Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

in my family, WOMEN RULED THE WORLD!

I felt filled with the freedom of being young and leaving something, of my new detachment from a place I loved and hated and where I’d found so much comfort and pain.

I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same . . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it.

I even spoke on the phone to a high school–age Patti Scialfa, dispensing the fatherly advice that this was a traveling gig and it’d be best for a young lady to stay in school.

there is something in the gathering of souls that blows the blues away. Something that lets some sun in, that keeps you breathing, that lifts you in a way that can’t be explained, only experienced.

(“the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance”)

Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”).

My writing was focusing itself around identity issues—who am I, who are we, what and where is home, what constitutes manhood, adulthood, what are your freedoms and your responsibilities.

Hey, mister rock star, get the fuck out of my mind and into my feet, into my heart. That’s how the job

gets done. That’s how you introduce yourself.

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.

that “and” was really important. It said there was a party going on, a meeting taking place, a congregation being called forth, YOU WERE BRINGING YOUR GANG!

I later told my children, compassion is a wonderful virtue but don’t waste it on those undeserving.

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.

Man cannot live by sobriety alone. We all need help somewhere along the way to relieve us of our daily burdens. It’s why intoxicants have been pursued since the beginning of time. Today I’d simply advise you to choose your methods and materials carefully or not at all, depending upon one’s tolerance, and watch the body parts!

So there, with you, I’m near free and it’s party ’til the

lights go out.

We are a nation of immigrants and no one knows who’s coming across our borders today, whose story might add a significant page to our American story.

I can feel the love I’m a part of surrounding me and flowing through me; I am near home and I am standing hand in hand with those I love, past and present, in the sun, on the outskirts of something that feels, almost . . . like being free.

We were far too formidable a unit to go gently into that good night.

As we’d slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there’d been only one thing missing: you.

Rock ’n’ roll music, in the end, is a source of religious and mystical power.

There is no evidence of the soul except in its sudden absence.

he was also incredibly lovely and my friend.

Clarence once mentioned to me during a negotiation that he should be paid not only for playing but for being Clarence.

As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he wrote upon Clarence’s death, C was blessed with “the power of musical intent.”