Compare any of his songs with anything by Cole Porter or the Beatles and you will see that in their cases, the words bounce in sync with the melody. Listen to the Boss, and the words hang across the music like wet laundry, spread out here, smooshed together there. One can hardly avoid the feeling that most modern lyricists are merely lazy, unwilling to get past a first draft. But the second change in modern music is more difficult to explain, but more important, ultimately. That is, a song is built on a set of harmonies in which each chord leads inevitably to the next, providing a direction and movement to the music.
Songs lead somewhere.
This is true not just of European classical music, but of popular music, too. The harmony is the solid foundation upon which the melodies are constructed. The movement has a feeling of inevitability to it. Oddly, these are the same set of chords under He art and Soul that so many teenage girls play in piano duet. But they give the hearer a feeling of direction.