Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Review

He was sold to a label as a solo singer with a notebook, and the notebook is the whole story here. Blinded by the Light contains more internal rhyme in its first verse than most writers manage in a career, and it moves so fast that the meaning arrives about four listens in. Growin' Up is the one that still gets played live fifty years on because the central image, a boy standing up in a room full of people who want him to sit down, needs no decoding.

For You is a genuinely great song buried under a piano arrangement that fights it. The problem is the recording. It is dry, small and cheap, the drums sound like cardboard and the band was added late, so the arrangements never open out. There is also a young writer's compulsion to fit every idea into every verse. What survives is the voice on the page: specific, crowded, hungry, and unmistakably somebody.