The River is the fifth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released as a double album on October 17, 1980, through Columbia Records. The album was Springsteen's attempt to capture the E Street Band's live sound on record. Co-produced by Springsteen, his manager Jon Landau, and bandmate Steven Van Zandt, the recording sessions lasted 18 months in New York City from March 1979 to August 1980. Springsteen originally planned to release a single LP, The Ties That Bind, in late 1979, before deciding it did not fit his vision and scrapped it. Over 50 songs were recorded, with outtakes being released as B-sides, or on compilation albums.
The River is a heartland rock and rock and roll record with a live garage-band sound, combining party songs with introspective ballads. The lyrics expand on the themes of Springsteen's previous albums Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and mainly focus on love, marriage, and family. Springsteen took inspiration from the writer Flannery O'Connor for the characterizations. The cover photograph of Springsteen was taken by Frank Stefanko, who also took the front cover photograph of Darkness on the Edge of Town.
The River became Springsteen's first album to top the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart in the US and was his fastest-selling album yet. It was also a commercial success elsewhere, topping the chart in Canada and Norway, and reaching number two in the UK. It spawned several singles, including "Hungry Heart", a US top ten, "Fade Away", and "The River". Springsteen and the E Street Band supported the album on The River Tour from October 1980 to September 1981.
Upon release, music critics praised the songwriting, the performances of the E Street Band, and the lyrical evolution, while others believed Springsteen was recycling old material and lacking in creativity. In later decades, The River has been regarded as one of Springsteen's finest works, although many critics remain divided on the album's consistency. It has appeared on best-of lists, while several songs foreshadowed the direction Springsteen took on his next album, the solo effort Nebraska (1982). The River was reissued as an expanded box set in 2015, featuring the scrapped single LP, The Ties That Bind, and a documentary detailing the album's making.
Background
Bruce Springsteen supported his fourth studio album Darkness on the Edge of Town on the Darkness Tour from May 1978 to January 1979, performing with the E Street Band – Roy Bittan (piano), Clarence Clemons (saxophone), Danny Federici (organ), Garry Tallent (bass), Steven Van Zandt (guitar), and Max Weinberg (drums). Upon the tour's completion, he began preparations for his next studio record. Having grown closer with the E Street Band during the tour, he wanted his fifth album to be a "band" album, one that captured the feel of the band playing on stage. Van Zandt exerted more control during these sessions after assisting with production during the Darkness sessions. He was tasked with giving the band a more "garage" and "rugged" sound to contrast with Born to Run (1975) and Darkness, and ensured the band was ready to play; Landau ensured progress was being made. Van Zandt later said: "The River was the first record where I felt comfortable enough to start capturing what the band was all about."
Springsteen's perfectionism from previous recording sessions remained, with the entire band recording numerous retakes of the same tracks. The Power Station's resident engineer Bob Clearmountain was taken aback by Springsteen's work ethic at first but was impressed by his material and dedication to achieving perfection. Songs were played based on the complexity of their chord structures. Springsteen taught the band the more complex ones in sections, while more simple ones began without the band knowing what they were playing entirely. Tallent remembered: "We'd hear the song for the first time while we were recording it." Tracks were mostly recorded live, apart from occasional vocal, guitar, or saxophone overdubs.
One of the first songs recorded was "The Ties That Bind". In May, the band attempted "Bring on the Night" and the Born to Run outtake "Janey Needs a Shooter", the latter of which Springsteen donated to Warren Zevon. Between May and mid-June, the band recorded "Sherry Darling", "Independence Day", "I Wanna Be With You", "Ramrod", "Bring on the Night", "Jackson Cage", "Be True", and "Hungry Heart", which Springsteen initially wrote for the Ramones, believing its poppy sound was out of place with the rest of the material, but Landau convinced him to keep it. This version was engineered and mixed by Clearmountain. Nevertheless, Springsteen felt the album "wasn't enough" as he kept listening to it. In his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, he explained that he was inspired by artists such as Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Marvin Gaye, who "created self-aware, self-contained worlds on their albums, and then invited their fans to discover them". After performing with the E Street Band at the No Nukes benefit concerts for Musicians United for Safe Energy at Madison Square Garden in mid-September, Springsteen reconceptualized the album. He had debuted "The River" during the shows and wanted to write new material that reflected the song's darker themes. Plotkin and Scott attempted to make their own mix of "Hungry Heart" before deciding Clearmountain's mix was superior. Mastering was done by Ken Perry at Capitol Studios in Hollywood.
Music and lyrics
The River is a double album that contains 20 tracks. Its musical style has been characterized as heartland rock, R&B, folk, and country, with vocal hints at British punk rock and new wave.<!-- all sourced by Margotin and Guesdon --> Kenneth Partridge of Billboard retrospectively described The River as Springsteen's "new wave album, but it's also his pop album". which Springsteen said represented an effort "to provide fuel for our live show and to create a counterbalance to the ballads that began showing up more and more in my work". Carlin said the live performances give the songs a "barroom feel that trade the precision of 'Born to Run' and 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' with the power of the full band's instrumental wallop".
thumb|upright=0.7|alt=A black-and-white photo of Flannery of O'Connor in 1947|The writings of [[Flannery O'Connor (pictured in 1947) influenced Springsteen when writing the characterizations on The River.]]
Expanding on the themes of its two predecessors, The River lyrics focus primarily on love, marriage, and family. Springsteen himself said the record "was my first attempt to write about the commitments of home and marriage." He was particularly influenced by the writer Flannery O'Connor for his characterizations, stating: "There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about." Paul Pearson of Treble stated that Springsteen stripped the storytelling of the album's two predecessors for in-depth character studies: "The characters on Born to Run and Darkness were ones everyone recognized. The characters on The River were ones we knew." In his 2004 book Two Hearts, Dave Marsh summarized:
Side one
The album opener, "The Ties That Bind", is an up-tempo track featuring saxophone. The song was inspired by Springsteen's relationship with his own father.
