10 Thoughts on Bruce Springsteen’s “Only the Strong Survive”

Here are 10 thoughts about Bruce Springsteen’s “Only the Strong Survive,” an album of covers of classic Soul and R&B songs.

Springsteen Only the Strong Survive

Bruce Springsteen released a covers album of classic Soul and R&B songs called Only the Strong Survive (2022). Springsteen has often covered songs live and he has done another album of covers (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions). Yet, many fans are disappointed that the songwriter is not releasing an album of new material. There are plenty of sources providing in-depth reviews, so instead Chimesfreedom gives you ten quick takes.

1. Short Overall Review: If you like Springsteen, Only the Strong Survive features the artist singing great songs. So if you get past being disappointed by the lack of new original songs, you should just sit back and enjoy this lovely album.

2. Do album reviews matter anymore? Most folks pay for a streaming service and can listen to anything they want without commitment. So if you like Springsteen or are curious, you can listen to the album and make up your own mind. I am old school and resisting streaming so I did buy it as I have done for every Springsteen album; and I’m happy I did.

3. Springsteen’s Voice: As others have noted, Springsteen’s voice has aged like a fine wine, and he is able to pull off these classic songs quite well. For example, on “I Wish It Would Rain,” one of the greatest pop records of all time, nobody can hold a candle to the Temptations’ David Ruffin. Springsteen does not surpass Ruffin or any of the originals, but he does a darn good job.

4. Well, then why do we need this album if we have the better originals? First, Springsteen has earned the right to do whatever he wants, and great songwriters can do tributes to music they love (as Merle Haggard did with albums honoring Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills). Second, if you are a fan, it is fun to hear him sing these classics. And third, while compilation albums can be good and you could make a playlist of the original versions of these songs, one artist doing a covers album offers a consistency to your listening that jumping between artists does not.

5. Good Song, Strange Video: Springsteen’s weird hand movements in the video for the Commodores’ “Nightshift” are distracting and may make it one of his worst videos ever. His facial expressions are distracting too.

6. Sounds Like a Springsteen Classic: By contrast, his recording of and video for “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” sounds like a classic Springsteen song from the first moment when the Boss yells “C’mon.” The video is fantastic and fun too.

6. The Music: The musicians, including the E Street Horns, and backing singers (Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Michelle Moore, Curtis King Jr., Dennis Collins, and Fonzi Thornton) on this album are absolutely fantastic.

7. A Southside Johnny Album? Not surprisingly, Springsteen singing R&B covers at times makes you think you are listening to an album by that other guy from Jersey, Southside Johnny. That is not necessarily a bad thing. At no point is the Southside Johnny connection stronger than on “Don’t Play that Song,” initially made famous by Ben E. King. Springsteen even inserts a reference to the Jersey Shore.

8. Covering Diana Ross: Maybe my favorite track on the album is the final song, with Springsteen singing “Someday We’ll Be Together,” made famous by Diana Ross & the Supremes. Along with Aretha Franklin’s “Don’t Play That Song” and Jackie Shane’s “Any Other Way,” the Supremes song features one of the selections where he is covering a song made famous by female singers. So Springsteen’s recording does add a twist to hear a male voice sing the lyrics. Or maybe it is that Springsteen finds a special connection to the song, having previously written a song with the nearly identical title, “Someday (We’ll Be Together).” Springsteen wrote that outtake from Darkness on the Edge of Town around 1977, but first released it on The Promise (2010).

9. Guest Artist: It’s cool that Sam Moore from Sam & Dave sings on two tracks with Springsteen. But why not a Sam & Dave song? Springsteen has indicated there were a lot of tracks recorded that are not on the album, so I wonder if there will be a sequel album.

10. Repeated Listens: Okay, you could have just read the first point and stopped reading. But the more I listen to the album, the more I get past focusing on differences from the originals and let go and just enjoy the songs. While this album probably won’t be at the top of my list of the greatest Springsteen albums, it will likely be in the running for one of the Springsteen albums I am most likely to play. It will be a great one to play if you have company who may not think they are Springsteen fans.

