The '90s are easily the least well-regarded decade of Bruce’s career. If people make note of this period, it’s to illustrate how far he fell without the E Street Band, who finally reunited with Bruce at the end of the decade to great acclaim and popular excitement, and have remained with the Boss ever since. And yet I’ve always had a soft spot for '90s Bruce. This period coincides with my coming-of-age years as a music fan. Bruce had been a fixture in my life since "Born in the U.S.A.," but it wasn’t until the '90s that I started to become a true hard-core fan and get deep into his catalogue. For fans of my generation, "Human Touch" and "Lucky Town" were the first big “new” Bruce albums of our lives. And then there's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," which as a piece of writing stands with anything he has ever done.  To talk about '90s Bruce, I called up Tim Showalter of Strand Of Oaks, who over time has evolved, like Bruce, from being a moody folkie to the maker of widescreen rock reocrds like 2014’s excellent "Heal" and 2017’s "Hard Love." In early 2018, he put out a very good outtakes collection form that album called "Harder Love."