Forbes Magazine just named Bruce Springsteen the fourth highest-earning musician in the world. Springsteen racked in $70 million from June 2009 and June 2010. The Boss started playing in his first real band at age 16 and he hasn't stopped rocking since.

He's released 16 studio albums, shows few signs of slowing down in his all-out concerts and he's looking ahead to more at age 60. Yet, the very first song on Springsteen's very first album is one of his very best.

These are the types of things you find out in the Ultimate Springsteen countdown. This week, we roll inside The Top 40 and Springsteen flirts with The Sopranos and tells a pure Jersey tale.

Song 40: “The Line”

Album: The Ghost of Tom Joad

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The emotional centerpiece of The Ghost Of Tom Joad — “The Line” — is a stunning tale of what happens when the call of duty conflicts with the necessities of the heart. In many ways the song can be seen as a counterpart to “Highway Patrolman,” as characters clash with the forces within themselves when faced with seemingly impossible choices.

Bruce borrows the melody from Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” although he turns this song into a much more somber affair than Bobby D’s jaunty number. Using just acoustic guitar, keyboards, and a voice that sounds like it’s been beaten down by fate so badly that it’s afraid to come up for air, Springsteen brilliantly brings these folks to life with just a few brief descriptions.

Springsteen puts us in the shoes of two California Border Patrol agents, scrambling to make ends meet while trying to scrape a semblance of happiness along the way. Carl, the narrator, is so wounded by the death of his wife that he can’t see the ulterior motives of his new love, who sees him as a ticket into the United States. His counterpart, Bobby Ramirez, wears the burden of making his living by depriving people of his own heritage the opportunity for a better life.

When it’s revealed to Carl that his new love’s brother is just another of the smugglers he’s been trying to catch, he still blindly charges ahead in an attempt to help the girl. Bobby stops them, and Carl finally pulls back from the brink after briefly considering shooting his friend.

The girl runs away, and Bobby and Carl are left with the debris of their friendship and the hard truths of the lines that they crossed while trying to defend “The Line.” This song is beautiful, sad, and revelatory without an ounce of strain. More people than just hard-core Springsteen fanatics should hear it.

Song 39: “Blinded By the Light”
Album: Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

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Let’s just get this out of the way at first: I suppose it requires some sort of talent to take a song as earthy as “Blinded By The Light” and turn it into something so bizarrely overwrought, but I do not recommend Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s cover of this Springsteen chestnut. That the cover version went to No. 1 in 1976, thus becoming the only Bruce-penned song to reach those heights, makes for one weird footnote.

As for Bruce’s own version, the first song on his very first album, it still stands as one of the most charming things he’s ever recorded. Even with all of the lyrical dexterity on display, the song doesn’t feel unreachable in any way. The rhyming dictionary just provided Springsteen with a vehicle to express all of the frustrations of youth in all of their romantic glory.

The recording, like so many on that first album, isn’t the best, but some parts stand out. I like the spare opening verse with Bruce tickling his electric guitar and doing double-duty on bass for some soulful interplay. The chorus is sloppy yet apt. And Clarence Clemons’ presence is already a powerful one in this early incarnation of the band, even if Bruce hadn’t quite figured out how to maximize his impact.

Beyond that, you still have those wild lyrics. I’ve seen some hilariously frothy message board arguments as to the meaning of it all, but I think you’re just meant to go along for the funky ride. I’ve always heard the song as an ode to growing up, with all of the tiny victories and heartbreaking losses that accompany it melding into one big glorious mess. Sometimes, at that age, you learn from your mistakes exactly how to make them again, but as Bruce puts it, “that’s where the fun is.”

Song 38: “Cautious Man”
Album: Tunnel of Love

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One of the pitfalls of many singer-songwriters is their tendency to try to wrap their songs up in a neat little bow at song’s end. They feel the need to provide some sort of definitive ending, be it happy or sad, or even provide a moral to the story. Life rarely works out that smoothly, one way or the other, and ambivalence is much more often the prevalent mood. Springsteen’s willingness to embrace that ambivalence, even at the cost of tidiness, is a big part of what makes his music so enduring.

Take “Cautious Man,” for instance, where the ambivalence on display probably was hitting close to home. Springsteen’s marital woes bubbled to the surface in the guise of a man named Billy, whose life of solitude and wandering is interrupted, against all odds, by a sudden love affair. This guy is right out of some pulpy film, what with the symbolic tattoos and his adherence to the code of the road, but all that quickly goes by the wayside when this girl comes into the picture.

Domesticity wins out.

But only for a little while. Despite all of his good intentions and efforts to stay true, the road keeps calling to Billy. Again, a dream is the turning point, and when he wakes to find his new wife “breathing beside him in a peaceful sleep, a thousand miles away,” he tears out to the highway. But even that has now lost its luster, as Billy finds no answers, just “nothing but road.”

