Bruce Songs: The Music of Bruce Springsteen, Album-by-Album, Song-by-Song

Shockingly, this is the third comprehensive look at the songs of Bruce Springsteen in five years, and, unfortunately, it’s not as good as its predecessors. Brian Hiatt’s Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs (2019) and Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon’s Bruce Springsteen: All the Songs (2020) were both excellent and well-received. This new volume is very similar in design to the latter but is less engaging. The authors chronologically track Springsteen’s body of work album by album, song by song. Unlike the other two books, this volume features a few contemporary reviews of each album, as well as a “Comments from Springsteen and His Circle” section, featuring quotes pulled from major periodicals and memoirs. These historical texts certainly add to the merits of the book, but the lack of images—besides album covers—is unfortunate, considering the wealth of photos available of Springsteen and his band. Both authors clearly know their subject, as they are professors of English, music, and history at Monmouth University, NJ, but the writing is more factual than entertaining and the facts are not new.