Listening to Bruce Springsteen on Labor Day weekend? Here are the Boss' 8 best work songs

Hard work is a universal thing — that’s why the songs of Bruce Springsteen are so popular around the world.

Bruce Springsteen famously says he’s never had a job, yet a large portion of his work reflect the ethos of the working man. That’s no accident. He grew up in Freehold with very modest means. His dad, Douglas Springsteen, held a variety of blue-collar jobs, including cab driver, prison guard and working in the town’s Karagheusian Rug Mill.

The Springsteens lived week to week.

“I never thought of myself as a poor kid until my father said, ‘We are going to the movies tonight, we gotta sell the spare tire,’” said Springsteen in “Renegades: Born in the USA.”

Springsteen has sung of the plight of working men and women throughout his career. The trick is, how do you stay relevant to the plight of workers when you’re a multi-million dollar earning rock ’n’ roll superstar?

That challenge is especially in the forefront after some tickets for the upcoming Springsteen and the E Street Band U.S. tour sold for as much as $5,000 due to dynamic pricing, far out of the range many fans can pay.

Yet, the record is there, despite the ticket prices. Springsteen, thanks to his body of work, will always be the voice of the working man, and that’s an artistic legacy that’s hard to dispute.

Here are Springsteen’s eight best work songs to enjoy on this Labor Day weekend.

'Night' (1975)

This hemi-power rocker gives us one motivating factor for working — to make a few bucks to go out into the night.

The track could be viewed as a companion to the song “Born to Run,” a portrait of the protagonist before Wendy comes into the picture. The Boss really starts to flush out the meaning of hard work starting with “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” but here it’s a motivating factor, a thing we are burdened with and a means to an end.

'Badlands' (1978)

Why go to work each day for a pittance? Is it a search for sustenance, for honor, or is it a quest for a higher state of being? That is the search in “Badlands,” where you’re “Workin’ in the fields; Till you get your back burned; Workin’ ‘neath the wheel; Till you get your facts learned.”

What are those facts? Hard work, faith and love can raise one above the daily fray.

'Factory' (1978)

“Factory,” from “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” evokes the physical toll hard work can extract with an ominous foreboding of violence, though it’s not clear if the hurt will come from toil at the factory, or from an after work incident where somebody’s blowing off stream.

“Factory” is autobiographical as the protagonist watches his father go to work in the factory and consequently suffer hearing loss. Douglas Springsteen, Springsteen’s dad, suffered hearing loss at a factory job.

Yet, the line “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,” suggest there is a reward in hard work, no matter what the physical consequences. Through hard work the soul will be cleansed, even if the body becomes broken and dirty.

'The River' (1980)

A good job is the underpinning for a happy life in “The River.” When there isn’t work, a life and a family can be torn asunder.

Entry into adulthood is marked by a surprise pregnancy and a “union card and a wedding coat” in “The River.” Had the economy been better, and there had been more work, the love of the young couple perhaps would have not been so tested in “The River.” The protagonist and his young wife go down to the river at the end of the song to face their fate.

The song, in real life, has a happy ending. It’s based on Bruce’s sister Virginia, who married as a teenager hand has lived, by all accounts, a happy life.

'Highway Patrolman' (1982)

When you have a job to do, what will cause you not to do the job? In “Highway Patrolman,” from 1981’s acoustic “Nebraska,” Highway Patrolman Joe Roberts will not pursue his brother Frankie over the Canadian boarder, even though the ne’er do well Frankie has busted up a poor sap in a roadhouse pretty good.

“Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good,” sings the Boss.

Work can call on you to perform extreme duties, but we all have our limits.

'My Hometown' (1984)

“My Hometown,” the seventh single from 1984’s “Born in the U.S.A.,'' is a classic that works on many levels. Here, we’ll take it as an ode the working man. A central tenet of the music of Springsteen is what happens to blue-collar laborers when manufacturing jobs leave. Springsteen doesn’t have the answer — many will say America has not come up with an answer yet — still, the question ominously hangs in “My Hometown.”

Working is part of the fabric of hometown life, and if there’s no work, the hometown starts to crumble. The Boss performed “My Hometown” in “Springsteen on Broadway,” and he played the song, with the plays’ spoken intro, during the 2018 broadcast of the Tony Awards.

'Working on the Highway' (1984)

If you’re looking for profundity about work, it’s not here. What is here is a great Eddie Cochran beat that you can’t stop humming.

In “Working on the Highway,” from “Born in the U.S.A.,'' a highway worker dreams of better days. He gets involved with a connected young lady whose dad wants her back, and then he’s back to working on the highway, but now it’s “Cool Hand Luke” style.

'Western Stars' (2019)

The plight of a working man in Hollywood is presented in the mournful title track on Springsteen's 2019 solo album, "Western Stars." The protagonist is an extra whose claim to fame is that he shot John Wayne in a movie once. You get the sense he's been thrown off more than a couple of horses, yet the allure of the limelight and the rewards of a day's work, still draws him in. Physical labor, even in Hollywood, takes its toll, but all who partake share a quiet nobility.

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Chris Jordan, a Jersey Shore native, covers music and entertainment for the USA Today Network New Jersey. Contact him at @chrisfhjordan; cjordan@app.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Bruce Springsteen songs: Best work tunes for Labor Day weekend