What do you think of Only the Strong Survive? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Springsteen Makes a Life-Affirming Rocking Statement With “Letter to You”

    On an album wrestling with issues of mortality, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band join together to create one of their most joyous albums just when we needed them most.

    Perhaps touched by the pandemic that has taken so many lives as well as his own advancing years, Bruce Springsteen’s new album Letter to You begins and ends with songs contemplating life’s end. In between those two songs, in an album that serves as a live rousing concert for homebound fans, Springsteen and the E Street Band send a roaring message about what can save America. It is the same message they have been preaching since the 1970s: rock and roll can save our souls. Maybe it is a cliché. But in the hellhole that is 2020, Springsteen and the E Street Band preach, giving us faith and hope.  We may not deserve Letter to You after what we have created in 2020, but it is the album we need.

    The album begins with the warning of a “Big black train comin’ down the track” followed by the truth that “One minute you’re here / Next minute you’re gone.”  It is this statement in the opening track, “One Minute You’re Here,” that permeates through the album and its energy.  The album is of a man of advancing years contemplating death and what it means for his life and his art.

    Consistent with this theme, the album cover photo by Danny Clinch captures Springsteen in winter.  He stands near the location where John Lennon, one of his rock and roll heroes, lost his life at the Dakota. Springsteen’s eyes look into the camera with the determination he brings to facing mortality throughout the album.

    For example, on “Ghosts,” Springsteen seems to be recalling the musicians he has known and has lost, perhaps including Clarence Clemons and Danny Frederici.  But in the face of the losses, Springsteen shouts against his own impending darkness. “I’m alive!” he bellows.  A similar theme runs through “Last Man Standing.”

    The album includes three songs Springsteen wrote decades ago, now polished with the help of the band:  “Janey Needs a Shooter,” “Song for Orphans,” and “If I Was the Priest.”  These songs go back to early in his career, with the latter song famously being played acoustically in 1972 by Springsteen when he was seeking a record contract.  

    These old songs fit with the new ones perfectly, with Springsteen perhaps realizing he is running out of time to give these early songs a proper release.  He also has commented on how it was just plain fun to revisit these old songs written when his lyric writing was much more wordy than in later years.  

    Whatever the reason, the new version of “If I Was the Priest” rushes forth as one of the highlights on the album, ending with a rare album guitar solo from Stevie Van Zandt.  Although I’d heard the acoustic bootlegs many times before, I never realized what a wonderful song it was until this new version (and it’s not just because I like that older wiser Bruce now mostly uses the more grammatically proper “If I were. . . “).

    Springsteen wrote most of the songs during a short period of time this year, and based on Roy Bittan’s advice, he avoided creating demos for the songs. Instead, he brought the songs to the full E Street Band, so they all could work out the arrangements together.

    Thus, you may notice an energy in Letter to You, a Springsteen record recorded through this process for the first time since the 1980s with Born in the U.S.A. I first noticed the powerful sound of this album subconsciously when I started hearing the opening chords of “Letter to You” and “Ghosts” on the radio when I was not expecting them. If nothing else, give this album time to take you by surprise.

    Springsteen seems to be speaking directly to his fans with the lyrics. In the title track, Springsteen tells us that through his music he has been communicating with us all these years, sharing his feelings and thoughts. He reveals that all along he has just been talking with us, as if writing a “Letter to You.”

    But current events run through the songs on Letter to You too. “Rainmaker” was partially written three years before Donald Trump became president. And the image of the rainmaker has appeared throughout American culture including in Burt Lancaster’s amazing performance in the 1956 film The Rainmaker, in Tanya Tucker’s “Lizzie and the Rain Man,” and in Steve Martin’s starring role in Leap of Faith. But it is hard not to think Springsteen is thinking of President Trump in invoking the con men of the West who used to promise rain.

    Rainmaker, a little faith for hire;
    Rainmaker, the house is on fire;
    Rainmaker, take everything you have;
    Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad,
    They’ll hire a rainmaker
    .

