[4] On November 22, 2009, the album was played in its entirety for the first time by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, at the HSBC Arena in Buffalo, New York, to celebrate the last show of the Working on a Dream tour.

", "It's Hard to be a Saint in the City", and "Lost in the Flood") and five solo songs ("Mary Queen of Arkansas", "The Angel", "Jazz Musician", "Arabian Nights" and "Visitation at Fort Horn").

[10] Reviewing for Rolling Stone in July 1973, Lester Bangs hailed Springsteen as a daring new artist who sets himself apart from his contemporaries with songwriting that either has a serious meaning or showcases his uninhibited gift for verbose, overloaded lyrics and rhyme schemes.

"[22] Creem magazine's Robert Christgau said Springsteen's songs are dominated by the kind of mannered emotional transparency and "absurdist energy" that made Bob Dylan "a genius instead of a talent".

[14] In Christgau's Record Guide (1981), he wrote that despite the grandiloquent, unaccompanied "Mary Queen of Arkansas" and "The Angel", songs such as "Blinded by the Light" and "Growin' Up" foreshadow Springsteen's "unguarded teen-underclass poetry", while even the maundering "Lost in the Flood" is interesting.