He goes by many names. Bruce, The Boss, uh, “old fuss and feathers” maybe. More importantly, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen has got stories. LOTS of stories. And within those stories are even more characters. We all know the songs, but have we ever taken a deep dive into the actual well-being of all the Marys, Billys, Sherrys, Terrys, and, yes, the Shaniquas? Possibly. But we’re doing it again here. We’re ranking the health of the relationships between Bruce and his characters. Nothing like taking an incredibly complex, nuanced, and intangible concept like human connection and slapping numbers on them.
Now by our count, Bruce has 104 songs that mention somebody by real name (with apologies to all you Magic Rats, G-Mans, and Fish Ladies), so we had to cut down because we know you don’t want to read all that and we certainly don’t want to write all that. So we just picked 20, ranked from least healthy to most healthy. (Note: to qualify for this list, Bruce—or whatever he was calling himself in the song—has to explicitly interact with said character, not just play the role of narrator).
20. Cindy (“Cindy” from The Ties That Bind)
She’s clearly not into you, Bruce. You’re playing up the way-too-common rock trope of aggressively ignoring the “no.” She’s got her parents lying for her. Move on.
19. Frankie (“Highway Patrolman” from Nebraska)
The endurance of familial bond. Frankie might be a blood relative, but he’s still toxic. By not holding Frankie accountable for his actions, Joe chooses brotherhood over morality. To some, this may seem honorable, but if we really care about Frankie, we want him held accountable. Get him some therapy or something. Letting him off the hook just because he’s your brother tells me you don’t value him as much as you value your relationship with him. Not healthy and also potentially endangering other innocent people.
18. Candy (“Candy’s Room” from Darkness on the Edge of Town)
Ah, yes. The “I’m humanizing this sex worker so obviously she has to fall in love with me” angle. Pass.
17. Mary (“The River” from The River)
Harrowing tale of two young lovers forced to grow up quick, check. Bittersweet tale of loyalty, commitment, and sacrifice, check. Bruce hearing the story of his sister getting pregnant in high school and thinking “Oh yeah, let me put myself in this story, first person,” [red flag emojis].
16. Sherry (“Sherry Darling” from The River)
Pro tip: if your love song for somebody is 93% about their mother…it is not a healthy relationship. Freudian-by-proxy.
15. Mary (“Mary Queen of Arkansas” from Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ)
There’s a large power dynamic here that isn’t totally healthy. The overall tone of the lyrics paints a one-sided relationship in which Bruce is hero-worshipping a non-reciprocating, distant Mary. It’s clearly got Bruce outside his head, because a functioning cognition would never produce the line “I’ve been a shine boy for your acid brat and a wharf rat of your state.” Bonus points for potential, if not problematic, non-binary representation way back in 1971 (“You’re not man enough for me to hate or woman enough for kissing”). You be you Mary.
14. Mary (“Thunder Road” from Born to Run)
Bruce is plainly stating what he has to offer (“I’m no hero, that’s understood”). Honesty and realism is essential to any healthy relationship. What’s troubling is the line “Don’t turn me home again.” Is this not the first time Bruce has made his pitch? Is he not respecting the “no” from Mary? Then we find out Mary’s tendency to waste her summers “praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets.” Sure sounds like Bruce is obsessed with Mary and Mary is waiting for someone better. It also sounds like Bruce is one of many (“There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away”). Don’t torture yourself, Bruce, find someone who sees your value.
13. Mary Lou (“Mary Lou” from Tracks)
In trying to portray himself as a romantic candidate brimming with gritty realism, Bruce comes off a little mansplain-y, a little gaslight-y, and pretty condescending. What’s wrong with Mary Lou setting her bar high? This song was written in 1979, so Bruce was in his Darkness “disillusionment is unavoidable” era while Mary Lou clearly still living her Wild, Innocent life.
12. Cynthia (“Cynthia” from Tracks)
It’s platonic (“You don’t smile or say hi but baby that’s alright ‘cause I don’t need to hold you or taste your kiss”) but a little resentful (“You ain’t the finest thing I’ll never have”). It’s good to see platonic representation in songs, but it undermines the impact when constantly compared to sexual opportunity.
11. Gloria (“Gloria’s Eyes” from Human Touch)
Just because a romantic relationship dies, doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy. Not every relationship works out and that’s okay. You can’t convince me, however, that this song isn’t about erectile dysfunction and Bruce’s slapstick, sitcom-esque attempts to cover (“I was you big man […] I tried to trick you, yeah but baby you got wise […] you cut me right down to size […] at night I pray as silently as you lie/some day my love again will rise”). Big yikes.