Side two
thumb|upright|alt=Two men singing on stage|The duo [[Flo & Eddie (Mark Volman, left, and Howard Kaylan, right, in 2008) provided harmony vocals on "Hungry Heart".]]
Based on a piano riff from the Four Seasons' "Dawn (Go Away)" (1964), "Hungry Heart" is a pop song about a man who leaves his family. Inspired by the lives of Springsteen's own sister and brother-in-law, Musically inspired by "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It" (1949) by Hank Williams, "The River" is a mid-tempo folk and Americana ballad featuring harmonica. Springsteen wanted The River cover photo to be "sober and serious". In it, he appears unshaven, dons a plaid shirt, and is looking into the camera. The authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon argue that the image signifies that The River is a record "from the American heartland of the countryside and small towns" and "an album recorded by blue-collar musicians". Springsteen's name and the album title are colored blue against a black background. The cover was designed by Jimmy Wachtel.
The album's back cover features various images, including five brides and a groom, a stack of paper cups, a bald eagle, and an American flag. The album was a commercial success, becoming Springsteen's first album to reach number one on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. It also became his fastest-selling album yet, selling 1.6 million copies in the US by Christmas 1980.
thumb|upright=0.8|alt=A black-and-white photograph of a man holding a microphone|Springsteen performing in Norway on [[The River Tour in 1981.]]
"Hungry Heart" was released four days after the album on October 21, 1980, as the first single from The River, with "Held Up Without a Gun" as the B-side. It became Springsteen's first Billboard Hot 100 top ten hit single, reaching number five, eventually selling five million copies. In the UK, it reached number 44. "Fade Away" appeared as the second single in North America, Australia, and New Zealand on January 22, 1981, with "Be True" as the B-side. It reached number 20 in the US. "The River" was also nominated for Best Rock Vocal Performance at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards in 1982. "Cadillac Ranch", backed by "Wreck on the Highway", appeared as the next single in August 1981 in the UK only. Additional singles released in 1981 included "I Wanna Marry You", backed by "Be True", in Japan only, and "Point Blank", backed by "Ramrod", in the UK only.
Springsteen and the E Street Band supported The River on the River Tour, which ran 140 shows. The North American leg ran from October 3, 1980, to March 5, 1981. The band performed songs across Springsteen's career, as well as outtakes and numerous one-off covers, although Springsteen typically focused on The River material. When asked by interviewers about the focus on new material, Springsteen said he wanted to play the new songs live and "[had] very little to do anymore with my first two, even three LPs". The shows themselves featured upwards of thirty songs and lasted over three hours in length. During a filmed show in Tempe, Arizona, in early November, Springsteen, who had remained politically conscious up to that point, made a rare political statement about the election of Ronald Reagan that occurred the day before. He later said his first trip to Europe led him to "step out of the United States and look back with a critical eye". Soon after, Springsteen began performing covers of songs that added social commentary to the shows, such as Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" (1945) and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain" (1970). A European tour ran from April to June 1981, followed by a final American leg from July to September, which opened with six sold-out shows at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Critical reception
The River was greeted with the widest range of critical reviews of Springsteen's career up to that point. Among positive reviews, the album was hailed as his best work to date, one of the year's best records, offering "a full, panoramic screen of rock at its most glorious and passionate". Writing for Trouser Press, Ira Robbins ridiculed the album for having repetitive lyrical themes, a "party atmosphere", poor vocals and "flawed" lyrics, equating to a "water-treading exercise" record that "neither upholds his standards of excellence nor explores any new avenues". In a very negative review for NME, Julie Burchill said The River is "great music for people who've wasted their youth to sit around drinking beer and [are] wasting the rest of their lives too".
Rolling Stone ranked The River the year's best album, Springsteen the best artist and singer, and "Hungry Heart" the best single. It was also voted the second-best album of 1980 in The Village Voice annual Pazz & Jop poll, behind the Clash's London Calling. In an accompanying essay, the poll's supervisor Robert Christgau wrote: "All the standard objections apply—his beat is still clunky, his singing overwrought...but his writing is at a peak, and he's grown into a bitter empathy. These are the wages of young romantic love among those who get paid by the hour." Despite NME negative review, the publication ranked The River the 12th best album of the year in their end-of-year list.
Legacy
In the context of Springsteen's career, The River was a stepping stone between Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska, The album chronicled dark hardships felt by everyday blue-collar workers, as well as bleak tales of criminals, law enforcement officers, and gang wars. Several songs on The River foreshadowed the direction Springsteen took for Nebraska,
Retrospective reviews
In later decades, commentators consider The River one of Springsteen's finest works. Critics have praised the album's track sequencing, Springsteen's songwriting, Mark Guarino of The Guardian wrote that although the album examines themes Springsteen had touched on before and since its release, The River is unique in that "it takes its time to explore the highs and lows of growing pains, as adolescence wrestles its way into adulthood". Grantland Steven Hyden said that, despite being overshadowed by the records that surround it in Springsteen's discography, The River is "the most representative of his entire body of work". Critics have also praised the performances of the E Street Band, while Gillian G. Gaar stated the "mixture of joy and pain" gave The River "its richness and depth".
Rankings
The River has appeared on best-of lists. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 250 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, then was re-ranked at number 253 in the 2012 revised list. The following year, NME ranked it at number 484 in a similar list. In 2020 lists compiling the best albums of 1980, Paste placed it at number two, behind Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Paste also ranked The River the 29th best album of the 1980s in 2012. The album also appeared in a list of the 100 best rock albums of the 1980s by Ultimate Classic Rock in 2015.