bruce springsteen

Playlist #242: Top 10 Albums of 2025

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Happy Monday, folks! We’ve reached that point in the year when bands stop releasing new music and the music critic turns his weary, bleary eyes toward compiling top lists. Top 10 albums! Top 25 albums! Top 100 albums of the year! In all the genres and styles one can imagine. I’m just gonna do a top ten. It’s not that I couldn’t find enough for a longer list, but I already do ten-song playlists, so why not stick with that? In no particular order, my top ten for the year are:

  1. Matt Berninger, Get Sunk: Solo album from the National’s singer. As I commented back when I first featured a song off this album on a playlist, it seems to feature all the momentum and forward motion that’s been missing from the past couple of National albums. Virtually a no-skip album.
  2. Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World: She’s been trending more toward minimalism in her work the past couple of albums, and I kinda like it. Puts her amazing voice front and center. Her song selection skills remain top-notch, too.
  3. Snocaps, Snocaps: Feels very off the cuff and done for fun, which I’m always a big fan of. I like it when it sounds like the musicians had fun recording the music. And the two sisters at the heart of this group know how to write some killer songs.
  4. Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override: We get it Jeff, you’ve got lots of songs in you. A triple album, though? That just screams “I’m gonna one-up Ryan Adams at something not gross.” But the songs are pretty uniformly good, even if a few of them feel more like song sketches and ideas rather than full-fledged complete songs.
  5. Jason Isbell, Foxes in the Snow: I’m not gonna call it his divorce album or his Blood on the Tracks, but there is something stark and sharp and beautiful in this voice and acoustic only set that really sucker punches you in the best way.
  6. Neko Case, Neon Gray Midnight Green: Any new Neko Case music is a cause for celebration, and this particular album sticks with you long after it’s finished playing. Nothing as immediate or obviously gripped as “Hold On, Hold On” here, but it’s still a strong album filled with the sort of gorgeous vocals and left field approaches Case has come to be known for.
  7. The Mountain Goats, Through the Fire Across From Peter Balkan: Trippy, dreamy titles aside, John Darnielle has described this one as the closest he’s ever come to writing a musical, and it still isn’t a concept album telling a coherent story as far as I can tell, but the songs are beautiful and obtuse and demand that you sit with the record and really listen.
  8. Lord Huron, The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1: Atmospheric and folky, like Tom Petty mixing spaghetti westerns with ’50s pulp sci-fi.
  9. Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska ’82: As archival releases go, this one is pretty great. Getting a look at what could have been with Nebraska, one of my favorite Bruce albums, is a fascinating exercise. Hearing the so-called Electric Versions was pretty cool and does ultimately support the myth that the original solo demos were the superior versions and ought to just be released as-is. The more recent live recordings of all the songs seemed a little superfluous to me, but more Bruce is never really a bad thing.
  10. Bob Dylan, Through the Open Window (The Bootleg Series, Volume 18): Speaking of archival releases, the latest in the long-running Bootleg Series digs into the absolute earliest Dylan recordings we’ve ever heard, and while you can definitely hear who he would become in the voice and the guitar playing, it’s very protean. Primordial, you might say. But the man found his footing in Greenwich Village quite quickly, and hearing some alternate takes on some of his earliest compositions and covers was a fun diversion. Someday, I’ll have to dive into the complete version of this collection, as the only version available on Apple Music was the two-disc Highlights selections.

Playlist #237: Wrecks

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Happy Monday, folks. We’ve got a short week this week, what with Veterans Day happening tomorrow, but we’ve also got a historically-based playlist for you today. Starting with:

