Album: Bruce Springsteen, The Collection 1973-84 (Columbia)

Collecting together Bruce Springsteen's first seven albums in a handy slipcase box, The Collection 1973-84 reveals how his career development went in emotional waves, with the wordy urgency of his debut supplanted by the growing ebullience of his R&B street-opera style on The Wild,the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, which then crested on Born to Run, before his three-year recording exile incubated the flintier, more thoughtful cast of Darkness on the Edge of Town, whose burgeoning interest in social duty and blue-collar honour bore abundant fruit on The River before hardening into a more bitter medicine on the solo Nebraska.

Finally, with Born in the USA, Springsteen found a way of dealing out that medicine in a more generous manner that linked to his earlier, ebullient ways.

DOWNLOAD THIS Rosalita; Born to Run; Racing in the Street; Hungry Heart; Dancing in the Dark