Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run- A Classical Musician’s First Listen and Reaction
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- #virginrock #brucespringsteen
A great piece of music with layers of complexity far beyond what’s apparent at first glance.
Here’s the link to the original song:
• Bruce Springsteen - Bo...
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Amy Shafer, LRSM, FRSM, RYC, is a classical harpist, pianist, and music teacher, Director of Piano Studies and Assistant Director of Harp Studies for The Harp School, Inc., holds multiple degrees in harp and piano performance and teaching, and is active as a solo and collaborative performer. With nearly two decades of teaching experience, she teaches privately, presents masterclasses and coaching sessions, and has performed and taught in Europe and USA.
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Credits: Music written and performed by Bruce Springsteen
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Anyone else envy Amy getting to hear these songs for the first time?
I think that's why reaction videos are a thing. Sharing the experience of a song you love with another is the next best thing to being able to hear it again for the first time.
Kinda, but there's always more that I haven't heard yet. I've found that this is a good channel to find those.
She’s so expressive!
@@dmooreca2 Yup! Nothing better than sharing songs you love with people you actually know and like, or maybe even love... But those opportunities come few and far between.
Reaction videos are a cheap fix when you can't get the GOOD shit!
I do if it’s true.
You should watch a live performance of this and see how much energy he, and the whole band, put into it.
En vivo es una aplanadora!!!
Brother loses five pounds per show.
No one can count to 4 like Bruce.
Dee Dee Ramone is also in that discussion
I can, but I'm not Bruce.
Has to have b a parody of this on Sesame Street, no?
haha
Sometimes he just counts to three to keep us guessing.
When somebody says to me "Bruce Springsteen" the first word that comes to my mind is empathy. this guy loves people and that's why we love him and his music also. I am French and you Americans are so lucky to have such an artist. We are all born to run. Thanks Bruce
This song is still one of the most passionate songs I've ever heard. No matter how many times I hear it, it never loses its intensity.
The scope of his early songs was HUGE. This and Thunder Road are just grand examples of a wall of sound in rock composition.
The River.
Jungleland
The myth of escape when there is none.
You couldn't have summed it up better or more succinctly.
Superb 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Damn.
Damn! This cut deep. Kudos.
Exactly. Also, the myth is realer at a young age and can win a girl. Later, saying I will love you no matter what though we're sad. Myth realized.
Love Bruce Springsteen’s music. He has written so many fantastic songs. I’m a son of a coal miner from the North East of England and his lyrics speak to me as surely as they do to the American working class. My favourite song of his is Racing in the Street - it breaks my heart every time I listen to it.
It's an escape this town song
Is it not an «I love my car» song?
@winterbird4447 I could swear he invites Wendy to ride his motorcycle. On Thunder Road he invites Mary to get into the car 😂😂😂
The highway's jammed with broken heros on a last chance power drive.
Damn that is such a great line.
Going to a Bruce concert was like going to church.
They would play for 3 hours.
Still do and some more. Although he doesn’t run anymore.
Still are. Saw them last week at Wembley stadium. Three hours straight
Saw him last week. Three hours fifteen minutes non-stop! At 74!
Except you don't leave feeling like it was a huge waste of time😂
You mean pray not play.
That incremental stepping up youre talking about, it very much mimics the feeling of shifting gears
It's a call to chase their dreams. ✨️
The way I understand it he and Wendy are running to keep ahead of the life they were born into.
Same here. They want to run away from the life they are living now.
I'd never realized it because their vibes are so different, but it's not unlike Tracy Chapman's Fast Car--the first verse, where youthful enthusiasm is still certain it can escape the cycles that entrap us.
Him and his car loves to burn rubber.
@@irisblue2332I always thought those two songs went together
@@DTatMC I always linked Fast Car with Red Dirt Girl. It also works, but it’s tapping into the latter verses instead.
I feel like Amy needs to hear Thunder Road next, although Jungleland (or New York City Serenade as has been suggested) would also be good choices given her background. I feel like she needs to explore some more early Bruce and then The River. Then Darkness & Nebraska era. I’m so relieved you were able to see the depth of the lyrics, Amy, and hope you get hooked enough to dive deeper into a huge and varied back catalogue. Bruce has so many influences and has been influential to so many artists. I’ve just subscribed, a great reaction! 😅
Just don’t let her listen to Reno 😂
😂 Get whatcha mean but I think she would like it!
I also wonder how Born in the USA hits for a non-American
Bruce is one of the great wordsmiths. I’m a novelist and dude inspires me. Turn a phrase like Bruce and you’re golden
Yes, I would say that you could call this a driving song. For Bruce, cars are a symbol of freedom.