    A possible reference to Trump also arises in what may be the best song on the album, “House of A Thousand Guitars.” The song begins with references to a “criminal clown” who “has stolen the throne.”

    But, like the album, “House of A Thousand Guitars” is ultimately about hope, reminiscent of “Mary’s Place” on Springsteen’s post 9/11 The Rising album. Also harkening back to one of Springsteen’s greatest songs “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the new song takes us not on a train but to someplace here in the (hopefully) near future. Perhaps it is a reference to the pandemic someday ending, when we can all come together to find community in the music at the local bars and the stadiums.

    Well it’s alright yeah it’s alright;
    Meet me darling come Saturday night;
    Brother and sister wherever you are,
    We’ll meet in the house of a thousand guitars
    .

    Springsteen told Rolling Stone about how important “House of A Thousand Guitars” is to him : “It’s about this entire spiritual world that I wanted to build for myself,” he says, “and give to my audience and experience with my band. It’s like that gospel song ‘I’m Working on a Building.’ That’s the building we’ve been working on all these years. It also speaks somewhat to the spiritual life of the nation. It may be one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. It draws on everything I’ve been trying to do for the past 50 years.”

    Similarly in singing about “The Power of Prayer,” heaven is found from entering a bar and hearing the voice of Ben E. King.

    Yet, as the album began with a slow song contemplating death, the final song “I’ll See You In My Dreams” contemplates a lost friend: “And though you’re gone / And my heart’s been emptied it seems / I’ll see you in my dreams.” Springsteen notes that our human connections live on, through such things as shared memories (records, guitars, books, etc.). And that we will all meet again, if not in another world, then in our dreams and memories of one another, as he asserts, “For death is not the end.”

    In the book Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote about how humans deal with the inevitability of death. He advised that the best way to live was to confront the fears openly, so that whatever humans do “on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.”

    As he sings in the title track here, Springsteen has always tried to reveal what his “heart finds true.” And for decades, he has been bringing together fans in life-affirming bars, concert halls, and stadiums. Now that the pandemic has tried to take that live human connection from us, Springsteen’s new (and possibly last?) album Letter to You faces the rumble of our terrors and panic. And he comes out preaching. And what he preaches is the power of truth, joy, memories, togetherness, and rock and roll.

    What do you think of the Letter to You? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Childhood Summers In the Movies

    Slate has put together a movie montage supercut featuring scenes of childhood summers from various films. Along with the sound of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” the video Nostalgia of Summer is sure to take you back to your childhood . . . or at least make you remember some of these movies. Although it skews toward more recent movies, it still is a nice nostalgia trip.

    What is your favorite movie featuring children in the summer? Of course, Stand by Me (1986) is a great movie about childhood, but so is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Don’t Forget Who’s Taking You Home

    You can dance every dance with the guy
    Who gives you the eye, let him hold you tight;
    . . .
    But don’t forget who’s taking you home,
    And in whose arms you’re gonna be;
    So darlin’, save the last dance for me.

    — Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, “Save the Last Dance for Me”

    CBS Sunday Morning recently featured a story about divorce attorney Raoul Felder, which surprisingly revealed a touching story about the co-writer of the song, “Save the Last Dance for Me.” The song became a number one recording by The Drifters with Ben E. King on October 17, 1960.  Later, it would be covered by others, including Michael Bublé and Dolly Parton.

    Doc Pomus

    Doc Pomus

    Raoul Felder’s brother was Jerome Solon Felder, who became better known as a songwriter under the name Doc Pomus. Pomus, who was born in 1925, developed polio when he was 7 years old so had to walk on crutches and later rely on a wheelchair. Starting in the 1950s, Pomus wrote several hit songs with pianist Mort Shuman.

    Pomus’s Wedding

    Pomus wrote the lyrics to “Save the Last Dance for Me” as he looked back on the day he married Broadway actress and dancer Willi Burke in 1957.  The song recounts a memory from their wedding reception at the Waldorf Astoria.

