BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN : ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE

  1. Only The Strong Survive
  2. Soul Days (with Sam Moore)
  3. Nightshift
  4. Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)
  5. The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore
  6. Turn Back The Hands Of Time
  7. When She Was My Girl
  8. Hey, Western Union Man
  9. I Wish It Would Rain
  10. Don't Play That Song
  11. Any Other Way
  12. I Forgot To Be Your Lover (with Sam Moore)
  13. 7 Rooms Of Gloom
  14. What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted
  15. Someday We'll Be Together

Label : Columbia

Release Date : November 11, 2022

Length : 50:34

Review (AllMusic) : 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. This persistent, evident love of soul means his decision to cut a collection of covers of R&B chestnuts isn't surprising, nor is it a shock that the 15 songs chosen for this 2022 comp demonstrate deep knowledge and good taste; those traits have been a constant throughout Springsteen's career. The unexpected thing about Only the Strong Survive is how it's essentially a two-man show between Springsteen and co-producer Ron Aniello, who plays every instrument save brass, woodwinds, and strings. There are also occasional backing vocals, along with two guest spots by Sam Moore, but the basic tracks are all studio creations of Aniello, who expertly re-creates the sounds of Motown, Philadelphia International, Stax, and Chicago's uptown soul. His mastery in crafting the tracks inadvertently illustrates the distance between the originals and the covers; those oldies crackled with the magic created by a bunch of musicians in a small room but these digital wonders feel studied and airless, even if they do sound good. The lack of additional musicians does mean that all the attention is placed on Springsteen's performance and, thankfully, he sounds quite good. He knows how to play with his diminished range, knows how to get a good growl going, knows how to croon without getting saccharine -- skills that help keep the proceedings lively. It's enjoyable enough that it takes a minute to realize that Springsteen and Aniello aren't exactly re-interpreting these 15 songs: they're merely playing them for a lark. That's enough for a good time but once Only the Strong Survive fades out with the last notes of "Someday We'll Be Together," there's not much that lingers behind in the memory.

Review (Pitchfork) : There are Bruce Springsteen albums born of obsession and perfectionism, endless studio hours and piles of discarded could-have-been classics left in the vaults. There are others that arrive in sudden flashes of creativity, bolts of inspiration with the smoke still rising while you listen. And now there is Only the Strong Survive, a covers album he made in early lockdown during “off hours” at his home studio, where he recreated a selection of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs alongside producer Ron Aniello and engineer Rob Lebret. Before you rush to judgment about another classic rocker taking the Rod Stewart route, it’s important to remember that covers have always meant something different for Springsteen. Whether he was turning a Jimmy Cliff reggae single into an arena-ready burst of tension and release, or digging through centuries of American folk music to craft his most playful and vibrant record of the 21st century, he has a way of not only telling us his favorite songs but also showing us how those songs make him feel. It’s a quality that’s allowed chestnuts like “Shout” to stand alongside, say, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Jersey Girl” as staples of his concert setlists for decades. From the opening snare thwack of the title track, however, it’s clear that Only the Strong Survive is a less transformative endeavor. “Now I remember my first love—of course, the whole thing went wrong,” the 73-year-old announces in his warm crackle of a speaking voice, updating Jerry Butler’s original with only some slight variations in word choice and an actorly chuckle. From there, it’s almost note-for-note: the strings and backing vocalists, the walking bassline and mid-chorus fadeout. (A “Volume 1” on the cover indicates there’s more where these recordings came from, and it quickly becomes evident how he was able to be so prolific.) The most surprising thing about Only the Strong Survive is the song selection itself, which ranges from classics like Jimmy and David Ruffin’s “Turn Back the Hands of Time” to relatively modern fare like Dobie Gray’s 2000 song “Soul Days” and later gems from groups like the Commodores (1985’s “Nightshift”) and the Four Tops (1981’s “When She Was My Girl”). For those with even a casual familiarity with Springsteen’s music, it will be obvious what draws him to this material. The arrangements share his penchant for grand catharsis and minor-to-major uplift, blues in the verse and gospel in the chorus. In the lyrics, there are Chevrolets, backroads, summer nights, and lost love. Even just glancing at titles like “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and “Someday We’ll Be Together,” the connections are so evident and obvious that he barely has to adjust them to put his own stamp on the music—and so he doesn’t. In the place of his more characteristic touch is a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic-sounding accompaniment provided largely by Aniello as his one-man band. (Sam Moore of Sam & Dave makes two welcome appearances as a guest vocalist.) Since 2012’s Wrecking Ball and its grab-bag follow-up, High Hopes, Aniello has proven to be Springsteen’s most focused studio collaborator, seemingly pushing him to explore a specific element on each release. On 2019’s Western Stars, it was a wistful, melodic side of his solo songwriting, embellished with lush orchestral arrangements that felt like completely new territory. On 2020’s warm plate of comfort food Letter to You, it was the live-in-the-studio sound of the E Street Band: a familiar atmosphere that encouraged Springsteen to dig back into his catalog for abandoned songs he had yet to record with his bandmates. On Only the Strong Survive, as Springsteen tells it, the focus is his voice. In an introductory video, he is practically shouting with excitement about the fruits of this exercise. (“I’m a good old man,” he says, cracking himself up.) You can hear what’s got him so hyped. From a gravelly whisper to a full-throated croon, a giddy roar to an anguished howl, the material allows him to explore the range of his late-career delivery, the same way his Broadway show could swerve between vulnerability and self-effacing humor without losing its narrative thread. There’s a jolt of comic desperation as he bellows “I live with emptiness” to kick off “7 Rooms of Gloom” and a sense of profound tenderness as he tells us it’s “gonna be all right” in “Nightshift.” He makes the nostalgia of “Soul Days” feel like a recollection of his formative years in Asbury Park, while it’s easy to imagine the regret of “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” situated between his own tortured chronicles of couples drifting in and out of each other’s lives. On a record whose unrelenting brightness veers as close to Vegas as Springsteen has ever allowed himself—even 1992’s Human Touch, another largely upbeat collection with a similar set of influences, feels downright gritty by comparison—these moments of purpose help earn its place in his ongoing winning streak of studio work. It’s got character, and more than that, it’s got energy: Springsteen has never sounded quite so lighthearted, so unburdened, on record. It’s easy to think of a few ways he could have made this music feel more essential to his body of work—say, enlisting his E Street bandmates to help flesh some songs out—but at this stage in his career, he seems more driven by the act of creating itself: lighting a spark and watching as it grows, knowing someone, somewhere, could find a little hope in its light. After all, he reminds us, that’s what these songs provided for him.

