A Sweaty Ranking Of Bruce Springsteen’s Horniest Songs
What can we say? Bruce Springsteen is mad horny.
Bruce Springsteen is America’s horniest popstar. That’s not even up for debate.
He’s a tight jeans-wearing, big muscly arms-touting, rooting, tooting working class hero, and there’s not a human being on the planet who wouldn’t wanna lick the sweat from his guitar strings.
But it’s not just the man’s physical presence that screams “deadbeat stepdad in an ’80s porno.” It’s also his body of work. Even his darkest, saddest songs reek with sweat and desire. Nine times out of ten, when Bruce Springsteen is singing about woe, he’s singing about sexy woe.
Not, mind you, that all Springsteen songs are equally horny under God. Nope. Every now and then, the man outdid himself, penning particularly ripe ballads to sweat and fornication.
Here then, are ten of his horniest ballads.
#10. ‘The Little Things (My Baby Does)’
This one starts pretty coy, filled with talk of kissing and sighing and summery breezes. But then, about halfway through, Bruce starts singing about “graces and angels up above.”
Lemme tell you something right now: Bruce isn’t really singing about angels. He’s singing about cumming. And the world’s sleaziest saxophone wailing away in the background proves it.
#9. ‘Maria’s Bed’
Gotta tell you, the narrator of this song sounds sexy as hell, what with his “smilin’ skull ring” and “dead man’s suit”. Of course, it’s possible you don’t agree — my taste in men was once described by a friend as ‘degenerate’ — but it’s hard to deny the sheer horny bliss of collapsing into your partner’s bed at the end of a long day at work.
#8. ‘Lonesome Day’
Springsteen is an underrated chronicler of what I’m calling angry horny. In this, ‘Lonesome Day’, he’s so goddamn horny for love and affection that the whole world looks like a burning cesspit to him.
“Hell’s brewing,” he grumbles. “Dark sun’s on the rise.” Who’s ever been angrier about not busting a nut than that?
#7. ‘I Wish I Were Blind’
Here, Bruce is so horny for someone who isn’t horny for him, that he transforms into Oedipus himself and threatens to pluck out his own eyes. This is what we call “full horny”, and it is not recommended that anyone get this turned on.
#6. ‘I’m Going Down’
I mean, what can I tell ya?
#5. ‘Cindy’
Have you ever seen Antiviral, the horror movie in which ordinary people buy cold and flus that their favourite celebrities have had, so they can get infected by their heroes? Well, tell you what, it came out in the mid two thousands, and Bruce Springsteen was so horny that he stumbled across the plot some three decades before.
After all, in ‘Cindy’, he’s so desperate for some contact with a girl who refuses to see or speak to him that he tries telling her dad that he wants to catch her flu. Dude was a psychosexual pioneer!
#4. ‘The Girls In Their Summer Clothes’
Bruce likes to write songs about adolescence, but usually such coming of age stories are soaked in regret and gentle, lilting horror. Not ‘The Girls In Their Summer Clothes’.
‘The Girls In Their Summer Clothes’ is about walking around feeling horny as fucking hell, and trying to make sure you look as chaste as a nun. Relatable.
#3. ‘The River’
Water is the horniest element, hands down, and ‘The River’ is a testament to soaking, slick desire. Sure, there’s also definitely a murder going on somewhere in this song, but if you just overlook all those lines about life-ruining guilt, then boy howdy, you’ll have yourself a good old fashioned sexy time.
#2. ‘Hungry Heart’
As you’ve probably picked up by this point in the list, The River is the horniest album that Bruce Springsteen ever wrote — a collection of trembling, sweating songs of desire.
That album’s orgiastic peak? ‘Hungry Heart’. Not necessarily just because of the lyrics, which are simmering in their carnal desire. But because of that music, rollicking and determined as it is. Nobody has ever made a rinky-dink organ sound so much like a moan of pure pleasure.
#1. ‘I’m On Fire’
There’s no hornier pop song in modern American history. I mean, the narrator’s so horny he can’t fucking sleep. He’s pacing up and down his shitty apartment in the middle of the night, so full of gusto and spunk that he feels like his head is splitting open. Whom amongst us has ever been that horny? Not I.
Truly, ‘I’m On Fire’ is an inspiration to us all. It’s new ground broken in the perpetual experiment to see who might become the horniest human being on the planet Earth. And ya know what? Springsteen’s in with a running chance.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.
Photo Credit: Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images