Bruce Springsteen: Ranking His Albums From Worst To Best

10. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HnEDhnDgA Year Of Release: 1973 Key Tracks: For You, Growin' Up, Blinded By The Light Bruce's first studio album! Bruce didn't exactly set the world (or charts) on fire with Greetings but he did produce a really good folk rock record, one that is vastly different from everything else in his back catalogue. It only sold 25,000 copies in its first year (reaching No.60 on the Billboard 200) but its status has grown considerably in recent years. Bruce does his best Bob Dylan impression as he spits rhyming lines about eccentric characters and situations. He must have had a thesaurus handy when he wrote this one. It is full of innuendo, metaphor and offbeat 70s poetry. It is brilliant, a really good rookie effort that, unfortunately, sounds like it arrived five years too late. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. is a playful album with an acute sense of humour and self-awereness. It was generally well-received but didn't do a great deal for Bruce or his career at the time. In fact, the only thing Bruce got from it at the time were royalty cheques from Manfred Man's No.1 hit cover of Blinded By The Light - Bruce's only No.1 as a songwriter. A phenomenal yet strangely underrated debut.