “Racing In The Street” contains a heavy sense of melancholy, as if the song’s narrator realizes the escape he once found in racing can no longer be felt. For once, cars are a prison, not freedom.

The first flowering of Bruce Springsteen’s romanticism, “Growin’ Up” sketches portraits of teenage dreams and memories, blurring the line between fact and fiction in a fashion that suggests eternal hope. Inherently nostalgic, “Growin’ Up” doesn’t feel stuck in the past: Springsteen seems bemused by his adolescent antics, using them as a source of internal inspiration instead of wallowing in embarrassment.

The title song to Bruce Springsteen’s sprawling double album The River has its basis in the story of his sister Ginny and her husband Mickey, who wound up marrying young after she became pregnant. The marriage was successful, which is something you might not assume after hearing “The River.” A brooding rumination, “The River” is all about dashed dreams and upended hopes, all made even sadder because the memory of teenage dreams lingers. It’s a masterpiece of narrative, given melancholic weight by its minor-key melody.

Taking a title from Chuck Berry but leaving that song’s sense of optimism behind, Bruce Springsteen paints a portrait of a country that turns a blind eye to the good intentions of good men. Although he’s done his best to “live the right way,” the song’s narrator feels beaten down, summoning some hope in his belief in a promised land—a dream that the E Street Band supports with their insistent pulse but Springsteen undercuts by his heartbroken delivery.

“Brilliant Disguise” charts the disquiet a man feels at the start of a new relationship, wondering if he can trust his new love or if she’s just putting on a disguise. By the end of the song, after the pair has married, the narrator realizes that the problem is him, spinning the song’s titular phrase away from his love and onto him. Springsteen’s denouement is merciless: restless in his marital bed, he concludes “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of,” leaving no mistake that the narrator of his song is indeed trapped by his own brilliant disguise.

The prolonged piano and organ piece from Roy Bittan that opens “Backstreets” lends a sense of portent and doom to the relationship at the heart of the song—a tale of a friendship torn apart for reasons that are difficult to discern. Bruce Springsteen tells that relationship through a series of vignettes about a couple attempting to escape their home, finding solace “running on the backstreets,” and the song gets its power from how it captures the romance of that abandon and the heartbreak of its loss.

The quintessential number on The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)“ is an exhilarating celebration of the possibilities of rock & roll. Taking lyrical flights of fancy that recalled the rapid-fire “Blinded By The Light,” Springsteen structures his passionate pleas to Rosalita as an escalating series of exuberant rock & roll tropes. As the guitars ring like a bell, Clarence Clemons wails on the sax and the group all clap as they harmonize with gusto, not finesse. It’s little wonder that “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)“ served as the set-closer during the glory days of the E Street Band: it captures all the might and magic.

Opening Darkness On The Edge Of Town with a pronounced gallop, “Badlands” performs a nifty trick: it conveys the sense of being trapped by circumstances and the thrill of breaking free of those very constraints. Springsteen spends the first part of the song getting tired of the same old scenes, all as the E Street Band badgers him to break free… which he inevitably does, delivering a line that could stand as his epitaph: “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Even more than its title track, “Thunder Road” captures the essence of Born To Run, the album where Bruce Springsteen attempted to blend the melodrama of Roy Orbison with the poetry of Bob Dylan through the prism of Phil Spector. “Thunder Road” is an opera in the confines of a pop song: opening with just a harmonica and piano, it builds to a cathartic crash of guitar, saxophone, and piano, repurposing the tools that created cheap ’60s garage rock for something grand and majestic.

Notoriously misappropriated as a patriotic anthem at the height of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to bring morning back to America in 1984, “Born In The USA” sounds absolutely cavernous: its drums and keyboards pack the same wallop, leading Springsteen to strain himself to be heard over the clamor. The sheer noise disguises the despair at the song’s heart, how it depicts a Vietnam vet who can’t find a place anywhere in his own country when he finally returns home. It’s a bitter song given a treatment so rousing and electrifying that it almost erases its meaning but its force also telegraphs the anger at its heart.

It may be a cliche to place “Born To Run” at the top of a list of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest songs but its greatness is like the earth, water, and air: it’s an elemental part of our world. Where so much of its accompanying album builds to a moment of catharsis, the genius of “Born To Run” is that it comes crashing into view at the moment of transcendence and then proceeds to climb ever higher. It’s not only Springsteen’s definitive song but one of the defining songs of rock & roll, conveying the genre’s sense of sensual pleasures and spiritual liberation.