Bruce Springsteen - The River

It’s not the best Springsteen album-that title probably goes to Born To Run-but The River ranks as my personal favorite. It’s the album that introduced me to Bruce and, as a double record, gave me a nice overview of a variety of different moods our boy from New Jersey possessed.
I suppose that The River is fairly limited in epic scope while filled with songs-a-plenty about life, love, and those annoying Mother-in-laws.
Considering this, The River is probably the best record that a 14 year old kid could stumble upon when examining his collective works. It’s full of out and out rockers (“Ties That Bind,” “Out On The Street,” “Two Hearts”), blue-collar heartbreak (“The River,” “Fade Away,” “Independence Day”) and a bunch of songs that only began to grow as I grew with them.
The best examples are probably later on in the album, a section that I frequently skipped over as a teenager. These were the ones that didn’t immediately grab me-they weren’t intended to-but when I became old enough to appreciate things like space, mood, and sublety, then I began to understand how great Springsteen was, even at that young of age, was an incredible craftsman of rock and roll.
The song that did it for me both then and now is the title track. The appeal was because I grew up in a river town, so the imagery was something I could relate to. I remember vividly thinking how the protagonist, a young man who knocked up his high school sweetheart and then is forced to face the consequences, could have been anyone in my hometown. And as honorable as getting married and doing the right thing might have been, it doesn’t provide him with the tools to keep love strong.
He reminsices of the time when his passion ran deep. Years later, it all seems like a cruel joke as he surveys the remanents of his lost love. “Is a dream a lie that don’t come true” he ponders, “or is it something worse?”
With The River, I became a full-fledged fan of The Boss. I jumped into his back catalog and found that his talent was established well before that two-fer. Every week, I watched the ads for his show in Des Moines supporting The River, longing for a chance to see him and for an allowance that could even afford a ticket.
I got that opportunity a few years later, but I’ll forever be fond of the album that introduced me to Springsteen even when there are other parts of his catalog that are more deserving of praise.