  1. Gordon Lightfoot, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: Fifty years ago today, the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, taking twenty-nine men with it. Lightfoot apparently wrote and recorded the song just a month later, and it was released in August of 1976, giving him the biggest hit of his career.
  2. Tom Petty, “You Wreck Me”: Is there a better Tom Petty album than Wildflowers? If so, I haven’t heard it (and neither, I’d assume, has anyone else, ’cause this is clearly his best album). That chorus is so good to sing along to.
  3. Pearl Jam, “Wreckage”: Pearl Jam’s latest studio album included this gem, an acoustic-based song that stands as one of the best they’ve written in the past fifteen, twenty years.
  4. Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball”: It’s a song about Giants Stadium in New Jersey. They were about to tear it down, and the Boss had to write a song in ode to it. It’s one of his better latter-day songs.
  5. George Harrison, “Wreck of the Hesperus”: Based on a Wordsworth poem about a shipwreck? Or a Procol Harum song of the same name? I dunno. It’s mostly George Harrison lamenting getting older, but still being able to rock out. It’s chock-full o’ puns, which is one of my favorite forms of song lyrics.
  6. Loose Fur, “Wreckroom”: Look, Loose Fur is weird. Just…really weird. But also nifty. Mostly weird.
  7. They Might Be Giants, “Wreck My Car”: Please do not wreck someone else’s car, even if they ask you to. That’s probably insurance fraud, and you don’t wanna be involved in that.
  8. Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs, “Wreckless Abandon”: Mike Campbell’s solo work is more workmanlike than anything he did with the Heartbreakers, but c’mon, not everyone is a songwriting dynamo like Tom Petty was.
  9. Emmylou Harris, “Wrecking Ball”: A different “Wrecking Ball” than the Bruce Springsteen one. It’s a beautiful song, though.
  10. Wreckless Eric, “Whole Wide World”: Featured to great effect in the movie Stranger than Fiction, it’s one of those three-chord garage rock songs that you can learn in two minutes and play all by yourself forever. We recommend turning the amplifier way up for this one.

Playlist #236

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Happy Monday, folks! I spent the weekend hanging out with visiting family, strummin’ guitars and eating to much food. As one does. Here’s some songs to get you through the week.

  1. Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy”: My dad had heard of the Gin Blossoms, he said, but couldn’t place a song by them. This is probably their best-known song. If he’s heard any of them, it’s probably this one.
  2. Snocaps, “Cherry Hard Candy”: It’s the lady from Waxahatchee! And her sister! And a couple of dudes she’s been performing with for a while! But it’s also a whole new and different band! But hey, more Waxahatchee by any name is good for me.
  3. Enigma, “Return to Innocence”: I heard this song (from the Pure Moods CD, natch) while I was in a Wawa last night. It’s the one with the faux-Native chanting/singing in it. You know the one. You heard it in all the commercials they ran for that collection in the ’90s.
  4. Tom Petty, “You Saw Me Comin'”: Finding Wallflowers is a fascinating document to me. I was talking with my dad about it this weekend, along with all the other archival releases legacy acts like Dylan, Springsteen, and Neil Young have been cranking out in the past few years. I’ve always enjoyed the iterative process of songwriting, and would have loved to hear where Tom took this particular song that just sorta…went away.
  5. Iggy Pop, “Passenger”: A classic Iggy four-chord rocker from Lust for Life.
  6. Wilco, “Handshake Drugs”: I love playing this song on the guitar. I have since I first figured out how to play it. Sometimes, Jeff Tweedy and Co. create some simple, very effective songs.
  7. Bruce Springsteen, “Reason To Believe (Electric Nebraska)”: One of my favorite songs from Nebraska. Is the electric version really all that different? No, not really. Again, it’s really obvious in hindsight why Bruce went with the solo demo versions of all of these songs.
  8. Hank Williams, “Move It On Over”: I always loved the George Thorogood version of this song, and the Hank original remains completely awesome as well.
  9. The Eagles, “Tequila Sunrise”: Always a fun guitar song.
  10. The Bee Gees, “To Love Somebody”: Learned this one playing guitar with my dad this weekend. Good song.

Playlist #235: The Boss

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Happy Monday, folks! I was in a Bruce Springsteen mood over the weekend (thanks in large part to the release of Nebraska ’82), so here’s a list of ten of my favorite non-studio-album Bruce songs.

