Bruce Springsteen: The Ties That Bind – The River Collection

ON HIS FIFTH E Street Band album, Springsteen still struggled "to gain the knowledge of how to make records". But this sense of technical difficulty at least afforded him a rational explanation for the hesitations that made the studio a scene of slowmo "suffering" for all concerned (the River sessions ran from March 1979 to October 1980). More broadly, writing on either side of his 30th, he barely gave a thought to career trajectory; instead, he concentrated on telling stories to address working people's lives, American history, aesthetics… and what the hell his own heart and soul were playing at.