Only the Strong Survive
From the start, Bruce Springsteen has braided the poetic reach of Dylan with the energy and showmanship of a soul singer—so it makes sense that he finally decided to take a minute and pay explicit tribute to the soul and R&B that shaped him. The reads on *Only the Strong Survive* are pretty straight, and you get the sense that that’s the point: Rather than flatter his own interpretive powers, he gets out of the way and lets the songs—and their original arrangements—come through. He’s had practice here, of course: Reflecting on his early days, he once wrote that his high school band The Castiles kept their repertoire stacked with soul covers because they “made the leather heart skip a beat”—a nod to the motorcycle-jacketed Jersey kids who couldn’t make heads or tails of the bohemian milieu of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones but knew everything about “In the Still of the Night” without a lesson or nothing. Soul, for Springsteen, wasn’t just a matter of raw expression or physical endurance, but the sound of working-class people claiming a dignity and comfort that might otherwise be beyond their reach, especially the upwardly mobile orchestrations of Motown. Even after he’d proved his seriousness and credibility as an artist, he kept his music studiously low to the ground, channeling the fresh-off-work feel of Sam Cooke into “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and the ache of Otis Redding into “The Brokenhearted,” or the rock-and-soul hybrids of “Badlands,” “Prove It All Night,” and “Glory Days.” When he finally brought what he later called “the next-generation E Street Band” onto the stage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in March 2012, he introduced himself with a joke any self-respecting James Brown fan would get: “the hardest-working white man in show business.” In terms of selection, *Only the Strong* is an interesting mix. Plenty of Motown, most of it well-known (The Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together,” Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” The Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain”), but also the Frankie Valli (and later Walker Brothers) track “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” whose Vegas-style sound anticipated Springsteen’s own balance of rawness and carefully orchestrated melodrama. Or The Four Tops’ “7 Rooms of Gloom,” which is about as close as classic R&B gets to psychedelia, to say nothing of Springsteen’s own music, which always felt like a rejoinder to the looseness and experimentation of late-’60s rock. “If you played in a bar on the central New Jersey shore in the ’60s and ’70s, you played soul,” he said onstage at the Apollo in 2012. In *Only the Strong Survive*, you can hear the gaps—between Black and white, wealthy and working-class, elevated and elemental—Springsteen has spent more than a half-century trying to close. One night, and one night only.
Bruce brings heaps of feeling to a new set of some of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs, giving them a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic sound.
The Boss shines a light on the greats of the past and leans into his full vocal prowess with this beautiful celebration of soul music
Bruce Springsteen's love letter to soul, Only The Survive is a passion project where the divide between rhythmic soul and Americana just isn’t as wide as you might expect
Springsteen kicks back with the Sixties soul and R&B songs he knows from his teens
Only the Strong Survive may be the first time Bruce Springsteen has recorded an album dedicated to soul and R&B, yet those styles have always been present in his music, welling up in the rhythms and outlook of the E Street Band at their most jubilant.
When his multi-decade shift at the docks of rock is over and done, New Jersey’s most beloved son will go down as one of the greatest and most universally admired performers to ever roll up his sleeves, strap on a telecaster and shout “1,2,3,4!”
Bruce Springsteen does soul… it’s always been there; The Boss has always been a fantastic soul singer, but has always gravitated towards his own brand of
This new album of old soul covers is warm and enjoyable, but leaves you wishing it had gone a little deeper
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Only the Strong Survive’ is expertly crafted, but a rougher hewn approach would have better honored its source material.
On 'Only the Strong Survive', Bruce Springsteen places his voice front and center, and his love for this timeless, joyous soul music is jubilant and infectious.
For his 21st album, one of the greatest rockers of all time takes on vintage R’n’B. What's not to love?