  1. “Thundercrack”: This song always reminds me of “Rosalita.” It’s similarly-epic in scope and style, I feel, and features some great saxophone work from the Big Man.
  2. “Losin’ Kind”: I’d never heard this song before this weekend, but damn is it haunting and more than a little troubling. The whole narrative around Nebraska and the man lost in the woods period feels very real here.
  3. “Blood Brothers”: From the ’90s Greatest Hits collection, this sounds exactly like what you think a Bruce Springsteen song should sound like.
  4. “Rockaway the Days”: The Boss is a strong storyteller, as seen in this song where a dude gets in a bar fight and then wraps his car around a tree.
  5. “Follow That Dream”: From the recent Tracks II collection. Such a weird collection. Seven whole albums you recorded and never released? That’s a wild flex, Bruce.
  6. “Johnny Bye Bye”: Is this song just a retelling of “Johnny B. Goode”? I think this song is just a retelling of “Johnny B. Goode.”
  7. “Ain’t Good Enough for You”: Bruce has a lot of charisma, or “rizz” as the kids say these days. It’s hard to imagine someone rejecting him, but apparently it was a problem when he was younger? If this song is anything to go by, anyway.
  8. “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)”: Just a jumped-up blues song that’s way too much fun to sing.
  9. “This Hard Land”: Another one of those Greatest Hits songs that just sounds like a quintessential Bruce song. It’s, like, the ur-material that all other Springsteen songs are extracted from.
  10. “Open All Night (Electric Nebraska)”: One of my absolute favorite songs off of Nebraska, only with drums and bass.

Playlist #231

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Happy Monday, folks. A lot of new music came out last week that I really dug, and I’m still going through it and listening. But hey, the playlist waits for no man, except sometimes me when I forget that it’s Monday and I have to post one of these.

  1. Neko Case, “Winchester Mansion of Sound”: Case’s music continues to grow and shift; she’s never content to just coast by on what she’s done before. This is probably one of my favorites off the new album.
  2. Jeff Tweedy, “Cry Baby Cry”: Dude dropped a triple album on Friday. That’s wild. This is not, unfortunately, a cover of the Beatles song of the same name, but it is, fortunately, quite a good song anyway. The whole album is pretty good, honestly, though I feel like some of the lyrics could’ve used a second pass.
  3. Amanda Shires, “The Details”: I have never been divorced, as I’m sure most folks know. That being said, this song sounds like what I imagine divorce feels like, and it makes me uncomfortable and more than a little voyeuristic, like I’m listening in on a couple in the final throes of the inevitable end.
  4. David Gray, “Kathleen”: Sometime in the past few years, Draw the Line somehow became my favorite David Gray album, and this one of my favorite songs off that album. I can’t adequately explain the why of either of those, so instead I just accept them and continue grooving to the album and this song in particular.
  5. Bruce Springsteen, “Reason to Believe”: I always enjoy the work of Bruce the Storyteller. Here, it’s a series of vignettes with a common theme: at the end of a hard day, when the world wears you down and tells you to just give up, folks still find a reason to go on.
  6. Andrew Bird, “So Much Wine, Merry Christmas”: I learned the lead break from this song a few months ago, and it’s a great joy to play.
  7. Buckingham Nicks, “Frozen Love”: This album has finally appeared on streaming, so it’s okay that I left my copy in Oklahoma with my dad back in April.
  8. Doechii, “Anxiety”: It uses that one Gotye song (you know the one, he only did the one) as a basis for a very different tune.
  9. The Presidents of the United States of America, “Kick Out the Jams”: Who doesn’t love an MC5 cover? It’s suitably quick and jagged, and I kinda love it.
  10. Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”: Speaking of covers, here’s Iron & Wine and the dude from Band of Horses doing an U2 cover. It sounds exactly how you think that will sound.

