The New Issue: Bruce Springsteen Brings It All Back Home

With Working on a Dream — his third great album this decade — a Golden Globe and the Super Bowl halftime show, Bruce Springsteen is hitting another career peak. He invited David Fricke into his New Jersey studio to talk about his new music, the first song he ever recorded and life with the E Street Band. Get the full story in the new issue of Rolling Stone, which hits newsstands today, and get even more Bruce right here:

• Inside Bruce Springsteen's Rolling Stone Shoot — photographer Albert Watson takes you inside the session for this issue's cover in Springsteen's "writing room" and reveals what it was like to put the legend on film.

And don't miss these killer Springsteen galleries:

• Bruce Springsteen: The Vintage Photographs — His early days with the Castiles and hanging backstage with the Who.

• Bruce Springsteen: The RS Covers — Track Springsteen's evolution from 1978 to 2008 in all of our Bruce cover stories.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
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  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
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  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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