If fans hoped for a soul covers album replicating the energy of the great versions Bruce Springsteen has done in concert, ‚Only the Strong Survive‘ is too overproduced for that.
When it was announced that Bruce Springsteen would celebrate the sweet sounds of soul music with a new solo album, “Only the Strong Survive,” one could, in the words of the immortal James Brown, go into a cold sweat. The idea of an album of classic soul covers from a man who truly understands the form in this, our winter of discontent 2022, sounds righteous. When Springsteen and the E Street Band were first playing the bars along the Jersey shore, they were known for biting down hard on AM radio epiphanies from soul gods such as Eddie Floyd, Sam Cooke, Arthur Conley and Gary U.S. Bonds. with holy, boozy brashness. Even on his last major tour of 2016-2017, he and the band wound hammer their way through a gospel-inflected “Shout” by the Isley Brothers with playful reverie.
So when an album was announced that would be taken from what Springsteen called “the great American songbook of the ’60s and ’70s,” with the E Street Horns and duet partner Sam Moore from the legendary Sam & Dave, you had to think: C’mon. How did this not happen sooner?
Yet Springsteen’s 2022 sessions with his decade-long co-producer get bogged down in an overly rich arrangement of strings and horns, sounding so much tamer than the tortured, joyful, loving, hating, sweaty soul you’d expect from a man who once sang and played it like a wanton preacher wailing for salivation. Instead of heating up and boiling over, “Only the Strong Survives” is often coolly reserved and occasionally dispassionate. This is not the soulful Springsteen renowned for mashing up his own molten lava-like “Light of Day” or “Rosalita” with Wilson Pickett’s “Land Of 1000 Dances” — not even close.
Now, you could say that Bruce Springsteen at age 73 is not the Bruce Springsteen of age 23 when he was raging through the most tumultuous of amped-up R&B covers at the Stone Pony as part of the best bar band this side of Memphis.
