Rock, Metal

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Greatest Hits (2009)

2010-09-06T19:31:47Z

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Greatest Hits (2009)


01. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
02. Born to Run
03. Thunder Road
04. Darkness on the Edge of Town
05. Badlands
06. Hungry Heart
07. Glory Days
08. Dancing in the Dark
09. Born in the USA
10. The Rising
11. Lonesome Day
12. Radio Nowhere

Personel:
Bruce Springsteen - lead vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano, synthesizer, glockenspiel
Roy Bittan - piano, keyboards, accordion, backing vocals
Clarence Clemons - tenor and baritone saxophones, pennywhistle, backing vocals, percussion
Nils Lofgren - guitar, slide guitar, accordion, backing vocals
Patti Scialfa - vocals, acoustic guitar
Steven Van Zandt - guitar, mandolin, backing vocals
Garry Tallent - bass
Max Weinberg - drums
with
Soozie Tyrell - violin, backing vocals, percussion, acoustic guitar
Charles Giordano - organ, accordion, synthesizer
Jay Weinberg - drums (substitute during part of 2009 tour)

This Sony release is essentially the Bruce Springsteen greatest-hits set that appeared earlier in 2009 as a Wal-Mart exclusive -- setting off a mini storm in the media about whether or not the pro-union Springsteen should have any dealings at all with the non-union Wal-Mart company -- with three tracks, "Long Walk Home" (from 2007's Magic) and live versions of "Because the Night" and "Fire," added to the end of the sequence. Columbia's 18-track Greatest Hits set from 1995 probably does a better job of charting through the commercial, radio-ready side of Springsteen's career, but the addition of the live tracks here strengthens this collection and makes it feel like a much broader and more rounded portrait than the original Wal-Mart issue was. The truth is, Springsteen has so many great songs that it is probably impossible to put out a single-disc greatest-hits set that would please everyone, but this one essentially does it's job -- you've heard all of these songs on the radio. ---Steve Leggett, AllMusic Review

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Bruce Springsteen - United Center, Chicago 2009

2010-09-11T10:45:34Z

Bruce Springsteen - United Center, Chicago 2009

CD1:
1 Seeds
2 No Surrender
3 Johnny 99
4 Cover Me
5 Outlaw Pete
6 Hungry Heart
7 Working on a Dream
8 intro to complete Born to Run album
9 Thunder Road
10 Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
11 Night
12 Backstreets
13 Born to Run
14 She's the One

CD2:
1 Meeting Across the River
2 Jungleland
3 Waitin' on a Sunny Day
4 The Promised Land
5 Radio Nowhere
6 Lonesome Day
7 The Rising
8 Badlands
9 encore break

CD3:
1 Hard Times
2 Raise your Hand (instr)
3 Da Doo Ron Ron
4  figuring out the next song
5 Rockin' Robin
6 I'm Goin' Down
7 American Land
8 Dancing in the Dark
9 Rosalita

United Center, Chicago, IL USA
20-Sep-2009

Familiar name, new face. He’s the teenage son of longtime E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, and he and dad have been sharing timekeeping duties on the current Bruce Springsteen tour, which played to a sold-out house Tuesday at the United Center.

With the younger Weinberg in the drum chair for the final two-thirds of the three-hour show, the band’s chemistry was slightly unsettled for the better. Jay Weinberg hits just as hard as his father, and is touch looser, less predictable. His fills during “Radio Nowhere” kicked the song, and the concert, into a higher gear, and galvanized a band that was starting to pace itself.

Springsteen smiled in approval. He had to love the kid’s energy.

Springsteen is about as consistent as a performer gets. You pay, he plays until he drops. You may not love all the songs, you may wish he’d play "Glory Days" or that obscure B side no one else knows except you, but Springsteen always works his tail off.

All of that was still true Tuesday, but his longtime E Street Band is in transition. They’re a band of pros, and they do their jobs well, but they lack the physicality, the sustained urgency of their prime. Slowly, the band is being retooled. Stellar organist Danny Federici died last year, and has been replaced by Charles Giordano. Patti Scialfa, Springsteen’s wife and backing vocalist, was back home in New Jersey with their three children. Violinist Soozie Tyrell, a relative newcomer, has assumed a larger role, and longtime saxophonist Clarence Clemons a smaller one, in part because he’s been hobbled by ailing hips (he had double hip replacement surgery in 1998).

Springsteen has always played his band like a small orchestra, and their versatility allowed him to explore the widest contours of his catalog. He ranged from the stark blues of “Seeds” to the Celtic celebration of “American Land.” The E Streeters expertly negotiated the ebb and surge of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped” and the gospel drama of “The Rising.” And they figured out the chord changes for Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 garage-rock classic “Mony, Mony” during the audience-request portion of the concert.

“Doesn’t it have some weird bridge?” Springsteen asked guitarist Steve Van Zandt. It did, and they crossed it unscathed, in one of those smile-inducing moments that echoed the band’s early days, when Springsteen used to shout out impromptu covers with mischievous regularity.

If there was a disappointment, it was that Springsteen didn’t make a stronger case for his latest album, “Working on a Dream.” I’m not a fan of the album, but I always look forward to how the singer reinvents his studio work on the stage. In this case, however, he barely touched the new material, which was a shame, because he did a marvelous job of turning “Outlaw Pete” into a theatrical, Old West showpiece while doffing a black cowboy hat with Spaghetti Western guitars, Tyrell’s campfire fiddle and Grand Canyon reverb on the vocals.

