Bruce Spreengsteen

Bruce Hornsby's hardest-rocking album, A Night on the Town announces that he is heading into a different direction in its first few notes. John Mellencamp's producer Don Gehman gives the sound, especially John Molo's drums, a feel reminiscent of Mellencamp's best work. The material here is among Hornsby's best, and guest players include Jerry Garcia, tenor saxman Wayne Shorter, banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck, vocalist Shawn Colvin (before she was known), and jazz bass legend Charlie Haden. The arrangements still include the mix of synthesized and real percussion, and the trademark piano licks are sprinkled abundantly throughout, but the overall feel is much more rock & roll than anything before or since.

Though Springsteen’s 1992-93 World Tour ran a full calendar year, his first outing sans E Street Band carried the sense of a perpetual work in progress for good reason.

The Tunnel of Love tour again? That’s surely a sentiment some are expressing with this month’s release of New York 5/16/88, the outstanding opening night performance from the final, five-show stand on the US leg of the 1988 tour.

On February 8th, 2013, Bruce Springsteen was honored as the 2013 MusiCares Person Of The Year. MusiCares was established in 1989 by the Recording Academy to provide a safety net of critical assistance for music people in times of need, through innovative programs and services. A highlight of Grammy week activities, this recording brings together a stellar list of other artists paying tribute to Bruce and his music performing many of the songs he wrote throughout his illustrious career, as well as Bruce himself and the E Street Band performing new songs and a few favorites.

Western Stars is a title that suggests wide-open, cinematic vistas, music made for the outer reaches of a widescreen. Such sweeping ambition isn't necessarily alien to Bruce Springsteen, a rocker who designed his self-styled 1975 breakthrough as a larger-than-life hybrid of AM pop and FM album rock profundity – a daring fusion that eventually favored the latter, perhaps because it was easier for the E-Street Band to fill arenas with cranked amps and big riffs…

Best Of Bruce Springsteen is a collection of original songs spanning his storied 50-year recording career, from 1973's Greeting from Asbury Park, NJ to 2020's Letter To You. It will be available as an 18-track set across 2 LPs or 1 CD. The collection spans early-career favourites like "Growin' Up" and "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," staples of Springsteen's live shows from "Dancing In The Dark" to "The Rising," best-selling breakouts like "Born To Run" and "Hungry Heart," as well as recent releases "Hello Sunshine" and "Letter To You." Here, these career-spanning works appear together in one set for the first time. The packaging includes archival photos and a new essay.

Bruce Cockburn's self-titled debut's blend of diversity, enthusiasm, and innocence never quite resurfaced again in his work, especially in his more clinical, politically inclined tracts of later decades. The opening number, "Going to the Country," still evokes that hippie-esque, back-to-the-earth movement as well as any song ever recorded, complete with a sly wink that keeps it fresh to this day. And since this was 1970, the album also comes equipped with some of those quaint excesses of the period; try the nasal tone poem gracing "The Bicycle Trip." "Musical Friends" remains a lively, happy-go-lucky classic with piano signature lifted from Paul McCartney's playbook; it's difficult to picture the dour Cockburn of more recent years ever having this much fun. In contrast, "Thoughts on a Rainy Afternoon" offers a trance-like, introspective atmosphere reminiscent of British folkie legend Nick Drake.

Bruce Cockburn is Canada's version of Richard Thompson, a brilliant folk-rock guitarist who also writes smart, acerbic lyrics about the twisted ways of modern society and modern romance. Never as vicious or as funny as Thompson, Cockburn is a more restrained, less obvious talent, but rewarding just the same. Dart to the Heart, free of political abstractions and filled with personal musings on love, is his best since 1985's World of Wonders. The first single, "Listen for the Laugh," is a boisterous hornªpowered rocker that insists good-naturedly that the surest sign of love is not sighing but laughter–and very specific sort of laughter, like "a chain saw in a velvet glove." That's a good description for Cockburn's guitar work, too, for he keeps it buried behind his deep, sleepy vocals, but if you listen closely you can hear just how his picking chews up chords and sends notes flying in all directions.