The Definitive Guide to Bruce Springsteen’s “Street” Songs

What can I say? I love Bruce and the man loves the road. In (not quite) all seriousness, I was originally going to make a list of all of Bruce’s songs about night (“Something in the Night,” “Drive All Night,” “Prove it All Night,” “Night,” you get it!). But I soon realized he has even more songs about streets. So, without further adieu, the list we’ve all been waiting for…

Honorable Mentions
One Way Street  – The Promise
Wrong Side of the Street – The Promise
Hitch Hikin’ – Western Stars

I have to admit I only listened to “One Way Street” and “Wrong Side of the Street” to write this list. Neither of which are bad. But they don’t rank at the top of Springsteen B-sides either. I like “Wrong Side of the Street” better. It’s fast and jangly. It feels like a less fleshed-out version of Springsteen’s top-notch B-Side, “Loose End.” Maybe it was the prototype?

While “Hitch Hikin'” doesn’t have a street in it, I mean come on. Where else are you gonna hitchhike? Though I guess the same could be said about “Drive All Night,” “State Trooper,” or “Cadillac Ranch.” Nevertheless, “Hitch Hikin'” is easily one of Springsteen’s best 21st Century entires. I can remember my first time listening to it. I fired up Western Stars on my way to work and couldn’t make it past the first song. The way the instruments build and build. It’s beautiful.

 

Dishonorable Mention
Further On (Up the Road) – The Rising
I totally forgot about this song. It’s not very good.

14. Working on the Highway – Born in the U.S.A.
Springsteen was incredibly particular while making Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River. There are dozens of good songs (and several great ones) left off each of these albums only because they didn’t fit in with his vision for them. Born in the USA is…not like that. Several of the songs are Nebraska leftovers. The rest feel a bit random. “Cover Me” was a song written for Donna Summer, for instance. “Working on the Highway” is pleasant enough. It’s a fun song to see live. It is just not essential.

13. Highway 29 – The Ghost of Tom Joad
The Ghost of Tom Joad is Springsteen’s most underrated album. Probably because it has so little to do with the music he’s most known for. In fact, The Ghost of Tom Joad is just barely musical. The instrumentation is so muted that at times the album beings to feel like a spoken word piece. What I love most about “Highway 29” is how ambiguous it is. It’s Bruce at his most dreamlike. A song that feels more akin to Neil Young or Bob Dylan’s lyricism than his own.

12. Streets of Fire – Darkness on the Edge of Town
“Streets of Fire” is my least favorite song on my favorite album. Make of that what you will. I really like the part where it gets 10x louder and Springsteen yells Streets of Fire / Streets of Fireeee!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSrPrJyz1k

 

11. The E Street Shuffle – The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle
While many albums have title tracks, I can’t think of many bands that have them. This song is all vibe. Springsteen clashed with his label over his debut. They wanted a singer-songwriter album. He wanted a band album. This song feels like a statement for the follow-up. It’s Bruce at his funkiest. There’s guitars, horns, and plenty of backing vocals. Everybody form a line.

 

10. Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street? – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.
This is Bruce at his most “I’m on one.” One could say that this song lacks the focus and restraint of his later work. I would argue that his later work lacks characters riding to heaven on gyroscopes. This was the first song David Bowie ever saw Springsteen perform. Take it from him: “The moment they kicked in he was another performer. All the Dylanesque stuff dropped off him and he rocked. I became a major fan that night and picked up Asbury Park immediately.”

 

9. Streets of Philadelphia – Single
The 1994 Oscar winner! When I made this list I totally forgot this song. Not because it’s forgettable, but because it’s an outlier in Bruce’s career. It doesn’t appear on an album. It was made in the 90s, a strange and mostly lost period for Bruce. The sound is pretty different from the rest of his catalog. It very clearly doesn’t feature the E Street Band. But it’s still a pretty great song. The coolest story behind it has to do with the music video, directed by Jonathan and Ted Demme. Bruce recorded the vocal live for the video, feeling that lip-syncing would be too inauthentic for the subject of the song.

 

8. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out – Born to Run
This is the fan favorite that’s never quite clicked for me. It was one of the four songs he performed at the Super Bowl! I will say that it easily has the best drop in Springsteen’s catalog (if for some reason that’s what you’re looking for in a Bruce song). Early live versions feature lots of Bruce’s white funk voice (which I love). Check out 3:26 of this version to hear him really hit one of these notes.

 

7. Wreck on the Highway – The River
The River is an album based in conflicting ideas. Springsteen meant for the album to capture every part of life: love, heartbreak, life, death, community, and isolation. How do you end an album like that? I would argue that Bruce should have gone with his first instinct, the previously mentioned B-side, “Loose End.” How better to cap an album that opens with “The Ties that Bind?” Bruce elected to end it with “Wreck on the Highway,” a haunting ballad that details a man at a crossroads in life, driving home when he sees a fatal wreck. It’s made even more powerful on the album where it follows “Drive All Night,” a love song whose protagonist could very well be the dead man here. It’s this wreck that leads the narrator from the road back into bed with his baby. In other words, life and death all in one song. Eh? Maybe Bruce was right.