Playlist #229

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Happy Monday, folks! Here’s this week’s playlist:

  1. Genesis, “Just a Job to Do”: The number of songs Phil Collins has written over the years about being a criminal just trying to do a (rather sinister) job is not a huge number, but it’s not a non-zero number, either. Was he secretly a hitman in the 1970s? Only he knows for sure.
  2. Margaret Glaspy, “These Days”: A lovely cover of the old Jackson Browne tune. It’s very sparse and slow, and I kinda dig it.
  3. Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA (Electric Nebraska)”: If Bruce had pursued this sound on Born in the USA rather than the athematic, keyboard-heavy style he used, maybe there’d have been fewer misunderstandings about what the song is actually about.
  4. The Cars, “Since You’re Gone”: Oh, 80s drum programming, never change.
  5. Andrew Bird, “Fake Palindromes”: This suprisingly uptempo song is so good, and apparently twenty years old now! Wow.
  6. Earth, Wind & Fire, “September”: No, it’s not the 21st of September, but Monday is the 22nd, so that’s too late. Therefore, have some EWF.
  7. The Shins, “Australia”: Is this song actually about the continent/island/country Australia? If so, what is it trying to tell us about it? I have no idea, but it’s a good song that I haven’t listened to in far too long.
  8. Veruca Salt, “Volcano Girls”: A 90s rock girl explosion of sound and energy, rather like a volcano.
  9. The National, “Terrible Love (Alternate Version)”: Still one of the best songs these guys have ever done, and the best version of the song.
  10. The Mystiqueros, “Good”: Back when I played with the group of musicians up in DC, this was one of the songs they played all the time. It’s a great song if you’ve got a group that can harmonize well.

Playlist #218

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Happy Monday, folks! Summer proceeds apace, and we have air conditioning again, thank God. I was not doing well in those higher temperatures we were experiencing last week, let me tell you. Anyway, here’s some songs.

  1. Bruce Springsteen, “Shut Out the Light”: Been slowly working my way through Tracks II the past few days, and I know it’s cliche at this point but holy crap, Bruce throws out entire albums he’s not completely satisfied with? Which makes me wonder what possessed him to release High Hopes (zing!).
  2. Wilco, “Hell is Chrome (Live)”: A new live Wilco set just dropped, but most of what it did was remind me that I really do not remember many Wilco songs after about Sky Blue Sky. These are good songs, expertly performed, but they all feel pretty damn ephemeral to me, just background noise as I go about my day. This song, from A Ghost is Born, still slaps, though.
  3. James McMurtry, “South Texas Lawman”: A new James McMurtry album is a cause for celebration. He does one about 9/11 and W on here, and even though that’s only about a quarter century late it still feels entirely too relevant given the current tensions in the Middle East with another country whose name starts with an “I.” But that’s not this song. This is a country rocker about a lawman who wants to retire to the beach.
  4. Murder by Death, “Believe”: These guys just hit that dopamine button in my brain and make me wanna pick up my guitar and just strum the hell out of a couple of songs.
  5. Better Than Ezra, “Desperately Wanting”: There’s more to this song than the chorus, but all you really want to sing is the chorus part. The band gets that. They keep the verses short.
  6. Adeem the Artist, “Cowards Together”: I wish more country artists had the guts to be as open about who they are as Adeem the Artist, the cast-iron pansexual who pens such beautiful songs about not wanting to fight.
  7. The Wallflowers, “It’s A Dream”: My brother dismisses Glad All Over as “the Wallflowers just trying to sound like the Clash, but we’ve already got the Clash at home,” but I think it plays enough with the usual Wallflowers formula to keep them fresh and interesting and it’s still one of my go-to driving albums.
  8. Jack Johnson, “Taylor”: I remember, back in college, hearing a solo acoustic demo of this song around the time his debut, Brushfire Fairytales, came out, and I loved it. The version included on On and On is still plenty good, mind you, but I’ve been sorely tempted to go digging and see if I can find that original version again.
  9. Counting Crows, “Untitled (Love Song)”: “Throw your arms around my neck” is actually a pretty good chorus, actually.
  10. Aimee Mann, “Columbus Avenue”: Aimee Mann makes me nostalgic for college. Not because I listened to her stuff in college – I was stick pretty deep in the Bob Dylan thing back then – but just the tone of it seems to evoke a nostalgia in me, and when I feel nostalgic, that’s the time I think of. I feel like I could walk the streets of Clarksville at midnight with this song on repeat on the discman and all would be, if not quite right with the world, at least bearable and acceptable.

