Editor’s Note: From Albumism’s inception back in 2016, we’ve remained unabashedly and unequivocally passionate about our mission of celebrating the world's love affairs with albums past, present and future.

But while our devotion to the album as an art form has remained steadfast, as evidenced by our deepening repository of individual album tributes and reviews, we’ve admittedly seldom taken the opportunity to explicitly articulate our reverence for the virtues of artists’ complete album repertoires as a whole.

Hence why we’ve decided to showcase what we believe to be the most dynamic discographies of all time in this recurring series. In doing so, we hope to better understand the broader creative context within which our most beloved individual albums exist, while acknowledging the full breadth of their creators’ artistry, career arcs, and overall contributions to the ever-evolving musical landscape.

We hope you enjoy this series and be sure to check here periodically for the latest installments.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen did something unexpected. After the enormous success of three anthemic records—Born To Run (1975), Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), and The River (1980)—and years of leading the hard-rocking, pants-dropping, earth-shaking, booty-quaking, history-making, legendary E Street Band on world-conquering tour after world-conquering tour, he put out Nebraska.

The new release was somber, entirely acoustic, and no longer about small-time dreamers coaxing their girlfriends to run away with them. There are two (two!) songs about executions, one auspicious drug deal, a nightmare or two, and a heart-crushing story of brothers on opposite sides of the law. This was not the rocking joy of “Out in the Street” or even the defiance of “Badlands.” This was failure. Defeat. The final line of the title track revealed what seemed like a new, darker worldview: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” No more “I’m pulling out of here to win”—there is no “out of here.”

Nebraska was a daring move at the time—a complete career shift that didn’t make any narrative sense for someone who was climbing relentlessly to the top of the rock & roll pile. But if you zoom out, Nebraska actually does make a lot of sense: Springsteen has always been fascinated with the meanness in this world and our ways of coping with it. His live concerts are “rock & roll exorcisms” (his words, not mine) that are built on the idea that this meanness is a little bit more tolerable if you’re enduring it in a room with 60,000 of your closest friends. But you need to walk into that arena willing to believe, which means that you need to see yourself as part of the story that he’s telling.

This is where the discography comes in—fifty years of stories of people gritting their teeth and scraping out some version of joy in a world that denies any sense of dignity to those who aren’t already on top. Of course, the best-known work is Born to Run (1975), an album that’s massive in scope in spite of a tight eight-song track list. Full of attempted, proposed, and abandoned escapism, Born to Run features a level of musical adventure that elevates what the first two albums presented. The early-morning haze of “Thunder Road”, catharsis of “Backstreets,” and Broadway drama of “Meeting Across the River” set a precedent for a cinematic writing style that would follow him from project to project, while the E Street Band was at the height of its powers. Everyone wants to believe in Born to Run, even though they know that it’s going to end in tragedy by the time they get to “Jungleland.” It’s the believing that’s the important part.

Other work from the same period, like The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as later releases like Tunnel of Love (1987), The Rising (2002), Magic (2007), Wrecking Ball (2012), and Western Stars (2019) give you as many windows into defiance and resistance as possible. Still, it doesn’t get old because of the variety of approaches: Wrecking Ball opts for political anthems, while The River leans on juxtaposition between bar band rock and ballads. Darkness gets under your bones and makes you want to overthrow the government; Western Stars makes you want to sit back and commiserate with a friend over a whiskey. Not every album hits every person, but every album hits someone.

It’s the earliest work—Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (1973) and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973) that keeps me personally dedicated to the Springsteen Cinematic Universe. On these records, you’ll find a crew of punks making love by a lake just to feel something in “Spirit in the Night,” a boardwalk regular giving up on the scene in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and a brash musician asking a girl out over her father’s protest in “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” The stories are vivid and the sound is loose, jazzy, and youthful.

It’s probably also true that these are the stories with the most hope. The thing is, every character in every Springsteen story—and, by extension, everyone at a Springsteen show—was once in that joyful lakeside crew even if they eventually grew up into the killer in “Johnny 99,” the dejected worker in “Factory,” or the musician mourning his lost friends in “House of a Thousand Guitars.” I think that we all turn out a bit better if we remember that, and Springsteen’s discography will always keep it at the top of your mind.

Jeremy’s 3 Favorite Bruce Springsteen Albums of All Time:

1. Born to Run (1975)
2. Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
3. The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973)

VISIT Bruce Springsteen’s Official Store

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