2007 was a strange, strange year for music and fashion in the hard rock world. My Chemical Romance-influenced guyliner slowly started to disappear to the end from Warped Tour kids in favor of way-too-tight t-shirts with bright colors and obnoxiously happy dinosaurs going “RAWR.” Yes. Dinosaurs. Yes. RAWR. No. You should be ashamed of yourself if you partook in this trend. Basically, this time period foreshadowed a dark-in-the-corniest way aggressive musical future moving forward in spite of (mice & men) and its vomit-inducing neon colors. Pierce the Veil is objectively cheesy, especially at its beginning, but definitely one of the less cringey of the pack; we’re looking at you, crabcore. Hard pass. Still, this debut album is the band’s worst effort and we aren’t taking any more questions on the matter.
Taking a high-school-length break between albums makes sense for Pierce the Veil in a theoretical form given singer/guitarist Vic Fuentes’ grating-to-some soprano voice and the band’s obnoxiously loud-to-all pre-pubescent fan base. Anyway, between its breakout and yet-to-be-mentioned 2012 effort “Collide with the Sky,” PTV released the aptly and appropriately titled “Misadventures” in 2016, proving that a surprisingly long and four-year strong break isn’t always worth the effort. Bada Bing! Wit a Pipe! Puberty has its literal growing pains, and this album contains some tracks that stupid idiot superfans of the band will love, but it isn’t a gold medal ribbon-winning and consistent front-to-back listen for any outside of those circles.
Speaking of something long (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID), 2023’s “The Jaws of Life” came out seven years after “Misadventures,” which is the combined amount of time that a 2.0-GPA student goes through college and law school, and extremely atypical for other bands in the similar flash-in-the-pan nu-screamo world. Fans of this LP will likely call this record the band’s most progressive one, but if we have to read one more article about a band’s newest record being their most mature album, we will act very, very justifiably immature and call the guilty writers and listeners poo-poo-pee-pee heads. Shit’s lazy and overdone. Still, “The Jaws of Life” is very likely the band’s best album for non-listeners who wouldn’t give more than five seconds to a prior PTV album. This one snugly feels closer to ‘90s flannel than the four other releases and was clearly influenced by much, much, much, much better music, as evidenced by its finest composition and best song title below. Milk it.
The band’s last effort on Equal Vision Records, 2010’s “Selfish Machines,” shreds harder than both Bebop and Rocksteady ever could or should, and is a fan favorite that will likely enrage ardent Pierce the Veil obsessors for this silver medal slot when it should’ve gone gold in more ways than one; if you think otherwise about its ranking, please stay away from my friends. Seriously, creep(s). This sophomore release proved the popular expression that timing is everything, and a feature from the then-stratospherically-rising A Day To Remember helped ensure that the PTV’s next album would have more eyes and ears on it. Insert sell-out joke here.
Since record sales solely gauge a record’s worth, 2012’s “Collide with the Sky” showcases Pierce the Veil’s finest hour at forty-six minutes and fourteen seconds, and is overall their best and least amount of filler LP. Like we said several times throughout this piece, stop trying hard to disagree by ranking its two predecessors higher, you misguided, off-base morons are trying too damn hard to be punk in a world that truly isn’t. Sorry not sorry. Basically, the band moved from a cult favorite second-of-four opening act to a solid big room headliner with its release, and the band’s third album had a minor hit with its O-Town and 2gether collaboration song “King For A Day.”
King has said that this is his favorite of all the novels he’s written, which is why it ranks dead last. Nothing anyone is proud of belongs on a list about Maine.
We haven’t read this one yet, but the jacket says it’s a story of redemption, so it has no place here.
A boy inherits a key to a magical world where he and his dog need to fight vague evil. Since the evils in question don’t consist of black flies, gas station pizza, and 8-month winters, this one misses the mark on capturing the horror of living in Maine.
Many of the books on this list do not take place in Maine, and that has no bearing on their ranking because it was still the trauma of living there that inspired them. This one, however, takes place in Florida, an entirely different place of evil.
This novel features Holly Gibny, a minor character in several other King novels, now as her fully realized best self trying to solve the case of a young girl. The prime suspect – and seemingly normal couple harboring a dark secret. While nothing is more Maine than people harboring dark secrets, no one there is their fully realized best self, so this one ranks low.
A horror/fantasy that draws its fantastical elements from Greek mythology, King himself has described “Rose Madder’ as a “stiff, trying-too-hard” book, which is why it ranks low on our list. No one who chooses to live in Maine tries too hard. They just like, stand there.
Somehow laboring under the delusion that he just hadn’t published enough books, Stephen King dusted off a copy of this pre-Carrie manuscript, tightened it up, and published it in 2007. It centers around Clayton Blaisdell (get it?) and the bond he forms with a baby that he has kidnapped from its millionaire parents. Since it features an adult connecting with a child, it ranks very low on our list of horror found in Maine.
