10 Underrated Bruce Springsteen Songs You Should Listen To

This track was released on the American Beauty EP, a four-track collection of studio outtakes from previous albums. If you listen to it with a distracted ear, that may seem like a wise decision. It's moderately catchy, pretty on the ear but a little uninteresting, and it seems like a run-of-the-mill love song which understandably did not make the cut.

You have to say, with this sweet chord progression and inoffensive title, Bruce made it real easy to miss out on the most powerful political song he'd release that decade. The verses make things unmistakably clear though:

"She says in this house we’ve abandoned history, in this house there are no laws

Just the false taste of paradise, and then the fall

In this house the guilty go unpunished, blood and silence prevail

Here the dead remain nameless, the nameless remain jailed

The narrator of the song is actually an inmate at the Guantamo Bay detention camp (the line "Tonight I’ll have you naked, and crawlin’ at the end of my leash" is a reference to an infamous photograph taken there). "Blue eyes" presumably being the prison guard who's torturing him, the chorus is anything but a cute pick-up line: it is an insane serenade sung out of despair.

You can try, but it won't be easy to find a song this melodious, with lyrics this macabre.