Review (The Guardian) : The album’s title is, of course, mostly bluster. Despite its tough-guy posturing, Only the Strong Survive – Bruce Springsteen’s new record of old soul covers – deals in yearning and hurt, in summer nights remembered and love squandered. Its true theme is vulnerability. These, though, are tender moments delivered with the effusive, upbeat vigour of the soul revue segments of Springsteen’s live shows and the Boss’s lived-in, barrel-chested growl: a very feelgood record about feeling bad. The title track, Only the Strong Survive, was originally recorded by former Impressions singer Jerry Butler in 1968; it finds a heartbroken Butler being consoled by his mother. She prescribes resilience and a brave face: you can’t just go to pieces. (It’s hard not to hear the veiled wisdom of the civil rights struggle here too.) Springsteen and his long-time producer Ron Aniello, who, in the absence of most of the E Street Band, plays the majority of the instruments, add oomph in the form of thrumming organ, a cadre of balmy backing vocalists and the E Street horns. You can hear Springsteen chuckling ruefully in the intro. His brawny vocal – that of an older man – contrasts with the protagonist’s youthful romantic despair. Throughout his long and exuberant career, Springsteen has, naturally, paid tribute to a vast quantity of other people’s songs. Twist and Shout – the Top Notes via the Beatles – has long been a feature of his live sets. A glance at his gig statistics on Setlist.fm confirms his love for Jimmy Cliff as well as Patti Smith. Folk activist Pete Seeger has already been the subject of a previous Springsteen compendium, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006). A striking feature of Only the Strong Survive, therefore, is that its 15 songs are not the cuts that Springsteen has been delivering with sweat-drenched abandon since the New Jersey club circuit. (There are live albums, bootlegs and YouTube for those.) It’s a soul set without Soul Man, the Sam & Dave hit that Springsteen revisits regularly live, sometimes with Sam Moore himself guesting, although Moore features on two songs here, Soul Days and I Forgot to Be Your Lover, tracing a vivid songline back to the era. If this album’s November release date suggests it’s now open season on musical gift-giving, the mix of rarities (for Springsteen) with nailed-on tearjerkers (The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, which follows the Walker Brothers’ version) feels generous. To add to the comfort and joy, everything here gleams with brass and bonhomie. When Springsteen and Aniello first started this project in downtime, they codenamed themselves the Night Shift. It was a natural segue from there into a version of the Commodores’ Nightshift, one of many tracks here that were themselves written looking backwards. Nightshift, released in 1985, celebrates soul greats Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, who both died the previous year. Vast swaths of Only the Strong Survive hymn old songs playing on the radio, wish they could have their time again with an ill-treated sweetheart. Springsteen is looking back on looking back; nostalgia, squared. If there is a criticism to be made of this big-hearted wallow, it’s not only that the mood here is galvanising, rather than anything more subtle or bruised – witness the northern soul stomper Do I Love You (Indeed I Do), originally sung in 1965 by Frank Wilson – but that Springsteen is so lovingly loyal to his string-swept, sepia-tinted sources, rather than more artistically brave. There is no attempt to update, reinterpret or own any of this material as, say, the late Johnny Cash did on his series of records celebrating American music. You don’t want to say the k-word – karaoke. It would demean the skill and ardour of this persuasive set. But there could be a wider range of moods here. For that, it helps to dig. On what is a big warm hug of a disc, two tracks stand out, not so much for Springsteen’s performances – rich, warm – but for their backstories. The final cut, Diana Ross & the Supremes’ Someday We’ll Be Together, looks forward to a time when two lovers might reunite. There’s a wry chuckle to be had here too. Although this song was credited to Ross and the Supremes, it was Ross’s first solo record and the track’s wistful longing for unity is rather ironic. Motown lyricist Rodger Penzabene poured his heart out at his own partner’s infidelities into the words of I Wish It Would Rain, a Temptations track from 1967; he took his own life shortly after the song was released. I Wish It Would Rain is the shadow twin of the title track. On Only the Strong Survive, boys shouldn’t cry. On the Temptations cut, they do, and pray for showers to hide those tears. A little more rain could fall on this upbeat arrangement too.