A shadowy organization is kidnapping kids with psychic abilities, and keeping them imprisoned in a palace known as The Institute for nefarious purposes. It’s a scary premise, but not Maine scary because at least these kids are getting an education.
Stephen King teamed up with his son to spin this tale about a future where women cocoon at night and transport themselves to a better place. It ranks low on our list because it presupposes that sleep can offer an escape to someone living in a state where the number one pastime is Lyme disease.
A girl is given a mysterious button box by a stranger who warns her that if she presses any of the box’s buttons bad things will happen. It is here at 55 because unlike most people in Maine at least Gwendy can control something, anything.
12-year-old Jack Sawyer walks from New Hampshire to California on a quest to find a Talisman that can save his dying mother. Along the way, Jack finds himself in “The Territories,” a Medieval parallel universe that mirrors our own. While more fantasy than horror, it is clearly inspired by Maine, a place that refuses to acknowledge what year it is. Maine is similar to our world, but everywhere you go people are playing something called Def Leppard from something called a radio, and the Starbucks are all called Dunkin Donuts, and everyone who works there is an old sea captain.
A grieving man is pushed over the edge of sanity after a proposed interstate highway threatens to demolish his home. An unstable man with a gun standing his ground in the cold is very “Pine Tree Ttate,” but it ranks low on our list because Maine never updates its infrastructure.
If It Bleeds is a collection of four novellas. The titular story centers on a TV news anchor with a suspiciously uncanny nose for viewer-grabbing tragic events. Tragic events are bad, but the horrors of Maine are more bleak than newsworthy.
This one is more of a full-on fantasy lacking real horror elements. It shares a few threads with the Gunslinger series so everyone talks weird, but they’ve still heard of the letter “R” so the horrors of Maine are not accurately represented.
While not the scariest Stephen King novel or even the scariest entry in the Dark Tower series, it features a lot of junkies and racism, giving the reader a reasonably accurate picture of life in Portland.
When a journalist threatens to expose a famous author’s pseudonym, the author decides to get ahead of the story and out himself, but it turns out the alter-persona won’t go out without a fight. It comes to life and commits a series of horrific crimes. This novel perfectly encapsulates Maine’s state slogan: “Keep your nose out of my dark secrets or I will fucking murder you.”
In the future of 2025, Ben Richards agrees to be on America’s favorite reality show, The Running Man. If he can elude capture and execution by police and bounty hunters for one month, he’ll get the money he needs to cure his daughter’s terminal illness. Published in 1982 the book is extremely prescient, and the game presented is barbaric, but it is still a form of entertainment so it doesn’t quite represent the horror of Maine.
Stephen King tackles the divide tearing our nation apart with a good ole “Can’t we all just get along?” It may take place in Castle Rock but spiritually this book is about as far from Maine as you can get.
A new antiquities shop opens in Castle Rock that seems to have exactly what everyone desires, and the customers don’t pay with money, they pay with IRONIC TWISTS! Sort of like how when I moved to Maine I thought “At least the lobster rolls will be good” only to find out that their version of it is cold lobster meat and celery mixed with mayo served on stale bread with lettuce. Oh, except that shitty lobster roll cost a lot of money.
After a night of kink gone wrong, Jessie Burlingame is left alone handcuffed to her bed. Trapped and alone with her thoughts she is consumed by the demons of her past. I think anyone who lives in a state where it’s almost always winter and everything closes at 9 p.m. can relate to Jessie.
A suspicious death in a Maine island community prompts suspect Dolores Claiborne to confess her life story, a tale of tragedy, injustice, and unspeakable family secrets. Throw in a plate of fiddleheads and you’ve got everything you need to know about New England’s most haunting state.
There is, of course, no one living in Maine with basic compassion, let alone a Christ-like ability to heal people, but if there was they would for sure kill them.
A group of travelers is lured to a small, dying town and must thwart an ancient evil unearthed by minors. This novel speaks to the deep, yearning desire in the heart of everyone with the misfortune of being born in Maine. For someone, anyone, to come and vanquish the repressive, miserable, intangible ether of misery that haunts the very air they breathe.
A terrifying story of a suburban Ohio neighborhood where suddenly all of the houses are transformed into log cabins and no one is allowed to leave their house. The Regulators explores what might happen if Maine were allowed to spread.
The humble beginnings of what would become The Dark Tower series finds Roland trekking through a wasteland where he tangles with mutants, horny church ladies, and people who talk really weird. It’s sort of a love letter to Bangor.
