Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen

Early in our relationship, one Valentine's Day, B told me "you ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright." And my heart melted. In a moment, I knew that he got it. He got my obsession with Bruce.

(B would like to add, btw, that he said it not because he believed it, but because he knew she loved the line).


Simply put dear reader, this is the greatest album of all time. L is not sure she can write about it and do it any justice. Thunder Road. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out. Jungleland. Born to Run. Born to Run is on most mix tapes, cd or playlist we've ever made and is always the first song played in the car on every road trip to Melbourne. Of course, only once we get past Hall and can put the foot on the gas.


L once heard Bruce talk about Born to Run album cover. As you open the sleeve, you see Bruce leaning on E Street Band saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. He describes the cover as an invitation to join the band. Thunder Road, the opening track, was Bruce's invitation to the album.

The song starts slowly with a lonely harmonica wail. It picks up speed as Bruce describes a vision: "the screen door slams, Wendy's dress sways". It's a simple but evocative image, which takes you somewhere else - straight into small town America. No songwriter has mastered imagery like Bruce. Indeed, he's more a storyteller than a songwriter. And there's many a novelist who could do well to learn from Bruce's pithiness. It doesn't take him 60,000 words to tell a tale.

Born to Run is extraordinary. Every listen makes us want to pack up our lives and get in a car and just go. What stops us is that we'd make it to Yass and realise it's not as easy as it sounds. That's the tragedy of the characters in Born to Run. We know that for all their enthusiasm and pent-up energy, they're not going to find escape and release.  The song apparently took six months to record, with overdub after overdub. Listen to the song closely and repeatedly and you can hear how it is painstakingly constructed. It's worth it. Every bar is a masterpiece; it's never been bested.

Bruce has made great solo albums but the E Street Band take his songs to a whole nother level. Each member of the band is a great talent and there's an unusual egalitarianism to the songs' production. No part dominates the other. Each instrument equally vies for your attention, which makes the album anything but subtle. The complementarity shows a band of geniuses working in perfect harmony.

Of course, Bruce is the pinnacle. His vocals are raw, rock and roll. But he has range and he can do it soft or loud. And when he's loud he's electrifying. The best there ever was.

Jungleland warrants mentioning because it's the world in a song. It doesn't have a single narrative arc, it has multiple. From highs to lows to deeper lows and the most breathtaking pinnacle. Our favourite line is "down here the poets don't write nothing at all, they just sit back and let it all be". Clarence's sax solo is magnificent. In a world where "sax solo" has rightfully become a dirty phrase, this stands alone.

It's a town full of losers. I'm pulling out of here to win.

Heartbreaker - Ryan Adams

And we're back. Christmas holidays, milestone birthdays, Hottest 100 and finally we've returned to the routine of a martini, an overly ambitious meal and a classic album. How I have missed martinis.

What an exquisite album to bring us into 2012. Ryan Adam's debut solo album from 2000 is his masterpiece. It opens with a rockabilly foot stomp, To Be Young, which incites some backyard dancing at Martini Saturdays headquarters. It's followed up with My Winding Wheel, which is a beautifully optimistic love song. In fact they are all beautiful love songs, either about wanting someone, finding someone or losing someone. There is no shortage of women who have fallen in love listening to this album.

Ryan is usually categorised as 'alt-country'; we've always doubted the utility of this term because it seems to only ever be used to describe Ryan Adams and Wilco. In which case, it is probably the greatest music genre of recent times.

My Sweet Carolina is a lonesome travelling ballad about loss, hope, thwarted ambition and missing your home. That is, it's like nearly all country ballads. It says something about the universality of these emotions that such a popular and enduring genre barely covers anything else. Also, like so many country ballads, Emmylou Harris and her ageless voice provide sweet backing vocals.

Ryan's band, Whiskeytown, whom he left just before recording Heartbreaker, were a fun country band. But they didn't have the raw, subtle, brilliant melodies of Heartbreaker and (some of) Ryan's subsequent albums. Tracks 8-10 are the perfected and quintessential core of this album. Damn Sam is a simple tune with confused metaphors, but it's one of the first of his songs that I fell in love with. Come Pick Me Up is his classic, the song most often cited as his best. And even after a thousand listens, the first notes of the harmonica still have enough power to kick you in the guts.

To Be the One is Ryan musing on the night before, with a guitar in hand. I can never decide whether is about a relationship break up or a one night stand. This track has some great lyrics - "I don't know which is worse: to wake up and see the sun, or to be the one that's gone". And the best line on the album - "the empty bottle it misses you and I'm the one it's talking to".

There is a quiet intimacy to this album that no other Ryan Adams' album quite reaches. It's best enjoyed when you're drinking by yourself, late at night with headphones on, yearning for someone to share it with you (but knowing they'd ruin the wonderful loneliness).

For those of you familiar with Ryan, we can't write this blog post without acknowledging that he's a complete wang. I love him and (almost) everything he releases. However, the one time I've seen him live he was terrible. A prima donna who couldn't be bothered to perform. We're seeing him at the Forum in Melbourne next month on the back of his best release in five years (Ashes & Fire). He better bring it this time.