Bruce Springsteen taps nostalgia with a fist

Together, Wendy, we could live with the sadness

I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.

Most songs that make one feel part of a different time are those so far steeped in a story that you can’t help but feel as though you lived the life of someone whose life could never be a glimmer in your own eye. It’s the reason why songs such as Rhiannon and All Along the Watchtower remain so beloved, their authors invite you to a world so removed from most listeners that a simple tune into their lyrics lead to a new world, ones adorned with characters of witches and thieves.

But then there’s Bruce Springsteen.

While Stevie Nicks has a knack for filling your world with mysticism of ancient welsh witches and Bob Dylan could write a song of only six worlds that gives you a story, it would be Bruce Springsteen to place you in the middle of a boy caught between the world of the glory days of the 1950s, begging his one true love Wendy to run with him, and make you feel part of that not-so-far away story.

From the opening lines, you’re transported to Springsteen's perfectly crafted world. You can visualize your passing world, nearly feel yourself speeding down the streets in a car doomed to crash, you need no introduction to this place or these people, he’s not telling you a story - he’s placing you in the middle of these lives.

Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
'Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run
Yes, girl, we were

Unnamed places, unfamiliar faces, yet you feel as though you understand each word he says. It’s his crafting of the story that leads this, you don’t need to know where you are, or who's there, you don’t need to do anything but be able to feel.

The love story is unfinished. Similar to the world, we know nothing, yet feel the magnetism between Wendy and our unnamed lead. In an act similar to what Rod Stewart did with 1972’s You Wear It Well, we get glimpses into a relationship, nothing of the full scale. We know there was tragedy for our pinnacle couple, but we aren’t sure. Their history is rich, they are fleshed out despite our lack of information. In the way we don’t understand why the couple of You Wear It Well broke up, we don’t understand the urgency between the unnamed hero and Wendy. There’s something there, but we never know what.

Springsteen brings a lot of juxtaposition to the song that layers the story as well. For each bubblegum line of love there’s a line that exemplifies the desperation the narrator feels in his dead end town.

I wanna die with you Wendy 
On the street tonight
In an everlasting kiss

He wants to die, yet live in an eternal embrace of love. He could die in this very moment but as long as he knew she loved him he could drift happily over, if they both lost each other their love seems to live a life of its own. There is a certain romanticism in this line, very akin to that of The Rolling Stones' You Got The Silver. That song follows a lovestruck narrator, whose eyes can only see love when set upon the titular woman.

Oh babe, you got my soul
You got the silver you got the gold
If that's your love, it just made me blind
I don't care
No, that's no big surprise

Similar to what Springsteen penned for Born to Run, the narrator is willing to go past all the petty pain if they see enough love within this woman. Keith Richards had the same juxtaposition throughout You Got the Silver, love blinded him yet he can’t seem to care, similar to how Springsteen doesn’t mind dying as long as that entails being captured in eternal bliss with Wendy. It’s an interesting love song for this reason, as similar to the dreary landscape Springsteen bleeds New Jersey in throughout the song, the love story is muddled and confusing, leaving listeners with more questions than answers as to how to feel and what they’ve heard.

I think this is what Springsteen excels at, actually. You can accredit much to his success [his stage presence, emotional feel towards his music, the equality he treats his band with, the stellar output he’s showcased over the past fifty or so years, and the list drones on and on] but it feels wrong to not actually draw the true line between this song being Springsteen’s breakthrough into mega-stardom and how perfectly it demonstrates the key talents of said man.

Springsteen can write like no one else, and his talents should never be lost on any single person. His outrageously good debut [1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.] introduces the world to one of the best wordsmiths we're ever gonna see. In just nine songs a man is proven. Half the songs on the album can be consider Dylanesque, and probably even better than Dylan himself [coming from quite a big Dylan, too], and when you’re a 24 year old no- name from New Jersey fucking around hoping to make it big in the music industry that’s pretty damn impressive. To write a song like Lost in the Flood at 24 is insane to fathom, that a kid could have so much talent with words and translate this talent so effortlessly to music is much more impressive than most are willing to give credit too. How one can go up from such a strong debut seems impossible, but Springsteen did it. Not only that, but he did it no less than four times in ten years, each year bringing him closer to the success he proved to the world he deserved. While he’s not for everyone, he cannot be denied in how palatable he made rock of yesteryear and poetry of his day.