Playlist #213 – The Boss

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Happy Tuesday, folks! Yes, a holiday delayed the playlist again. We should be used to this by now. The school year is winding down, the parking lot at school is being eaten up by the construction, and I’m forced to get my steps in just to get to my classroom (in a trailer, where it’s been for the past three years). But none of that stops me from delivering unto you a playlist of some of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, inspired by (1) Memorial Day and (2) the fact that Trump hates the dude.

  1. “Downbound Train”: I think people sometimes forget just how dark the songs on Born in the USA are. Sure, the title track seems anthematic and fist-pumping, the sort of thing you expect to come blasting out of the speaker stack in an arena, but the lyrics to that one (and virtually all the rest of the songs on the album) are dour and troubled. At least here, the lyrical themes are matched better by the music, and I absolutely love the atmospheric keyboard part where all the rest of the instruments drop out and it’s just Bruce’s voice and that keyboard underneath.
  2. “Ain’t Got You”: Is Bruce as clever a wordsmith as Bob Dylan? Lord, no. And that’s okay! Dylan is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of talent. Bruce is a working man’s lyricist, but he can turn a clever phrase when he wants to. And he does several times in this song, discussing how all the riches and success he’s gathered unto himself mean nothing if he doesn’t have the girl.
  3. “Stolen Car”: Bruce tends to over-emote. It’s not his fault, of course; the guy grew up idolizing Roy Orbison, a man who turned a two-syllable word (“cryin'”) into a five-syllable word. But here, Bruce manages to tone down everything and just let the desperation and the defeat the character feels permeate everything, until you’re left feeling just as empty as the night was.
  4. “The Promised Land”: Despite the downer tone of a lot of his work, I think Bruce is, at heart, an optimistic guy. He wants the characters who populate his lyrics to be successful, to be happy, to win, dammit, and nowhere is that more obvious than in this song.
  5. “Rockaway the Days”: Of course, Bruce seems to me, first and foremost, to be a storyteller. His characters are hopeless romantics and strung-out losers, guys on the street corner begging for just one shot at glory and girls who sit at home, wistfully re-reading love letters and wondering when the dream died. And sometimes, the protagonists like to “drink and gamble . . . like to fight,” like Billy here. Ol’ Billy, he had some problems, and wasn’t able to overcome them.
  6. “All the Way Home”: A song of hope and longing with a great, driving beat.
  7. “Reason to Believe”: I think this is the song that summarizes Bruce’s beliefs more than any other. Yes, times are hard. Yes, life seems to beat you down day after day. Yes, there are hardships that seem impossible to overcome, frustrations that build up and overwhelm you. But, at the end of every hard-earned day, people do find some reason to believe. What else can you do?
  8. “Ain’t Good Enough for You”: More sardonic, clever Bruce. Sometimes, you just aren’t good enough for the girl, no matter what you do.
  9. “Wrecking Ball”: Is it about the tearing down of a football stadium? Or is it about a person smashing into your life and completely changing everything? Or maybe both? I think maybe both.
  10. “My City of Ruins”: At the moment, one of my absolute favorite Bruce songs. It’s sad and hopeful and full of life in all its messiness. It’s a prayer for a better world, one where everyone can “rise up” and be our better selves. It came out in the shadow of the September 11th attacks, part of Bruce’s reckoning with that event and the changes it brought to the country.

Playlist #209

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It’s Monday again, somehow. Time continues forward. SOL testing starts this week at my school, so we’re stuck in one class each day for two periods instead of one. I’m thinking the kids are gonna get real sick of my dad jokes before that time ends.

