5 Bruce Springsteen Songs That Sound Even Cooler Today

In his over 50-year career, Bruce Springsteen has earned innumerable titles and honors, worn a number of hats both artistically and personally, and yet perhaps his most enduring and undeniable trait of all is that he's just so effortlessly cool. There aren't many who can turn a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt into an iconic style, but the Boss did so with aplomb. Likewise, he built himself a career out of making pieces of everyday American life cool, no matter how trivial or mundane they otherwise seemed.

Across dozens of albums of material, Springsteen has turned his fixations to seemingly every working-class occupation, storied American city, and other slice of Americana he could think of, building an almost incomparably vast catalog of odes to quotidian living. Of course, with so many songs to his name, especially a few all-time anthems like "Born to Run" and "Born in the U.S.A.", some of the best from the Boss' past can go underappreciated.

We're out to fix that today, as we find a few Springsteen songs from his deep discography that not only warrant an active listen but do so more today than ever. We looked for lesser-known songs, avoiding his many radio staples in favor of tracks that may not have hit when they were released, but nonetheless aged like fine wine. To that end, here are five Springsteen songs that sound even cooler today.

It took a long while for Springsteen's 1982 album "Nebraska" to finally achieve the recognition it deserves as a masterpiece of minimalist songwriting. Initially, the album confused fans with its wildly stripped-down arrangements and the dark, almost dangerous feeling that pervades the album. Neither of the album's singles hit the Billboard charts, a noticeable contrast from his previous entries like "Born to Run" and his then-most-recent album, "The River." In fact, it was largely due to his phenomenal success over the past decade, and the feeling of disconnect from his roots that it created, that led Springsteen to hole up in a small New Jersey town with a simple tape recorder and create almost the entire album in one sitting, by himself.

Though he tried recording his "Nebraska" demos with the full E Street Band, Springsteen ultimately preferred the songs as they were, releasing an album built almost solely from his voice, lyrics, and guitar. Without any complex instrumentation to distract listeners, a song like "State Trooper" is free to let its quiet, menacing mood shine through. The totality of instrumentation on the song is merely Springsteen's acoustic guitar strumming a constant rhythm in a minor key, evoking the sinister bass line of The Doors' "Riders on the Storm." The only other sound is Springsteen's low, desperate growls that escalate to wordless yelps by the end, delivering one of the album's theses, "Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere."

It would be almost impossible to heap too much praise upon Springsteen's 1975 magnum opus "Born to Run" (which he initially hated) and many have tried. The album is frequently hailed as a masterpiece and has remained a staple among various "greatest albums" rankings since its debut. Given its success and legacy, unparalleled among Springsteen's other discography, the album doesn't seem like it could contain any hidden gems. However, both the title track and "Thunder Road" cast exceptionally long shadows, long enough even to hide the would-be anthem "Night."

If it had been on any other album, "Night" would have been a single. From start to finish, it's energetic and its lyrics are as paradoxically relatable and revealing as any from Springsteen's canon. The song begins with a typically Springsteen-ian appeal to the working person, and akin to some of the Boss' more famous anthems, "Night" ends with a beautifully articulated call to hope. "All day, they're busting you up on the outside," Springsteen sings. "But tonight, you're gonna break on through to the inside." The last lines are every bit as big and bolstering as any on "Born to Run," reassuring the long-suffering listener that, "Somewhere tonight / You run sad and free until all you can see is the night."

In 1977, Manfred Mann's Earth Band scored a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with "Blinded by the Light." The track was lauded for its expansive, prog rock-esque arrangement full of memorable synths and lush, indulgent guitar lines, and in addition gained just as much fame, or perhaps infamy, from its chorus, which included either the word "deuce" or "d****e" depending on who you ask (though singer Chris Thompson has always sworn he said "deuce"). Because of the song's success in the hands of Manfred Mann's Earth Band, there are some who aren't aware that Springsteen wrote and released the song first, and even among those who do know, it's fair to say that the track has been thoroughly underrated.

Oddly enough, Springsteen specifically wrote "Blinded by the Light" to be a hit for its album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." and indeed released it as the album's lead single. It failed to chart completely, but nonetheless remained a very early testament to the artist's exceptional talent as a lyricist. Springsteen has revealed that he wrote the piece using a rhyming dictionary, which is plain to see in its verses, each line of which has its own internal AAAB rhyme scheme. Only Springsteen could write lines as infantile as "Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east / He says, 'Dethrone the Dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that's where they expect it least'" and still work in a nicely-veiled commentary on church scandals.

After increasingly leaning into stillness and quiet with "Darkness on the Edge of Town," then "The River," and then "Nebraska," Springsteen pulled a drastic 180 with 1984's "Born in the U.S.A.", his most straightforward foray into pop songwriting. His swerve was a success, and the album produced mega-hits like "Dancing in the Dark," "I'm on Fire," "Glory Days," and the title track. Naturally, that left a few songs on the album in the dust, even singles such as the hilariously-named "Cover Me."

What makes the name so funny is that Springsteen originally wrote the song for Donna Summer. It wasn't until producer Jon Landau convinced the Boss of the track's worth that he decided to keep the song and record it for "Born in the U.S.A." As a part of Springsteen's collected works, "Cover Me" is certainly one of his most straightforward, '80s-appropriate pop songs, but that only serves to highlight his artistry even more. The wailing guitar and simple pop chord progression hide deceptively adroit lyrics about two lovers sheltering each other from the cruelty of the outside world. "This whole world is out there just trying to score / I've seen enough; I don't want to see any more / Cover me," sings Springsteen, demonstrating that even in his most commercial songwriting, the Boss still has room to add his own deft, dark little twists on the formula.

One of Springsteen's defining characteristics is his profound sense of empathy. Time after time, he's been able to put himself in his subjects' shoes, crafting their narratives into songs that come across as deeply honest and respectful, and yet intimately revealing. There may not be a more profound display of Springsteen's empathic storytelling than on "The Rising," his 2002 album that bared his emotions in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The album has a number of standouts including the title track and "My City of Ruins," but "Paradise" is the album at its simplest and most humane, qualities that many will find refreshing and resonant today. The song is split between three narrators, each affected by a deliberately vague terrorist attack. As Springsteen revealed to Uncut, the three characters were inspired by a woman whose husband had died in the attack; a survivor; and perhaps surprisingly, one of the attackers themselves.

Springsteen told Uncut that he felt compelled to write about even the attacker because he found "the loss of life and the false paradise" devastating. The song is indeed devastating to hear, not least because of its slow, sparse arrangement and Springsteen's unusually plaintive voice. Yet it ends on a positive note, with what Springsteen called "a survivor's verse." It's a short tale of a victim reaching a place "between life and death" and making it back to feel the sun again, a reminder that, as the Boss himself put it, "life is here. It's all you have and it's here and now."