Member-only story
Springsteen’s ‘The River’ Album: A Deep Dive into a Musical Masterpiece
It’s a river that never runs dry
I thought that reviewing Springsteen’s Born to Run album would be the most daunting review I would write about his music; as I said in that piece, it’s like trying to review the Sistine Chapel. As it turns out, I was wrong. Having lived my whole life with the eight songs on that album, reviewing it was simple compared to the 20-song monster I’ve been avoiding: The River.
Second only to Born to Run in its impact on my life, The River is hard to classify. It was the first album Springsteen released after turning 30, and is in many ways his first “adult” album. It is certainly the first where he looked at all those kids he put in all those cars on previous albums and asked himself what to do with them once they got where they were going. I could wax philosophical about these things, but Bruce already did that better than I ever could (no surprise there).
During The River anniversary tour in 2016, after opening the show with “Meet Me in the City,” and before launching into the entire album (in order, be still my soul) he described The River this way:
“By the time I got to The River I had taken notice of things that bond people to their lives, their work, their commitments, their families, and I…