  1. Dire Straits, “Your Latest Trick”: It’s one of those classic ’80s songs with saxophone solos in it.
  2. Elvis Presley, “Run On”: I’d only ever heard the Johnny Cash (and, by extension, the Gaslight Anthem) version of this song, which is slower and more menacing. Elvis’s version sounds like a tent revival on speed.
  3. Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, “Just Dropping In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”: Kentucky-Fried Kenny was apparently a bit…psychedelic back in the day? I somehow never realized he’d done this song, but it’s groovy.
  4. Drive-By Truckers, “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”: I love story songs, and ones based on reality (Carl Perkins really did win a Cadillac from Sam Phillips) are just always pretty great. And no one really does them better these days than the Drive-By Truckers, who have such an eye (and ear) for detail.
  5. Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins, “Born Secular”: Such a sad, deep song, driven by that drum machine loop and the big chords on the piano. There really isn’t a bad song on that album.
  6. Nanci Griffith, “This Old Town”: Oklahoma is littered with towns like the ones this song is about: small, isolated communities that should have shut down years ago, shoud’ve become ghost towns a dozen times over, but still somehow cling to life and continued existence. Most of them are built around the local public school, actually.
  7. Tom Petty, “Crawling Back to You (Alternate Version)”: The original version of this song remains one of the absolute best on his best album, Wildflowers. This alternate take feels looser and somehow sadder.
  8. Bruce Springsteen, “O Mary Don’t You Weep”: The Seeger Sessions collection is such a strange aberration in Springsteen’s catalog. It’s loose and celebratory and fun, without the dozens of layers of post-production and overdubs and the agonizing over mixing and mastering that usually accompanies a Bruce production.
  9. Van Morrison, “Almost Independence Day”: While the guitar riff sounds almost like “Wish You Were Here,” the song’s other Pink Floyd connection is the length – it’s over ten minutes – if not the thematic content. Van sorta goes on a rambling, stream-of-consciousness sort of thing over the course of the song, but it sounds amazing. The low buzzsaw of that keyboard (or is it a cello or a double bass? I honestly don’t know) that cuts through occasionally gets me every time, and I wish I could figure out how he got that tone out of it and how I could duplicate it.
  10. Collective Soul, “Shine”: So apparently the entire album this song is off of was just the demos the lead singer did on his own, playing all the instruments himself. The little “yeah” before the chorus was sung through a toilet paper roll, which is a hilarious bit of trivia with which to impress your friends.

Playlist #201

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Happy Monday, everybody. We’re in plague mode in the Casa Brancottrell; everyone has been sick all weekend, with high temperatures and body aches and all that goodness. But hey, even having a fever over 102 all weekend won’t stop me from giving you a new playlist!

  1. Bruce Springsteen, “O Mary Don’t You Weep”: I often wish Bruce would do more stuff like this. It’s so loose and he’s clearly having a blast playing these songs all off the cuff. Music can be fun, Brucey.
  2. Phil Collins, “The Roof Is Leaking”: I love that this song is made up entirely of banjo, piano, and slide guitar. It’s so strange, and yet it works.
  3. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Spike (Live)”: The live version is far superior to the album version, as it includes the story of who Spike is (a dude in a leather jacket and a dog collar) and how he found himself being castigated by some dude sitting at a bar.
  4. Bob Dylan, “Born In Time”: It still surprises me that Dylan writes and records songs this good that just…don’t make it onto an album proper. It’s why I keep getting the Bootleg Series collections whenever they come out, because there are always hidden gems like this.
  5. Marc Sibilia, “More To This”: Heard this guy playing this song on Instagram months ago, downloaded the official version of it, and it remains pretty darn good.
  6. Waxahatchee, “War”: I like how simple all of Waxahatchee’s songs seem at first. But then, you start digging into the songs, and you discover a whole world of amazing bits that come together to create a perfect song.
  7. Linda Ronstadt, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”: Beautiful song. Ronstadt knocks it out of the park.
  8. Dolly Parton, “Shine”: Dolly Parton, covering a Collective Soul song? It’s more likely (and more bluegrassy) than you think!
  9. Josh Ritter, “Golden Age Of Radio”: There’s never a bad time to listen to this song. It’s just always great.
  10. Lizzo, “Love In Real Life”: Lizzo does a pretty damn convincing version of The Strokes on this new single. I kinda dig it.