Despite Kanye West, the alt-right’s most critically-acclaimed soldier, listening to an exclusive advance of a Jewish man’s record, Say Anything’s 2016 LP “I Don’t Think It Is” is a twelve-track experiment that went alt-wrong. Say Anything songs often inspire repeated listens due to their many, many easter eggs, but this abrasive-in-a-meh-way album lacked ample replay value. To prove such, surprise albums from noteworthy acts often get a lot of PR, but buzz seemed to fade about this one shortly after its release. Even its album cover photo looks like an iPhone pic from someone stealing your mobile device at a bar during a quick White Claw piss break.
As evident with our “play it again” section below for “Anarchy, My Dear,” Say Anything’s debut LP for Equal Vision Records, we’re all about song sequels. “Admit It Again,” track four of 2012’s “Anarchy, My Dear,” was a then-modern inspired part-two to Say Anything’s perfect song “Admit It!” and it has some hot, thought-provoking hot takes, and many legit guffaws. Still, this full-length is inconsistent when one compares it to the band’s other six albums listed next.
Sometimes albums are way too long to effectively digest (more on that later), and other times records leave you thirsty as fuck in a non-creepy literal manner that would still likely get you canceled. The latter is certainly the case for 2019’s “Oliver Appropriate”, which at fourteen songs clocking in at just under thirty-five minutes, feels really, really short for a typically-verbose-in-the-best-way Say Anything LP. However, this potential swan song full-length opens up with and contains the band’s best song title, “The Band Fuel,” and we’re not taking any more shimmering questions on the matter.
2001’s “Baseball: An Album by Sayanything” is the band’s sole DIY-release LP before a well-deserved bidding war ensued and foreshadowed the band’s not-so-colorblind bright future. Get it? Regardless if you’re an OG fan or not, this is a hell of a debut, and gets further highlighted (sic; we’re clever, but not as clever as Max) on 2013’s three-plus-hour-long expansive compilation “All My Friends Are Enemies: Early Rarities,” also containing 2000’s “Junior Varsity” EP, 2002’s “Menorah/Majora” EP, the “Dormroom Demos,” and other SA rarities. Again, like we mentioned in the opening of this sterling piece, as staunch sticklers for accuracy and brilliance, none of the other EPs and compilations count as proper full-lengths. You’re shamelessly wrong if you attempt to poorly critique us for such and anything else in the comments.
This section of our soon-to-be-viral Say Anything album ranking piece, which starts again just after this article’s halfway point intermission, contains our second of two Kanye West references. We truly, truly wish that 2014’s “Hebrews’ was the one that Max played for Kanye in so many ways, namely for its seven-letter title, which would inspire Mr. West to write a disjointed but eventually-deleted social media post, and the many, many guest features which, like the next-to-be-mentioned LP, would put a scene band in hip-hop territory. The ambitious and incomparable guitar-less “Hebrews” may get lost in the shuffle of other amazing Say Anything LPs, but we implore you to give it another spin.
We know, we killed it for all of y’all, and this double album should be ranked differently in this here piece, but we are judging the LP objectively as an entity and without any semblance of emotion whatsoever. Honestly, if 2007’s “In Defense of the Genre” was cut by about 43, 46, or even 47%, it would likely be in the silver medal slot here, but we can’t change the past as much as our whiny pathetic emo hearts would like us to. For this recording and the following album placement listed, despite both being released on a major label, the first singles (respectively the-not-bad-but-middle-of-the-road Say Anything tunes “Baby Girl, I’m A Blur” and “Hate Everyone”) weren’t the best options to escape a sinking ship and successfully launch a record. Oh whale.
Full disclosure: We know that you purely look at these album lists out of an unhealthy combination of boredom and spite, and outside of the actual numerical rankings themselves, you don’t even read any of the piece’s actual text. Sad! We work hard on these so do better. Regardless, we know that we gaffed in a not-so-glorious-fashion regarding Say Anything’s 2009 self-titled record’s placement here, as it should be ranked fifth, seventh, or somewhere between the band’s hit LPs “Through Being Cool” or “On a Wire.” As we read on your blue checkmarked Twitter account, your list crushed ours anyway. Still, this #2 placement is undeniably the band’s catchiest effort and an overall enjoyable thirteen tracks front-to-back.
If you thought that a multi-layered and not-typically-mainstream aggressive rock song touching on a relationship torn apart by the Holocaust called “Alive with the Glory of Love” would successfully infiltrate the world in the mid-aughts you’re far, far more astute than most. If not, and you weren’t scoping absolutepunk.net on your T-Mobile Sidekick, Clive Davis’ J Records sure noticed its potential, and signed the band shortly after the band released its 2004 LP “…Is a Real Boy,” and re-released the record along with some extra songs known as “…Was a Real Boy.” Much lore has been told about this album’s dramatic creation, but regardless of the fact or fiction behind such harrowing tales, this album is a 10/10, and a 21st-century classic without a trampled flag on a city street. Please tell us that “Baseball: An Album by Sayanything” should be the winner here in this piece, we dare you to!