4 Bruce songs in the first 2 episodes / Cinematic songwriters

The Beatles

He and Team Springsteen have always been quite protective about the songs, and I think he owns all the rights. I'm guessing this series will have a pretty much exclusive Bruce soundtrack, which is fine by me.
He's become far more open in the last couple of decades and is now allowing songs to be used. I think it will work really well in SMAH.


She's a man, it's a sled, he's dead already.

I'm not a big Springsteen fan in the slightest, but the use of his songs in the first parts of Show Me a Hero was wonderfully done and added to the experience. Good stuff.






Fighting the frizzies, at 11.

Plus a Steve Earle song at the end of Part 2. Simon really likes Steve Earle per The Wire and Treme...

I lived in this part of the country in this time period, in a town that dealt with its own school desegregation issues. In my part of town the schools were always desegregated from the 1960s....but on the other side of town, because of neighborhood demographics, they were almost exclusively white. They decided to start bussing in order to further integrate the schools, and it caused a lot of tension. Nothing like what I see here but it was bit contentious.

They capture the look and feel of the era perfectly, and the use of Springsteen songs fit very well for me. Of course I am a fan (Jersey girl!) but it works.

Leonard Cohen

Randy Newman

There's a total of 12 Springsteen songs used in Show Me a Hero, and I actually found it overkill. I think the show is excellent and I really like most of the songs used, but there were times when it felt like a "Springsteen's greatest hits" approach to the soundtrack. Obviously his socially oriented subject matter works well for the show's themes of class, poverty and economic crisis, but they could have at least varied it by using some tracks from other American folk, blues, gospel or protest singer-songwriters (e.g. the Steve Earle song at the end works beautifully).