Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

Children bring with them grace, patience, transcendence, second chances, rebirth and a reawakening of the love that’s in your heart and present in your home. They are God giving you another shot.

That was one of the revolutions the Beatles brought with them when they came to America. You wrote the songs, you sang the songs, you played the songs.

Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived.

wanted to use the classic rock ’n’ roll images, the road,

“In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway

These first two were the answers I was long looking for in the receding mists of Freehold, New Jersey. They are the incredibly complicated and simple answers

My first challenge was Time and Newsweek calling to put me on the cover of their magazines. I hesitated,

Meaningless distraction drains you of the energy you should be placing into more serious things or using to simply enjoy the rewards of your labor.

Eventually, for seed money for more kite dreams, Mike sold me back every piece of my music he ever owned. It was another one

I’m one of the few artists from those days who owns everything he ever created. All my records are mine. All my

in America we’re not supposed to leave anybody behind. In a country this rich, it isn’t right. A dignified decent living is not too much to ask. Where you take it from there is up to you but that much should be a birthright.

No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depend on who’s driving. I’d

My music would be a music of identity, a search for meaning and the future.

Robert De Niro once said he loved acting because you got to live other lives without the consequences.

In 1978, he’d started the Vietnam Veterans of America but he said that most businessmen and politicians had turned their backs on the organization. To establish the VVA as a viable concern, they’d need publicity and financing. Those were two things I knew I could deliver.

Henry Steele Commager’s A Pocket History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life

How could I know who I was if I didn’t have a clue as to where I’d personally and collectively come from?

does mean to be an American is all caught up in what did it mean to be one.

But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.

All I do know is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them to wrongly isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.

I wrote and recorded my soldier’s story. It was a protest song,

“Born in the USA” remains one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music.

Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear

sing all of Woody’s controversial verses. He wanted to reclaim the song’s radical text.) In

We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and

Those whose love we wanted but could not get, we emulate.

Still, something as seemingly inconsequential as music does certain things very well. There’s a coming together and a lifting, a fortifying, that occurs when people gather and move in time with one another. It’s a beautiful