Song Spotlight - "She's The One"

Key Live Performance:



If I could time travel I would absolutely love to see Bruce on the Darkness tour.  He'd put out enough classic material that you'd still get a killer setlist, but it was prior to Born In The USA so Bruce was playing theaters and smaller venues where you could still feel like you were in on something that everyone else who wasn't there was missing out on.  I love listening to and watching shows from this era, and "She's The One" is a great example of why.  For over 13 mins Bruce and The E Street band have fun jamming on the classic Bo Diddley Riff that makes up the intro, including covers of Van Morrison and Buddy Holly, respectively, and then the song builds up to a perfect crescendo at the end.  It's no wonder this song has been a staple of Bruce setlists since 1975, but this era seems to be where he's having the most fun with it.

Key Lyrics:

"With her long hair falling,
And eyes that shine like the midnight sun
Oh, she's the one."

I know it's a bit easy to go for the chorus, but man do these lyrics just stick out for me.  When I reviewed the book "Tietam Brown", I wrote about how Bruce's lyrics may not seem to make the most sense literally, but there's something about Bruce's genius way of phrasing it that it makes perfect sense.  I think I can speak for just about every guy out there that when they read that lyric a certain special girl pops into their mind.  I don't even know what a midnight sun would look like, but I know exactly what Bruce meant when he said her eyes shine like one.

Overall:

"She's The One" is a strange song that is revered by Springsteen fans, that I never think I'm that big a fan of it.  But whenever I am at a Springsteen concert and hear that distinct organ intro, I start clapping and dancing along and really getting into it.  When I wrote about "Night" last week I wrote about how it was an oddity in the sense that Bruce never seems to capture the spirit of the song live as he did in the studio.  "She's The One" is the exact opposite.  I usually skip the studio version of this song when it pops up randomly when listening to music but I will spend hours seeking out different live versions on YouTube.