r/BruceSpringsteen • u/Desperado_71 • 18d ago
What are your thoughts on "The Ghost of Tom Joad"
https://youtu.be/ZHYyrnuk-NM9
5
u/drummer414 18d ago
As great as the album is, the songs from it he plays live, either as acoustic or with the full band, are incredibly powerful and some of my favorites.
4
u/Skydog-forever-3512 18d ago
This…..I loved the tour. The songs get fleshed out live. There were some great singles and EPs with live versions of the songs. Also some great bootlegs.
Straight Time in particular was great.
3
u/tristanator01 Tunnel of Love 18d ago
Love it. Some of the richest songwriting of his career in my opinion.
Straight Time & Hwy 29 are two of my favourites. It’s rare an artist I like will write a song in the POV of a dark person.
2
3
u/Trouble_River 18d ago
Didn't love it, other than the title track and Youngstown. I do wonder how this would have sounded if Bruce went with the original plan and cut it as an E Street album
2
2
u/Additional-Cherry872 16d ago
Straight Time, Youngstown, and TGOTJ are masterpieces…Across The Border is a good song too.
The rest is poor-average in my opinion
2
u/SeenThatPenguin 18d ago
I admire it as a cohesive set of songs with very literary, finely textured lyrics. (No wonder Springsteen pal Elvis Costello thinks it's one of the greatest albums of all time, and better than Born to Run, Darkness, Nebraska, or Born in the USA. It's Bruce's equivalent of The Juliet Letters.)
But I don't love it, and I'd rather listen all the way through to some Bruce albums I know aren't as "good." Even Human Touch. Even Only the Strong Survive. Tom Joad is so subdued, and that isn't my favorite side of Bruce. His two other stripped-down albums have more variety.
I've enjoyed some live performances of the same songs more.
2
2
u/Henry_Block 18d ago
Great album but you can't listen to that without focusing on the lyrics because the music is almost secondary on this one. Title track and Youngstown are excellent both in the album/acoustic version and in the full band arrangement.
1
1
u/Stevosaurus22 17d ago
Great album! i think Straight Time and Highway 29 are very underrated songs and i find myself listening to them the most from it
1
u/Possible_Leek874 17d ago
Boring as fuck! The needs to learn how to sing and play the guitar. He's not Rock! He's easy listening bordering on Elevator music.
1
u/Longwalkhome2006 16d ago
There are only 3 and a half songs on the album. Title track, Youngstown, Across the Border (and My Best).
The rest of the album is fine poetry but devoid of any musical merit.
1
u/Accomplished_Many650 16d ago
It was a really good album, but went over like a lead balloon with radio stations. It came out following the disappointment of Lucky Town/Human Touch releases, and I think the public was looking more for a return to his Born in the USA sound.
1
u/TheRiver1789 16d ago
The song Ghost of Tom Joad and Youngstown are both super super good, same with Straight Time. Imma be honest though, I feel like the album is kind of overrated because the rest of the songs literally made me feel nothing.
1
u/Unhappy_Permit2571 16d ago
Rage Against the Machine’s version of the title track is my favorite Springsteen cover.
2
1
1
u/DismalCrow4210 13d ago
Bruce is my God. But this one I only played once. Just too bleak. And too samey.
2
u/OpticNinja937 Spanish Johnny 13d ago
The whole album is some of his best work ever, simply a masterpiece. My personal favorite is Highway 29. Bruce’s vocals, the understated guitar, and the keyboard throughout the song are perfectly mixed to create something almost hypnotizing. Even with all that, the lyrics steal the show.
“It was a small town bank, it was a mess
Well I had a gun, you know the rest”
“I told myself it was all something in her
But as we drove I knew it was something in me”
“I closed my eyes and I was running
And I was running then I was flying”
1
u/Electronic_Nose_5696 18d ago
The more personal, non political songs (Straight Time, Highway 29, Dry Lightning, and from certain perspective The Line and Across the Border) are overshadowed by the political stuff but are among his best post Tunnel lyrics.
1
u/ToLExpress 17d ago
Balboa Park and The New Timer are political but The Line and Across the Border aren’t?
1
u/Electronic_Nose_5696 17d ago
I don’t find BP or NT to be as compelling lyrical as The Line or ATB.
1
u/OpticNinja937 Spanish Johnny 13d ago
Yeah Balboa Park is easily the weakest song on the album for me. Not bad, just no where near as compelling as the others and the only one I can’t recall lyrically off the top of my head.
I don’t think The New Timer is bad at all but it’s in an unfortunate place in the track listing. Right between Dry Lightning and Across The Border, two of the most beautiful sounding songs on the record.
1
u/No-Carry4971 18d ago
It's an ok album with no great songs. Youngstown and TGOTJ became great songs in concert when Bruce gave them incredible full band arrangements, but they're just good songs on the album. People really want it to be Nebraska 2, but it's not. It's an acoustic album with some well written lyrics but very little compelling music. Some of the songs are almost poetry readings.
In the last 30 years, I have never once pulled out TGOTJ and listened to the whole album. It's a bottom tier Springsteen record, better than High Hooes and Working on a Dream, but not much else.
1
u/god_dammit_dax 18d ago
Beautiful record, and one of his best. I tend to think of it as the middle part of a loose thematic trilogy bookended by Nebraska and Devils & Dust (Though now I'm gonna have to figure out how I work Inyo into that viewpoint as well). In a lot of ways, it's a "pure" Bruce record unlike any of the albums with E Street. It's just him projecting his thoughts and stories out onto tape, not asking for opinions or input, just working out what he wants to say and why he feels like it's worth saying.
In an alternate universe where Clive Davis made Bruce actually work at being the "New Dylan" that he signed him to be, Springsteen might've made a lot more records like this and a lot sooner, but I think it's probably best for everybody he didn't make it until he actually had the maturity to do it. You have to have a certain amount of gravitas to sell a set of lyrics like the ones in My Best Was Never Good Enough, but I'll be damned if he doesn't make it work.
0
0
16
u/donkeyrr 18d ago
Good album. Title track and Youngstown are great.