    The wheelchair-bound Pomus wrote the from the bittersweet perspective of a man who cannot dance with his new bride, so he can only look on as she dances with other men. But he reminds her that they are going home together at the end of the night.

    Someone today may try to say the song sounds a little sexist.  But the story behind the song gives it a deeper context. Also, some different sources disagree slightly on whether Pomus wrote “Save the Last Dance” on the wedding day, looking back on that day, or after another dance. But the most reliable ones connect it to the wedding reception. And all agree that the song was influenced by a real event as Pomus watched other men dance with the woman he loved.

    Ben E. King’s Emotional Recording

    A related story may explain the great vocal by Ben E. King on the song. As The Drifters prepared to record “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Atlantic owner Ahmet Ertegun told King how Pomus came to write the song.

    After hearing the story, King fought back tears as he prepared to lay down his vocals on the song.  And then he gave one of his most moving performances that captures the joy and sadness in the lyrics. (Hear an interview with King about the song on WNYC.)

    Below is the wonderful recording of “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Ben E. King and The Drifters.

    Life After “Save the Last Dance for Me”

    Pomus and Shuman wrote several other classics, although it is hard to imagine one as personal as “Save the Last Dance for Me.” The team’s hits include “A Teenager in Love,” “This Magic Moment,” “Turn Me Loose,” “Little Sister,” “Surrender,” “Viva, Las Vegas,” and “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.”

    Pomus also wrote songs with Phil Spector, Dr. John, Willy DeVille, and others. Others, like Bob Dylan and Pomus’s friend Lou Reed, wanted to write with Pomus.

    I could not find any details, but it appears it was not true that the singer in the song “Never, never” let the dancer go.  Unfortunately, Pomus’s marriage to Burke did not last. Although it is too bad for them, the rest of us got a great song from the relationship.

    Pomus died of cancer in 1991. In 1992, Pomus was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

    And that is the story behind the song.

    What is your favorite Doc Pomus song? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Is That All There Is?: Jerry Leiber, Rest in Peace

    Leiber and Stoller Hound Dog On August 22, 2011, Jerry Leiber, part of the great song-writing team with Mike Stoller, passed away at the age of 78 from cardiopulmonary failure.

    Leiber’s impact on your life may be best summarized by this list of songs he co-wrote, mostly writing the lyrics while Stoller handled the music: Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,” Dion’s “Ruby Baby,” The Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” The Searchers’ “Love Potion No. 9,” Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?,” Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” (written w/ Ben E. King and also recorded by John Lennon), Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” (Leiber and Phil Spector), George Benson’s “On Broadway,” and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

    Take away Leiber’s work and you have to imagine Elvis without “Jailhouse Rock,” or the movie Stand By Me without the song — or Reservoir Dogs without “Stuck in the Middle With You” (not for the faint of heart).

    Although many may not recognize the name, the above songs and others will be there for generations. Rolling Stone has a nice article about Leiber’s career.

    Check out Leiber in this video, recounting how he and Stoller came to form the partnership that put them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

    Rest in peace Mr. Leiber, and thanks for the songs, including this advice from “Is That All There Is?”:

    For I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you,
    When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself,

    Is that all there is, is that all there is?
    If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing;
    Let’s break out the booze and have a ball,
    If that’s all there is.

    UPDATE (Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011): After the above story was posted, we learned that we lost another great songwriter. Nick Ashford died of cancer at the age of 69. Like Jerry Leiber, Ashford was famous for writing great songs with a partner, Valerie Simpson, who eventually became Ashford’s wife too. Their songs included Diana Ross’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Reach Out and Touch,” Ray Charles’s “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor” (covered here by John Mayer and John Scofield), Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” (covered by Whitney Houston too), and one of my favorites, the Marvelette’s “Destination Anywhere,” which was featured in the movie The Commitments. Ashford & Simpson had success as performers too, including a hit with a song that has a title that described Ashford’s songwriting talent: “Solid (as a Rock).”

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