Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there’s always somebody faster, and if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration and you inspire me to work harder. I wasn’t afraid of that. I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broad or intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. I was all I had. I had only one talent. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me—my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness—night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in.

My voice was never going to win any prizes. My guitar accompaniment on acoustic was rudimentary, so that left the songs. The songs would have to be fireworks. I decided the world was filled with plenty of good guitar players, many of them my match or better, but how many good songwriters were there? Songwriters with their own voice, their own story to tell, who could draw you into a world they created and sustain your interest in the things that obsessed them. Not many, a handful at best.

Music on the radio is a shared fever dream, a collective hallucination, a secret amongst millions and a whisper in the whole country’s ear.

When you came to work with me, I had to be assured you’d bring your heart. Heart sealed the deal. That’s why the E Street Band plays steamroller strong and undiminished, forty years in, night after night. We are more than an idea, an aesthetic. We are a philosophy, a collective, with a professional code of honor.

You’ve got to let the audience feel that they’re coolly within your hands. That’s how you help them feel safe and free enough to let themselves go, to find whatever they’ve come looking for and be whoever they’ve come here to be.

People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands.

No matter how far you took it, I was always trying to understand where you were coming from, see your point of view, walk in your shoes. I later told my children, compassion is a wonderful virtue but don’t waste it on those undeserving. If someone has their boot on your neck, kick them in the balls, then discuss. My surfeit of empathy was great for songwriting but often very bad for living or lawsuits.

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 seen other great musicians lose their way and watch their music and art become anemic, rootless, displaced when they seemed to lose touch with who they were. My music would be a music of identity, a search for meaning and the future.

All popular artists get caught between making records and making music. If you’re lucky, sometimes it’s the same thing. When you learn to craft your music into recordings, there’s always something gained and something lost. The ease of an unself-conscious voice gives way to the formality of presentation. On certain records, that trade-off may destroy the essential nature of what you’ve done.

In Madison Square Garden, at peace, I’d sit surrounded by squealing teens and stout-hearted parents. I once sat next to a lovely woman who pointed to Jess and asked, “Is that your daughter?” I said, “Yes.” She then pointed to the stage, where an on-the-cusp-of-fame Lady Gaga, dressed in a white tutu, was singing her first hit and said, “That’s mine.”

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 now reside in us. It’s all we can do if we’re lucky.

Death, along with all its anger, pain and loss, opens a window of possibility for the living. It removes the veil that the “ordinary” gently drapes over our eyes. Renewed sight is the hero’s last loving gift to those left behind.

“My Father’s House” is probably the best song I’ve written about my dad, but its conclusion wasn’t going to be enough for me. In “Long Time Comin’ ” I lay out the wish I’ve had for my children. We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry. Insisting on our own experience, our own final calculus of love, trouble, hard times and, if we’re lucky, a little transcendence. This is how we claim our own lives as sons and daughters, independent souls on our piece of ground. It’s not always an option. There are irretrievable lives and unredeemable sins, but the chance to rise above is one I wish for yours and mine.