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One Great Hour of Bruce Springsteen in as Few Songs as Possible

Eight great tunes

Paul Combs
4 min readAug 21, 2022
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Over the past few days, several people have jumped on the prompt Walter Bowne never intended as a challenge: list as many songs under 3 minutes in length as you can without exceeding an hour total. Of course I did one myself, and you can find it below:

If you know me, though, you almost had to know that as soon as I finished I started thinking in the other direction: how few songs can I fit in a one-hour limit? Now, I could have cheated, just picked one Rush song, and been done with the whole thing. But it’s August, the anniversary month of the Born to Run album, so I obviously had to put a Springsteen spin on it: one hour of Bruce in as few songs as possible.

Once again, I could have cheated even with this. Bruce is notorious for stretching songs to impossible lengths in concert: he’ll tell stories midway through, introduce the band, or let Nils do a 6-minute solo while he takes a short nap (he is 72, after all). A perfect example is the classic “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which runs a lean 3:11…

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Paul Combs
Paul Combs

Written by Paul Combs

Writer, bookseller, would-be roadie for the E Street Band. My ultimate goal is to make books as popular in Texas as high school football...it may take a while.

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