Only The Strong Survive

Albums of all cover versions can fall into a couple of different areas. Some are contractual obligations. An artist owes the record company an album and what’s easier than recording a bunch of songs you don’t have to labor over writing.

Sometimes they’re pay-it-back tributes to music that influenced an artist, like David Bowie’s Pin-Ups. Or indulgent crate-digging through an artist’s record collection (see Elvis Costello’s Kojak Variety).

Bruce Springsteen’s Only The Strong Survive falls into the former, a heartfelt revisiting of soul and R&B standards and half-remembered songs that once clipped the lower regions of the Top 40. It’s Springsteen’s passion and commitment – his strong and expressive voice – that puts this record over. That and the arrangements, all of which fall close to the originals and feature an army of backup singers, Motown strings, Stax horns.

The song titles give away the ground he’s covering here: When She Was My Girl (Four Tops), I Wish It Would Rain (Temptations), Don’t Play That Song (Aretha), Turn Back the Hands of Time (Tyrone Davis) – heartache and regret were no strangers to soul music. There’s an unexpected cover of the Commodore’s 1985 tribute to the recently departed Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, Nightshift, a song that deals with another kind of loss and a subject that Springsteen seems preoccupied with lately.

Jerry Butler’s 1968 hit Hey Western Union Man is a reminder that once upon a time, songs that referenced telegrams and made use of that dot-dash cadence were big hits, like Western Union by the Five Americans.

Whether purposefully or not (and I tend to think that as with most Springsteen projects, a lot of thought went into the song selection), a few songs fit right into the artist’s persona. The Motown oldie from 1966, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted (Jimmy Ruffin), opens with a line that sure sounds like something Springsteen would have written on one of his better days: “As I walk this land of broken dreams/I have visions of many things/But happiness is just an illusion/Filled with sadness and confusion.”

Someday We’ll Be Together is not just a cover of the underrated Supremes hit from late 1969, but a title he used for a song intended for Darkness on the Edge of Town that didn’t make the final cut.

The Four Tops’ version of 7 Rooms of Gloom always felt chaotic and unpleasant. You can make out the lyrics in Springsteen’s version better and it takes on the life of the midnight ranting of a man whose wife has left him. He can’t sleep and as he roams his house in the dark, bumping into the furniture, it recalls Springsteen’s own line from Adam Raised A Cain about walking “these empty rooms looking for something to blame.”

If I have a single complaint, it’s the album cover. Hey Bruce, it’s okay to smile occasionally. And stop posing in front of cars. Brian Wilson hasn’t been photographed with a surfboard since the Kennedy administration.

Bruce has taken many paths over the course of his long career. Sometimes, there are detours that leave me cold, but this album is not one of them.