Bruce Springsteen … has been hiding in New Jersey writing these incredible songs…. [He] can be easily dismissed as "justanotherDylanrip-off" if you're not really listening—but increasingly, as he begins a road he knows has done in fellow travellers, he is his own man and points invitingly to the road not taken…. (p. 31)

Bruce Springsteen's songs offer that wonderfully bewildering problem of how to keep up. Words tumble over one another, phrases mysteriously feel right and then disappear…. This was an entirely new perspective offered, like nothing I'd heard before. There was no given, no center I knew all these spokes were connected to. I was once again on my own with new eyes, and it was exhilarating! All of a sudden I remembered the lack! Patterns had developed, formulas into which songs and musicians and songwriters got routinely thrown, and where music had once inspired and been inspired by passion, things merged and distinctions were blurred and then obliterated. And here, one guy with a scratchy voice and some weird words made the angles sharp again. (p. 32)

I hadn't felt this kind of hard edge/intelligent/lunatic intensity since Blonde on Blonde. (p. 33)

Bruce Springsteen's record is Greetings from Asbury Park, and it's a delight. Completed last September, it offers a picture of the performer/creator as he was stepping out of one sense into another. It's the kind of record you can play all the way through and then start all over again….

The album takes its toll on your time. One day one song reigns, demanding attention like the brightest kid in class; the next day, another. There hasn't been an album like this in ages, where there are words to play with, to riff off yourself, to pull out of the air and slap down with a gleam on the shiny counter of your conversation. There are individual lines worth entire records.

There is the combined sensibility of the chaser and the chaste, the street punk and the book worm. The record rocks, then glides, then rocks again. (p. 35)

If the record is a very impressive first step, it offers a talent guaranteed to move even farther….

He is like a man undammed: prolific and unpolluted. At 23 he stands perceptively between childhood and worldly wisdom. (p. 36)