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Greetings From Asbury Park NJ doesn't sound like anything Bruce Springsteen ever released afterward. The most obvious example being the excessive word count, it's as if the Boss was getting paid by the word and he needed extra cash. From the starting gate the listener is hit with a barrage of metaphorical indicators as "Blinded by the Light" dares him to absorb it in one hearing, an impossibility, mind you. Who would think, looking back at the context of the man's styellar career, that the first words he would record for the world to hear of him would be "Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat". Hell, this is too much like a Dylan nut, hard to crack but the meat makes it all worth it. If you can get to that meat, of course. It's not the only song that will send you screaming for a copy of Roget's thesaurus; "Growin' Up", "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City", "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?" and "For You" all alternately benefit and/or suffer from this technique of almost Dickensian descriptive songcraft. But it's when he settles in with intimate ballads that you really start to get a feel for his capability. Songs like "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" and "The Angel" are haunting, finding beauty in places where one might not think it could be found. "Spirit in the Night" introduces us to some of the earliest inhabitants of Springsteen's fictional Asbury Park crew. Crazy Janey, Wild Billy and his friend G-Man. Hazy Davy and Killer Joe take a trip to the beach with a bottle of red and countless raging hormones. Then there is the record's masterpiece, the intense and epic "Lost in the Flood". A sobering examination of Justice, it follows the experience of a veteran freshly returned from the war and his eventual downfall in a shootout in the streets. There is a jazz tint to the swing in most of these songs and whether or not he ever wanted to do that again, for some reason he never really did. As soon as his next album the musical template had changed and grown by leaps and bound. By the time the fourth album came around he had almost completely changed his narrative voice to utilize a more Midwestern approach as opposed to the New Jersey cliches. Greetings demands more of the listener, much in the same way as Dylan's more complex poetic songs do. But it delivers to those who choose to look deeper (and thumb through those Webster's dictionaries).