Three years, an Academy Award, an awkward E Street Band reunion, a Greatest Hits with a cluster of ‘new’ songs, and at least one scrapped album sit between Springsteen’s first albums of the the ’90s and The Ghost of Tom Joad‘s release in November 1995.

I love this album. It’s only grown on me over the years. It’s easily the most musically subdued in his entire back catalogue – with arrangements even starker than Nebraska – yet its beauty lies in those quiet moments and his willingness to paint striking stories with the slightest of brushes. It’s also worth noting that when that brush flushes with colour in the style of, say, the flush of keys on “Dry Lightning”, it’s down to Danny Federici. While it was clearly another left-turn after the short-lived E Street reunion for Greatest Hits, it’s his most consistent set of songs for some time. Rather than grappling with coming to terms with his wealth and status, Springsteen’s eye is turned outward for a compelling set of stories of those that America had turned its back on – working class, foreign born – by the mid-nineties. As the man himself puts it: “the austere rhythms and arrangements defined who these people were and how they expressed themselves….They were transient and led heard, complicated lives, half of which had been left behind in another world, in another country.”

Least: My Best Was Never Good Enough

Springsteen, in ‘Songs’, describes this as his ‘parting joke’ and a way of satirising the way that complex moral issues can be trivialised. Maybe it’s over my head but I’m not sure the album needed a final ‘gag’ song. It feels a bit like ‘Pony Boy’ slapped at the end of Human Touch as if to lighten the listener. It’s not an inherently bad song – none of these ‘leasts’ are – but it’s far from my favourite on the album and doesn’t really sit shoulder to shoulder with the title track, ‘Youngstown’, the compassion of ‘The Line’ or ‘Sinaloa Cowboys’ or…

Most: Galveston Bay

In a way I feel ‘Galveston Bay’ is one of Springsteen’s bravest songs as a songwriter: the lyrics and the story are of the highest quality but the music is so whisper-thin (delicate picking that’s more intonation than melody and the softest of keys, both courtesy of Springsteen, the only credited performer on the track) yet it demands your attention throughout. There’s no verse / chorus / verse structure here – there are two opening stanzas – as this feels more prose than song – that introduce the two characters without an indication of where we’re heading before tackling a theme straight from a real life event in Seadrift in 1979, tackling – in just five minutes – one hell of a story. A harrowing but redemptive story about how, after getting to a certain point, people can actually make the right choice instead of a deadly choice. It’s more a short story set to music.

I’ve been hooked on ‘Galveston Bay’ since I first heard The Ghost of Tom Joad and that hook has only sunk deeper as time moves on.