Born to Run

To my great shame, I recently ranked Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run as the 24th greatest album of all time. Even as I did it, I was thinking it might be a little low…but factor in a couple weeks of obsession and I’ve come to realize the magnitude of my error. It is, without a doubt, one of the four or five best albums I’ve ever heard. It is quite possibly note for note and word for word the most perfect album ever conceived. I know it’s a little trite to write a review on something so critically acclaimed, but the fact that there are people out there that have never heard this album borders on the criminal.

Most things cannot be easily summed up in one word. Yet I would not hesitate to pick a single word to describe the tone of Born to Run, and that word is “desperation.” It’s not a depressing album per se, but even the upbeat tunes have hints of feeling enclosed or rejected. Great works of art are often made with a unifying vision, and I have only encountered a handful of albums whose songs resonate with each other as well as they do on BTR. It is illuminating to consider the theme of each track:

1. The opener, Thunder Road, ends on a defiant note, with the protagonist proclaiming “it’s a town full of losers / and I’m pulling out of here to win.” The intended victory is to get with Mary, a decent-looking girl who’s rejected tons of guys in search of “a savior to rise from [the] streets.” But despite ending on a high note, and Thunder Road being a pretty driving tune in general, the protagonist’s victory does not feel quite assured. He’s already been turned away from Mary multiple times, and makes references to his being lonely and not being a hero. Thunder Road is ultimately a song about hope, a hope dreamlike in its magnitude, but hope unmistakably touched with desperation.

2. The second song, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, is the only track that doesn’t qualify joy with pain. In part due to that uncompromised feel, it perhaps belongs least out of all the album’s cuts. It is also the only song that is clearly autobiographical: the protagonist, Bad Scooter, is Bruce Springsteen, and the story depicts the creation of the E Street Band (a story which altogether ended pretty well). The horn licks are among the album’s most upbeat.

3. Night might be my favorite song on the album. It is required listening for anyone that’s ever held down a 9 to 5 job. Thematically it echoes Thunder Road, a song about the wonder of an open highway and a girl at your side, but rather than capturing a specific point in time it’s a more general portrait of one’s dreams. Also like Thunder Road, the hope in Night is desperately fleeting…something worth grasping at. The last lines are particularly loaded with significance: “you run sad and free / ’til all you can see is the night.” The incongruous pairing of “sad” and “free” is just one dollop of the genius that went into this album, but it rings true with the underlying theme.

4. Backstreets accelerates the relationship time-line from the point of courtship to the point of retrospection. I have the impression that everything on BTR takes place the summer after high school graduation; in Thunder Road we are told Mary’s graduation gown lies in rags at the feet of her suitors, and in Backstreets the period is described as a “soft, infested summer.” The third and forth lines again recall the album’s emotional essence, as the song’s protagonist and his love Terry try “in vain” to experience primal passion. Backstreets is a song about youth, specifically the time spent with others in youth, and the subsequent recognition that that life, and that love, have been reduced to memories.

5. The fifth track completes a fantastic song cycle with one of Springsteen’s biggest hits, the titular Born to Run. It is, of course, a brilliant song basically about escaping New Jersey. It is also sung by a man that knows the ebb and flow of his town well; at one point he passes deftly from images of amusement parks to “hemipowered drones” to the girls and boys that inhabit this thrilling but too small landscape. Born to Run is not desperation for a girl but desperation for escape, the kind of goal so pregnant with false promise that the protagonist desires it with “all the madness in [his] soul.”

6 and 7. She’s the One and its follow-up, Meeting Across the River, back the tempo down somewhat. She’s the One is not about some merely average-looking girl like Mary, but a true knockout that commands every waking thought (I find it interesting that this is one of the tracks where the female’s name is not mentioned; perhaps she is too great and too universal to be named). Both tracks 6 and 7 do not merely touch on the theme of desperation, they bathe in it; significantly, the last non-chorus word in She’s the One is “bitterness.” Meeting Across the River, with its skittering horns and gentle piano, has a more quiet needfulness about it. It’s about a small time criminal trying to make $2,000 with a job he’s identified as his “last chance.” Optimistically, the protagonist imagines how he’ll return home with the money, impress his girl Cherry, and then go out walking, at peace with himself. It’s a nice vision, but it’s left to the listener’s imagination as to whether it ever happens.

8. Most of BTR is sung in the first person, so Jungleland’s third person feels quite different. The change in perspective is an appropriate end to Springsteen’s document, providing a more omniscient appraisal of events, which are here centered loosely on someone called the Magic Rat. Jungleland encapsulates all the struggles of the previous tracks, indeed giving no precise name to the thing that ultimately does the Rat in. The important aspect of the Rat’s doom is not how it happened, but how unnoticed it goes; one observer’s reaction (who might be the “barefoot girl” mentioned in an earlier stanza) is to simply shut off the bedroom light. We are then told that the poets in Jungleland do not write anything down, but merely live their poetry. Just like the Magic Rat, their pain will not be remembered – but Springsteen assures us it is real.

How effectively does Spingsteen convey the themes described above? Lyrically, BTR is second-to-none. Supposedly Springsteen strove to emulate Dylan (and you can certainly see Dylan’s influence) but I think he surpassed his mentor, at least on this album. Springsteen’s imagery is phenomenal (I love the “skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets”) and he slides kaleidoscopically through one poetic moment to the next.

Musically, it took me longer to appreciate this album. As far as the two sides of the coin go, the music is not as good as the lyrics on BTR, but that’s also setting the bar incredibly high. The musicianship on BTR is somewhat complex and perhaps not immediately accessible, but it is undeniably excellent. A multitude of instruments were used to keep the overall feel of the album diverse, and many strains of music are only used once (multiple listenings make it easier for these bits to sink in). I think a particular musical strength of this album is the beginning of each song: I love the piano opening to Thunder Road as it delicately builds to the central theme, or the bittersweet violin that starts off Jungleland. She’s The One features a fantastic progression from its ethereal opening to the guitar-driven body followed by a jangling bridge.

Born to Run is not only a fantastic album, it is an example of the sort of artistry that can come from intelligence wedded with passion. Bruce Springsteen’s seminal work on youthful desperation is unquestionably one of the finest works in musical history.