As usual, Springsteen divvied up the show into thematic sections. Among the strongest was the topical trinity of “Seeds,” “Johnny 99” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a seething commentary on blue-collar citizens brought to the brink of desperation by hard times. Each was punctuated by nasty guitar solo: Springsteen channeling the mantra of “It’s gone, gone, it’s all gone” on “Seeds” with a vengeance through his instrument, then Van Zandt riding hard with “Johnny 99” and Nils Lofgren spinning out from Max Weinberg’s surging drums on “Joad.”

The show started to settle a bit after the midway point, but Jay Weinberg took care of that problem. During “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” one of his more enthusiastic fills brought an arched eyebrow and a smile from bassist Garry Tallent. The newcomer wanted to run, and the band had no choice but to rise to the challenge. --- leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com

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Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball (2012)

2012-04-01T19:44:33Z

Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball (2012)


1. We Take Care Of Our Own
2. Easy Money
3. Shackled And Drawn
4. Jack Of All Trades
5. Death To My Hometown
6. This Depression
7. Wrecking Ball
8. You've Got It
9. Rocky Ground
10. Land Of Hope And Dreams
11. We Are Alive
12. Swallowed Up
13. American Land

Bruce Springsteen‘s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” debuts on the charts at #1. Bruce and the E Street Band beat long-may-she-reign-Adele for the top spot, pushing the Grammy Winner to #2. But Bruce did a little less well than hoped, with just 201,000 copies sold. Adele came in around 192,000. Sony and Bruce put a lot into the debut, with the Apollo show, a week on Jimmy Fallon, etc. In the UK, Bruce also opened at #1, with 74,000 copies–all numbers care of hitsdailydouble.com. Most of the remaining US chart is filled with Whitney Houston‘s catalog, still selling briskly a month after she died. And that doesn’t count orders from after the Oprah interview. For comparison’s sake: Bruce’s last album, “Working on a Dream,” debuted with 224,000 copies. The prior one, “Magic,” was 335,000. “The Rising,” released in 2002, started with 520,000 copies. But that was a decade ago, and so much has changed: the audience has aged, downloading and streaming are far more prevalent, and that album was more airplay friendly in a friendlier airplay market. Maybe if Bruce had put Nikki Minaj and Lil Bow Wow on “Wrecking Ball,” he’d have done better. But his tour will be massively sold out, and more albums will be sold as it progresses. He’s already started higher than Van Halen’s return, which has petered out considerably from its 187,000 debut. --- Roger Friedman, forbes.com

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Bruce Springsteen – Working On A Dream (2009)

2009-10-10T15:24:44Z

Bruce Springsteen – Working On A Dream (2009)


01.	Outlaw Pete
02.	My Lucky Day
03.	Working On A Dream
04.	Queen Of The Supermarket
05.	What Love Can Do
06.	This Life
07.	Good Eye
08.	Tomorrow Never Knows
09.	Life Itself
10.	Kingdom Of Days
11.	Surprise, Surprise
12.	Last Carnival
13.	The Wrestler
14.	Night With Jersey Devil (Bonus track)

Musicians:
    Bruce Springsteen – lead vocals, guitars, harmonica, keyboards, percussion, glockenspiel
    Roy Bittan – piano, organ, accordion
    Clarence Clemons – saxophone, vocals
    Danny Federici – organ
    Nils Lofgren – guitars, vocals
    Patti Scialfa – vocals
    Garry Tallent – bass
    Steven Van Zandt – guitars, vocals
    Max Weinberg – drums
+
    Soozie Tyrell – violin, vocals
    Patrick Warren – organ, piano, keyboards 
    Jason Federici – accordion 
    Eddie Horst – string and horn arrangements

On this album's opener, Outlaw Pete, Bruce, it seems, is addressing nothing less than America's own past coming back to haunt it (in the guise of a bounty hunter finally catching up with the titular outlaw) and Working On A Dream uses the complete range of The Boss to hunt down and redefine the dream in the 21st century.

Yet the use of an harmonica sample from Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West on Outlaw Pete is misplaced, for unlike Leone's cartoon vision of the great American Western it's the late films of John Ford that seem more relevant.

These are songs filled with nostalgia, regret, shame and yet, like Ford, underneath it all a love of the American Dream. These days it seems that all the Boss can do is sound like a classic. The E-Street Band barrel manfully through tracks like My Lucky Day with all that Phil Spector widescreen verve, while This Life's first 15 seconds could even be the Beach Boys.

Much like Johnny Cash, Springsteen's status, at once heroic and preposterous, is now utterly assured. Whether you buy the image will probably dictate as to whether you regard Working On A Dream as being among his masterworks. Maybe we should just be grateful that somewhere there's someone still this guileless. But it's a paradox for a man who's made a career out of chronicling the working man's experience (he still sings about getting his hands dirty on the title track) that he's almost become an archetype.

Like his previous album, a great deal of this stuff is about mortality and age. Bruce's entourage is now feeling the hand of the Reaper. Magic was dedicated to right hand man Terry MacGovern and here The Last Carnival is a thinly veiled tribute to the passing of keyboard player Danny Federici. But it’s far from bleak; Tomorrow Never Knows sings of time's passage with a jaunty Pete Seeger-in-Nashville swagger. Beyond the usual bombast Brendan O'Brien's production work is a little less cluttered, the songs a little more closely mic'ed, and there are some small but significant stylistic experiments. Life Itself has some vaguely trippy guitars at its heart and Queen Of The Supermarket's coda checkout beeps lifts the potentially banal analogy of the mall as palace of seduction to another level.

It’s hard not to read all this as a brazen attempt to encapsulate a nation on the brink of a new era. But who else is as qualified to ring the changes? Dylan's found a new home in the primal blues of his youth, while artists like Neil Young are too personal in their attempts to sum up a nation's mood. Bruce still stands tall as both conscience and as a teller of tales. --- Chris Jones, BBC Review

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