25. Bruce Springsteen – “The River”
Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” isn’t just sad—it’s absolutely soul-crushing. A brief summary of its events: a teen couple in a dead-end town accidentally get pregnant. There’s a shotgun wedding, and Bruce does all he can to remind us no one’s exactly psyched to be getting hitched (“for my 19th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat” ... “no wedding-day smiles, no walk down the aisle, no flowers no wedding dress”). The narrator works construction, but there’s no work because the economy is terrible. Their relationship is a shell of what it once was, and memories of their early sparks “come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse.” And if that’s not enough, it also contains one of the biggest bummers of a line ever: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”—Bonnie Stiernberg
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
This list doesn't include 1952 Black Vincent Lightning or Fairytale of New York...
...or have Hank Williams at #1; ergo, I'm officially calling bullshit on it. Though it gets one right:
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