Yes, I've Met Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen, Don't Fucking Ask Because That's Between Me and Him...and His Mother...and Sister...and Uncle Juan

Via GodIHateYourMagicRat we see this article on The 10 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs of the Last Ten Years.

Bruce is an anomaly in that he isn't like the Stones, who fart out a shitty record every coupla years that they immediately ignore so they can play Start Me Up and Paint it Black at every show, or U2, who earnestly promise a "return to our roots!" with every record that suuuuuuuuucks hard.  Bruce has spent the last decade+ crafting albums that he honestly believes to be as valid as his earliest ones, never settling on pumping out a Bruce-by-the-numbers album so he can go around playing Badlands 300 nights a year. He also fears no stylistic shift: in the last decade alone he's done THE definitive 9/11 album, a solo acoustic album, a folk tribute to Pete Seeger, and a love letter to pop such as Big Star, among others. I'm not saying all of these albums are Born to Run, but each one of them have more than their fair share of not only great music, but music that is fresh, alive, and essential. It's cliché to say the Boss isn't mailing it in after all these years, but it's still pretty stunning to me, someone who generally refuses to listen to any song made after 1985, that three songs he's made in the last decade make it into my all-time Bruce Top 10: Girls In Their Summer Clothes, The Rising and Land of Hope and Dreams. This is incredibly rare - does ANYbody have a Ramones song in their top 10 after Too Tough to Die, or The Clash after London Calling? The Replacements after Pleased To Meet Me? And yet Bruce, in his 60's, can still produce material that stands up to the greatest songs that made him, for lack of a better word, Bruce. He's also the only songwriter asking questions that bands half his age should be asking. It's why I declared him Artist of the Decade for the Aughts, something that would have seemed unfathomable when he started putting out records in the 1970s. Incredibly, his best song might still be ahead.

Here's Blood Brothers, whch was recorded in 1995. I know, not in the last decade - whaddya want me to say? I'm an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in Toughskins!