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Everybody Form a Line: A Look at Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’
It is sadly underappreciated
Born to Run, The River, Born in the USA…these are the albums that immediately come to mind when most people think of Bruce Springsteen, and rightly so. Ask them to go deeper, and you’ll get Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, Magic, and even his debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (Alex Markham would surely include Working on a Dream). The album that rarely gets mentioned nearly 50 years after its released is his second, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.
Sophomore efforts can be a hit-or-miss proposition for any artist. With novelists, for example, the second book is often not as good as their debut simply because they poured a lifetime of ideas into that first book and are basically starting from scratch with the second. The same can be true with musicians, and there is no doubt that (lyrically at least) Springsteen threw all he had into that debut album. This being Bruce, however, the second album was, in my opinion, superior to the first; it has faded from memory simply because it had the misfortune of being overshadowed two years later by Born to Run, his third album and The Greatest Album Ever.