In many ways, the song, just acoustic guitar and brooding synths, ends in the middle of the story, with Billy returning to his wife’s bedside in an ironically peaceful scene as the moon pours light into the room. We can guess how it’s going to end from the “coldness” that Billy feels, and we can extrapolate how it ended from Springsteen’s own eventual divorce. But we don’t know, and it’s the not knowing that gives “Cautious Man” its depth and unsettling sadness.

Song 37: "I Wish I Were Blind”
Album: Human Touch

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Springsteen’s admiration of the work of Roy Orbison shows up in the arrangements of many classic songs from his catalog. But this is the only one I can think of which embraced the lyrical sensibility of many of those Orbison evergreens. Songs like “It’s Over,” “In Dreams," and, the ultimate, “Crying,” wallowed in sadness. There wasn’t a lot of hidden meaning to the lyrics beyond the main point of the guy missing the girl, but that was all they needed because they were so expertly constructed and, of course, rendered by that once-in-a-lifetime voice.

Bruce embraces that sorrowful aesthetic on this track off "Human Touch," not only in the high drama of the melody and the soaring musical crescendos, but in the lyrics. The narrator can see all of the world’s beauty at his fingertips, but wishes his sight were stripped away when he sees his girl with someone new. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I don’t remember the quote exactly, but I think Willie Nelson once said something like “That’s why the jukebox plays” when referring to tortured romantic souls like the one in this song. Orbison understood that, and Bruce gets it here as well.

Points go to Springsteen for casting the perfect backing vocalist for the track in Bobby Hatfield. As one half of The Righteous Brothers, he delivered one of the all-time great longing vocals on “Unchained Melody.” His acrobatic harmonies soaring above Bruce are the touch that puts this already wonderful track right over the top.

Song 36: “The Promised Land”
Album: Darkness On the Edge of Town

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“Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man.” Much of "Darkness On the Edge of Town" deals with the way the highways of youth can veer off suddenly into the cold walls of adult reality. But Springsteen, in the chorus of “The Promised Land,” refuses to lose faith even as all the evidence around him suggests he should.

Before we delve into the lyrics, we should mention the outstanding band performance of the song. It’s one of the most democratic E Street Band offerings in that every member of the group gets a chance to shine. Clarence, as usual, earns the spotlight solo, but uniformly fine work is turned in by all, as the band plays with delicate force, never trampling on Bruce’s solid melody.

This song features one of my all-time favorite Springsteen couplets: “Working all day in my daddy’s garage/Driving all night chasing some mirage.”

“Mirage” is the perfect word, because the protagonist expresses his frustration, which borders on hostility, toward the promises that are never meant to be kept. He feels kinship with the wild dogs in the night and their freedom. And in the last verse, he senses salvation in a major storm that will clear the useless stuff away: “Blow away the dreams that tear you apart/Blow away the dreams that break your heart/Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.”

Once again, as he did on “The River,” Springsteen equates dreams with lies.

But the chorus brings things to a resilient and defiant conclusion. He’s not propagating the belief in a heightened fantasy world that only leads to dead ends. Bruce believes in “The Promised Land,” but it’s real, and it’s only for those tough enough to persevere through the hard truths of everyday living.

Song 35: “No Surrender”
Album: Born In The U.S.A.

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In an unabashed throwback to his own glory days, Bruce went all-out on this firecracker track which kicked off side two of Born In The U.S.A. He was actually ambivalent about including it on the album for its fearlessly big-hearted attitude, but, ever the silent contributor, Steve Van Zandt insisted that it belonged. Thanks, Steve, for that, or else we might have been deprived of this song until Tracks was released so many years later.

Max Weinberg’s drums are the like the starter’s pistol, after which Garry Tallent’s bass sprints ahead to propel the whole band forward. In a song about brotherhood, it’s somehow fitting that there was no instrumental solo. Just the “li-lis” and the “whoa-ohs” connect the verses and the refrains.

In “No Surrender”, the dreams and promises of which Springsteen had been suspect of for so long are welcome friends once again. And if a statement like “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, then we ever learned in school” is outrageous, well, so is “All you need is love.” Sometimes, willful naivete can get you through the day when reality is too harsh. “No Surrender” is, in many ways, a big ball of naivete, and no less thrilling for it.

Song 34: “You're Missing”
Album: The Rising

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The timing of its release made this a song about 9/11 by proxy, but the absence felt by the protagonist of “You’re Missing” should resonate with just about anyone who’s ever suffered a loss. The song accurately depicts that odd feeling of the world stubbornly moving on even when you’re not prepared for it to do so.

