“Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen

"Glory Days" came off Bruce Springsteen's 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. and went out as its fifth single in 1985, climbing to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer as the fifth of the album's seven top-10 singles, a haul that tied the record. It's a seriocomic tale of a guy looking back, a little sheepishly, on his best years and on the high-school crowd he ran with, and the first verse is Springsteen's own story: running into Joe DePugh, an old Little League teammate, in the summer of 1973. When DePugh died, Springsteen marked it publicly on April 2, 2025.

The band plays it like a Friday night: Roy Bittan's piano and synth, Danny Federici's organ and glockenspiel, Little Steven's mandolin, Clarence Clemons on sax, and Bittan, Little Steven, Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg hollering along in the choir.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.