How Well Do You Know The Boss?

Studio 360

Bruce Springsteen’s album Wrecking Ball comes out March 6. And while last week’s press announcement didn’t tell us much more than that, it did supply a track list for eleven new tunes. These song titles have the honest, hardscrabble phrasing we expect from the Boss, which got us thinking: could a superfan tell the difference between actual Springsteen song titles and a list of other rough-and-tumble-sounding ones?

So we found some ringers in the backlist ofHardscrabble Books (yes, it’s actually called that), a publishing imprint out of the University Press of New England.

Mixed up below are ten fiction and non-fiction titles from Hardscrabble Books and ten Springsteen titles from Wrecking Ball. (We removed the record’s title track from the list, because we’re hardscrabble like that). Can you pick the ten that Bruce wrote?

  1. Exile in the Kingdom
  2. Best Revenge
  3. Shackled and Drawn
  4. We Take Care of Our Own
  5. Understood Betsy
  6. Story of a Bad Boy
  7. Jack of All Trades
  8. Shadow Child
  9. Live Free or Die
  10. This Depression
  11. Easy Money
  12. Bad Lie
  13. Mettle
  14. You’ve Got It
  15. Rocky Ground
  16. Wisest Man in America
  17. Death to My Hometown
  18. Land of Hope and Dreams
  19. Guardian Angels
  20. We Are Alive

We’ve got the answers here.

Are you with The World?

The story you just read is available to read for free because thousands of listeners and readers like you generously support our nonprofit newsroom. Every day, the reporters and producers at The World are hard at work bringing you human-centered news from across the globe. But we can’t do it without you: We need your support to ensure we can continue this work for another year.

When you make a gift of $10 or more a month, we’ll invite you to a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of our newsroom to thank you for being with The World.