Anguish and challenge run thick and fast, at a martial-rock clip, in the first single from Bruce Springsteen's forthcoming election-year address, Wrecking Ball (due March 6th). "I've been stumblin' on good hearts turned to stone/The road of good intentions has turned dry as a bone," he laments in the first verse, a precise, devastating assessment of a nation exhausted by economic straits and locked in an uncivil war of values stoked by selfish Washington gridlock. It gets worse: "Where are the hearts that run over with mercy?" Springsteen asks with deep ragged disbelief. "Where's the work that will set my hands, my soul free?" There is a quick reference to a shame that now seems like a lifetime ago: the black and poor of New Orleans, abandoned to sweaty feral hell in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. But it is a still-dark stain on our honor, now acted out in campaign vitriol about lengthening welfare rolls and the "food stamp president."

The broken promises actually come with contagious deja vú, a darkened twist on familiar pleasure.  Springsteen's urgent growl is set in a streamlined pop of shadowy synth-like countermelody and throaty-jangle guitar, like the mid-Eighties lift of "Dancing in the Dark" hungover with disappointment. But stubborn faith takes over in the final choruses. "Wherever this flag's flown/We take care of our own," Springsteen sings, scraping off the irony, surrounded by street-church voices. It is, coming through the despair, classic Springsteen, the sound of a guy who believes democracy is not a game of percentages, 99, one or otherwise. It's all for one – or it will be all for nothing.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen's "We Take Care of Our Own":

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“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.