There’s a clear line you can draw through his influences, a pegboard of rock’s greatest if all laid out. His debut features homages to Dylan, Lou Reed, The Beatles, and Ronettes. His harmonies, lyrics, and topics of choice aren’t cheap knockoffs of these people, they are carefully crafted by someone who clearly did their research, who held enough love and respect for each of these artists, and who knew how to showcase what he learned from them without being gimmicky. This is something that never shakes away in any of Springsteen’s music, that while all original and with his own homespun takes, it pays its credits to the glory days [pun intended] of rock and roll. This sure didn’t stop with Born to Run, as I already called upon his inspirations towards Rod Stewarts’ early songwriting and that of Keith Richards and his oh so cynical looks at love. The song's inspirations also call towards fellow New Jersey native Paul Simon’s 1967 magnum opus Homeward Bound, his self proclaimed hero John Fogerty’s Proud Mary, and to a lesser extent Paul McCartney’s 1973 comeback Band on the Run. These songs are all gently weaved into a beautiful, original piece. You can see all these songs in Born to Run, yet never hear them. You feel the urgency of Band on the Run, you sympathize with the self hating lover as you do in You Wear it Well, you long for the change of like you do with Proud Mary, pass through the familiar yet distant town like you do in Homeward Bound, and understand this one sided love of poison like you do throughout You Got The Silver. In his own magnum opus, Springsteen was able to pay tribute to all those who came before him whilst still doing his own thing.

The song is also some of his best, if not his best, self-interest work. Springsteen catches a lot of flack for his writing of self-inserts, as unless you deepdive into his work it feels like every song he’s singing as a poor old sap in an abandoned yet lively New Jersey suburb begging this girl to run away to the promised land with him. You have to delve to find his social commentary that he folds into the mix, like a little treat for listening to his six hundredth song about Candy, Rosie, Sandy, Mary, or, yes, even Wendy, being his salvation from a wasted life. Born to Run is a great example of this phenomenon, as Springsteen, as always, is treating the people that just want to hear generic rock and for people who want to truly listen and hear about this world he’s created.

The first time you hear this song you focus mainly on the incredible sax solo [that we thank Clarence Clemons for] , the insanely singable chorus, and how even if you hate this guy's music he “kind of went off with Born to Run.” Around the third, fourth, or five hundredth listen you begin to read the lines he’s playing out to you. “This town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap / A suicide rap” is not a line that would just be thrown into a nothing song, after all. Once more putting the listeners in the world, you pause your focus on the love story and start to see the wounds Springsteen is revealing about the fabled American suburbs. Springsteen grew up in the 60s generation, and he will not be held as prisoner to the life he was shown doesn’t exist. He saw the war in Vietnam, was enlisted for the draft [though failed his physical and never served despite admitting he wished to stand in solidarity with millions of other young men and serve], and watched the change that rock and roll music could make. He was born on the cusp of the idealized American society, but by the time he was old enough to understand the world had changed, and his music reflects this.

While Born to Run does use nostalgia to it's advantage, marked by the many callbacks to seemingly perfection of being a teenager in 50s, it uses that nostalgia to make you look. Springsteen is not speaking of an idealized society, he's talking about a real one. If life was ideal he wouldn't compare life to a death trap, he wouldn't have to long to leave, and Wendy wouldn't have to be begged to love him, she simply just would. But that's not realistic. And fantasy? Well, that's just not Springsteen.

As discussed, his work greatly leans on the work of rock and roll greats and showcases a wonderful duality very few artists can so artfully master. On the surface his work seems like it would be for those who don’t have to most progressive outlook on life, but the lyrics so tastefully weave in these ideas that those people disagree with it creates a juxtaposition of who listens to the music and who likes the music. This divide would become even present for Springsteen once he got more outwardly political, if you could even believe that. It would be Born in the U.S.A. that would make him the biggest star on Earth, and also prove that people never really listened to a single word he ever wrote. The topic of Bruce Springsteen and his political renaissance is a topic for a different time that requires a whole delve in and of itself for how bold and tastefully he managed and succeeded in it, but this is not that time. The point in it being brought up was to show that for as long as Springsteen has had a hit, he has had it be misunderstood. That didn’t start in the mid-80s, no. That started the second Springsteen landed on the scene, and was showcased the second he had a hit song, furthermore proving Born to Run as the definitive Springsteen song.

Bruce and the E-Street Band performing a killer live version of Born to Run in 1975: