Greatest Hits (Double LP)

You can grumble about the early romps that aren't here--what, no "Rosalita"?--or about your favorite B-side not being included, but the fact is these are the songs that have lasted through Bruce Springsteen's first two decades. This really is the cream.

The four blockbusters that open GREATEST HITS weren't actually hits--"Born To Run" peaked at #23 on the charts, "Badlands" didn't break the top 40, and the other two weren't singles at all--but they laid down the rules for all the hits that followed and they've remained concert and rock radio staples. "Born To Run" wraps a restless American dream into one of the most rollicking rock 'n' roll singles ever made; the latter couple find the dreamer waking up and finding real folk struggling with that dream everywhere he looks. What follows is one of the greatest strings of singles to ever deal head-on with that confrontation between dreams and realities.

The four new songs on GREATEST HITS find Springsteen finally finding a way to incorporate his E Street Band--which hadn't performed on a studio album for 11 years before this--into his current infatuation with mellower, though no less hard-hitting rock. "Murder Incorporated" is actually an E Street outtake from 1982, and it's an all-out, searing track. The others, all 1995 recordings (though "This Hard Land" was also written in the early eighties) form a cycle about unrealized dreams, in love, friendship and life.