Five Surprisingly Solid Country Covers of Springsteen Songs
A Jersey-meets-Nashville Rate-A-Record
With all due respect to the great man, I believe that Bruce Springsteen’s most recent studio album, Only the Strong Survive, was a huge misstep in an otherwise stellar career (yes, I just wrote that sentence). The album of 1960s soul and R&B songs was decent, but “decent” is a word not normally associated with Springsteen’s five-decade career. Even worse, on his current world tour he has been playing one song from that album at every show, and while the Commodore’s “Nightshift” isn’t a bad song, it should not take up a slot better saved for “Ramrod,” “Lost in the Flood,” or “Gypsy Biker” (to name just the first three that come to mind).
If he wanted to do a cover album of classic songs, he should have gone country. Before you protest that Western Stars was a country album, it was not; it’s clear from the title that it was a western album, and there is a difference between country and western even if Billboard does lump them both together. Consider for just a moment what Bruce and the E Street Band could do with songs like Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” George Strait’s “Baby’s Gotten Good at Goodbye,” and Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.”
