On Springsteen: A Guest Post by Peter Ames Carlin

Read the story behind the music, and get to the heart of the creative process behind Born to Run with The Boss and his band, in Peter Ames Carlin’s biographical track-by-track dive into the legendary album. Read on for an exclusive essay from Peter Ames Carlin on writing Born to Run.

The story behind Born to Run begins with Bruce Springsteen facing an existential crisis. After releasing a pair of critically acclaimed, but poor-selling albums in 1973, Springsteen went into 1974 facing a steep challenge from the executives at Columbia Records: If he wanted to keep making records for their company the 24-year-old musician would need to make a single that could fit on Top 40 radio stations. If he could record a new song that sounded like a hit, the Columbia executives would cut loose enough money to make his third album. But if the new song struck the executives as another dud, they’d drop Springsteen’s recording contract and send him back to the nightclubs of the Jersey Shore. 

A gifted songwriter and musician who came from an economically hobbled industrial town in central New Jersey, Springsteen threw himself into the writing and recording of a new song called “Born to Run,”  a blistering rock ‘n’ roll anthem that traced one young man’s determination to leave his dead-end hometown and make tracks for a new horizon – that place where we really want to go, he sang – where he and his girl could build a new life together. 

The song won over the Columbia execs, and the tunes Springsteen recorded next described other characters facing their own grim circumstances with the same blend of realism and idealism. The young hero in “Backstreets” recalls his first brush with heartbreak and corruption. The aspiring gangsters in “Meeting Across the River” are clearly bound for failure, while the Magic Rat in “Jungleland” is chased by police and ultimately left for dead in the gutter, gunned down by his own dreams. And yet the stirring conclusion of “Thunder Road,” the narrator’s promise that “…it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win,” rings across the entire album. 

Released in August 1975, Born to Run was the commercial triumph Springsteen needed to revive his career. Looking back fifty years later, he still sees it as a crucial turning point in his artistry: the point when he discovered the voice he’d carry forward, the stories he wanted to tell and the characters that would populate them. “It was a very intense period of self-discovery, a very intense period of identifying myself and finding my own identity and who I wanted to be, he said to me, describing his ongoing relationship with the album that changed his life when it could have gone either way.  “I’m very, very fond of it.”