Producer Brendan O’ Brien apparently had a big hand in how this song ended up, even going so far as to suggest some chord changes that differed from Bruce’s original vision. Whatever he did, it worked, because the stately beauty of the song, accentuated by the cello, doesn’t overplay the sadness, yet gets to the emotional core. Danny Federici’s organ solo tries to break away, but the fade-out hits too quick for him to provide a cathartic sigh.

The loss here doesn’t necessarily even have to be a death. All we know is that the narrator can’t bear the mundane routine that is his life, because it’s not routine anymore. It’s been irrevocably altered, and not even his kids’ cries or his friends’ well-wishing can change it.

If you’ve ever lost someone close to you, you know that it’s not something you get over. It becomes part of you, somehow embeds itself in your DNA. “You’re Missing” is the perfect musical embodiment of this phenomenon.

Song 33: “State Trooper”
Album: Nebraska

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The tension is just about unbearable on this "Nebraska" track. That repetitive guitar riff is like impending doom, always lurking, ready to strike at any moment. Indeed Springsteen sings as if he can barely contain himself, embodying this desperado with just the right dose of wiry energy. Little by little, the façade crumbles, a whoop here, a holler there. Finally, at the end of the final verse, he screams so loud that it threatens to blast out every speaker in proximity. The violence has finally been unleashed.

This is not the kind of guy with whom you’d want to cross paths. You get the feeling that even though he pleads for the state troopers to let him pass, he’d be more than happy to get into a dust-up should one fail to heed his warning. After all, he shows little remorse for his past actions, and he’s just about fed up with the lousy radio. (This was in 1982; just imagine if he was driving around out there with the sad state of radio these days. He’d really have a conniption.)

This song famously played out the magnificent first season of The Sopranos but it’s really not too apt when you think about it. The characters on that landmark show were famously conflicted about the lives they led, but Springsteen’s is just a loose cannon.

As he sings, “The only thing that I got’s been botherin’ me my whole life.” And whatever’s bothering him, he’s ready to take it out on somebody.

Song 32: "The Promise”
Album: Tracks

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Bruce debuted this song live right around the time he was going through an intense lawsuit with former manager Mike Appel, and, with the lines about promises being broken and “fixed games,” many assumed that the dispute was at the heart of this song. Maybe that’s why Bruce shelved it, and it finally saw the light of day on the 1999 "Tracks" compilation with a fresh recording.

It’s interesting to note the difference between the vocals on the two rendition. Look up the early version online, and you’ll hear how desolate Bruce sounded, almost spectral. In the ’99 version, his voice is much huskier and somehow sadder. The years that passed hadn’t softened up his disappointment at all.

With just some plaintive piano behind him, Springsteen is back in the land of dreams and promises again, but this time he’s singing about what it does to you when those intangibles are shattered. The illusions are bare, and as he brings back character names from past songs and references "Thunder Road," it’s clear that these shout-outs to his songwriting past are meant to evoke not nostalgia but heartbreak.

These people are not fulfilling their expectations, and "Thunder Road" is laid bare for what it really is: “There’s something dyin’ on the highway tonight.”

In a startling verse toward the end of the song, Springsteen reveals how it all went right and still went wrong: “I won big once and I hit the coast/But somehow I paid the big cost/Inside I felt I was carryin’ the broken spirits/Of all the ones who lost.”

It’s a powerful feeling of remorse conveyed in those lines, a startling contradiction to the stereotypical carefree rock star of the 1970s. But, then again, such empathy and insight is what helped separate the guy from the pack in the first place. Never has he exhibited those feelings in such a gorgeously sad way.

Song 31: “Zero and Blind Terry”
Album: Tracks

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I heard a live version of this once on E Street Radio with Bruce singing it alone at a piano. Before the song he explained that when he was writing on piano back in the early 1970s, he felt compelled to tell fantastical stories to go along with the melodies. Hence, the West Side of Jersey story you get here, with two lovers trying to make it in the midst of a gang war.

I love the way that Springsteen sings on the recording, which eventually surfaced as one of the unearthed gems on Tracks. He sounds like a grizzled veteran telling the tale years after the fact, sometimes whispering in confidence, sometimes getting all worked up when the action peaks.

And, maligned though it has been by history, this song is proof that the early incarnation of the E Street Band was starting to gel right before they morphed into the classic version that would eventually sustain. Vini Lopez turns in a deftly-felt performance on drums, and the elegant piano of David Sancious is perfect counterpoint to the gritty rhythms.

Notice also how Springsteen builds the drama. When the men that Terry’s Dad hired advance on Zero’s gang, the music steadily rises as the “whoa-oh-whoa” backing vocals approach. The music hits a feverish crescendo as the battle commences, with Clarence’s sax escaping to tell the tale.

Bruce, as narrator, settles back in to tell the epilogue with a wistful gleam in his eye, and you can tell that he believes in the almost supernatural element of the couple somehow overlooking the streets like benevolent angels. Fantastical, yes, but oh so compelling.

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