 

6. Highway Patrolman – Nebraska
Early in his career, Springsteen used movie titles as benchmarks for his songs. Something for them to live up to. So while “Thunder Road” and “Badlands” take their names from films, they are not actually tied to the movies themselves. It was not until Nebraska that Bruce really started integrating film into his work. The album’s title track, for instance, is a narrative retelling of Terrance Malick’s Badlands. “Highway Patrolman” is not based on any source material but it is certainly cinematic. So much so, in fact, that Sean Penn later made a film based upon the song. “Highway Patrolman” is a wistful and meditative portrait of two brothers: One, the titular highway patrolman, and one, “Frankie…who ain’t no good.” And while the narrative is set up on these stark divisions, the song is about how thin the line between them can become. At the end, the narrator lets his brother drive away. The highway becomes the dividing line between them.

 

5. Incident on 57th Street – The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle
This song is a Van Morrison-esque underworld fever dream. As far as I can make it, here’s the plot: Spanish Johnny, a gangster and possible sex worker, roams around the criminal underbelly of New York. He finds Jane, a possible client, sex worker, both, or neither, and falls in love. Meanwhile, the cops make a bust in the neighborhood. It’s getting hot. Then, late one night, Jane wakes up to see Johnny leaving. He’s going to make one more trick, deal, whatever. It seems doubtful that he’ll make it, but hey, that’s what makes him so romantic in the first place. To say that the music elevates this song is an understatement. It’s arguably the first of Springsteen’s great songs, complete with a transcendent outro. Good night it’s all right.

 

4. Out in the Street – The River
The happiest Springsteen song! It is four and a half minutes of euphoria. Which for Springsteen is like, a ton. Even his happiest sounding songs (“Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark”) are tinged with regret. But not this one. It’s all about making it to the weekend. There is an unfortunate lyric about “giving the girls the eye,” which I don’t condone like at all. But besides that, pure joy! I think of The River as the album that best reflects the E Street Band’s ability. There isn’t a better showcase of that than this song. It’s so tight and fast, it feels like it’s hanging on a wire. A true reflection of their power as a live band.

 

3. Backstreets – Born to Run
On another day, this might be number one. From the chilling piano intro to Bruce’s wails at the end, every part of the song is epic in scale. My favorite though has to be the bridge which is just totemic. I mean are there longer bridges than this?

Endless juke joints and Valentino drag
Where dancers scraped the tears
Up off the street dressed down in rags
Running into the darkness
Some hurt bad some really dying
At night sometimes it seemed
You could hear the whole damn city crying
Blame it on the lies that killed us
Blame it on the truth that ran us down
You can blame it all on me Terry
It don’t matter to me now
When the breakdown hit at midnight
There was nothing left to say
But I hated him
And I hated you when you went away

This song should also get props for its subject matter which is about the end of a relationship between two men. Springsteen has always maintained it’s a song about friendship. To which I ask, then why were they hiding on the backstreets? Whatever the case may be, it’s one of Bruce’s finest moments as a songwriter.

 

2. Thunder Road – Born to Run
What can I say? It’s one of the finest songs ever written! One that encapsulates so much of the Springsteen ethos. It’s the terrifying and thrilling prospect of the open road. If you haven’t seen it, Jim Cummings made one of the greatest shorts I’ve ever seen centered on this song. While the studio version is unassailable, I have to say I’m partial to the Live 75-85 version which is just Bruce and his pianist, Roy Bittan.

 

1. Racing in the Street – Darkness on the Edge of Town
Every piece I’ve read about this song mentions the same thing first. That the type of car Springsteen describes in the opening lines couldn’t exist. To them I say, that’s the point. “Racing in the Street” is a transformative ballad about a couple at the end of their rope. For the first two verses, the narrator describes a life of drag racing. How it’s brought him purpose, happiness, even his romantic partner. As he sings:

Now some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
Then go racin’ in the street

What makes this song profound is that Springsteen changes perspectives in the last verse. He details the woman’s increasing depression. For her, this tie to racing is not giving life, but taking it away. Darkness on the Edge of Town is an album full of characters in hopeless situations finding a way to keep pushing, however futile it may be. It’s an angry but ultimately resilient album. In this song, we already know that racing isn’t going to do anything for this couple. But we also know, it’s all this man knows how to do.

The song moves from this sentiment into an absolutely haunting coda. My favorite aspect of Springsteen’s songwriting is his lyricism. What sets “Racing in the Street” apart is that the musical outro not only tops his lyrical brilliance but transcends it. Especially in live versions, you can almost feel the car and this couple breaking free.