I would definitely call its sister song “Thunder Road” a driving song
Cars being symbolic of Freedom is pretty true for Americans in general. Europeans don't ever really seem to grasp it. My mom is from Ireland and been here over 60 years and still doesn't get it.
@@metalrules1135 Yeah, and Bruce totally tapped into that. I've heard that every now and then he goes back to his hometown and drag races people at stoplights
And, by his own admission, he didn't even know how to drive a couple of years before he wrote it 😁
Yes, the song is about the human spirit and being from a small town, and not really about the importance of having reliable transportation.
It's all about dreams and getting away to find them, and it's highly energetic. Very few artists can inflame and manage the listener"s emotional energy like Springsteen. Listen again and watch how the musical arrangement brings you up
Makes me wonder if 'Wendy' is a reference to Peter Pan, which has a similar theme...
I absolutely love this reaction to one of my favorite 70s songs and albums at the time when it came out in 1975. I loved all your lyrical analysis, you very much get the poetic heart of this song. It was an anthem to many of us in the 70s. Guys were really into fast cars back then, and it also poetically captured the emotions of the younger generations, the joys and sorrows of life and love that we were starting to experience for the first time as teenagers and young adults. And doing so in a far deeper, relatable and mature way than the early Beatles love songs from slightly over 10 years prior (the Beatles of course progressed). As you said, it operated on several levels, from the surface level to the deeper levels. Great reaction!
This song was so striking I can tell you exactly where I was when I heard it. What an album!
Me too
Springsteen is a great story teller. "I'm on Fire" is a haunting song that has been covered by bluegrass musicians.
I am pushing 60 years old and am a bit ashamed to admit it took me until almost the year 2000 to appreciate Bruce. One of our national treasures.
Don't feel too bad. Been trying to get my wife of 30 years interested for ... about 40 years.
It just doesn't appeal to her although she likes the lyrics and the music.
Takes a while to connect for some apparently.
Last year I got a friend who was 40 to give Bruce Springsteen another try (3rd attempt). The penny dropped for him over the summer, now he just harps on about the Nebraska and born in the USA album's 😅
Never been a big Springsteen fan, but I've always loved his ability to create a vivid image or create strong emotions with just a few words. From the beginning, this makes you feel the intense longing and desperation the character in the song it feeling. 2 of the other songs on this same album (Thunder Road and Jungleland) create vivid images of what's happening from the very first line of each song.
At first I feared Amy had missed the whole point of Born to Run. But she came good at the end as usual. This classic Boss song demolishes the myth of the American dream. It's about the cruelty of broken dreams that were never real and the desperate fight to find a better life somewhere, anywhere
By the time of the River, the despair in American life was already evident. The union jobs we were promised were all sent to Japan. Bruce was on top of the angst.
As are so many of his songs. Not a complaint, just an observation. He's been to New Zealand three times and I've seen his concerts each time. Having been a fan since I was about 13 or 14, there's no better rock/pop music experience than to see The Boss live.
Broken dreams that were never real? He realized them! As have millions in this country. America doesn’t guarantee your dreams it just offers you the chance to dream. The rest is up to you and your determination, commitment, passion - if you are good enough they will happen.
Try Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Bolivia........
I'm so glad that you're hearing this.
Please forgive me but there's an impression I get of snobbery amongst classical music aficionados.
This is the music of the common working man and he has something to say about the human condition.
This is a sentiment that would be understood by a farm boy from the dawn of civilization, that Wanderlust that drives us to get up and leave the farm, leave the community, leave our parents, get out there and do something.
It's a theme that's been around forever, no different than the call of the sea to sailors, ancient explorers and settlers.
What sounds like sadness is really the expression of an instinct for us to leave and explore the world.
We were born to run, it's who we are as humans.
Yes motorcycle!!
Motorcycle as metaphor for escape… for freedom…
Very specific in the lyrics!
“At night we ride through the mansions of glory
In suicide machines”
Motorcycles are universally called suicide machines…because even a minor accident can be deadly. No protection like what one would have in a car.
“Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
And strap your hands 'cross my engines”
This is how a passenger rides on a motorcycle, sitting behind the driver, holding on by wrapping your arms tight around the driver, and your legs squeezing tight on the bike….
I rode a bike for many years, a true love affair…
The symbolism for that feeling of freedom and more is something bikers crave.
I agree motorcycles are unquestionably a theme in the song, but then, so are songs. Hemi-powered drones clearly referring to Chrysler. Girl's combing their hair in rear view mirrors, something you can't really do on a motorcycle. He's clearly on a motorcycle, but also paying homage to "Cruising."
As a motorcyclist I noted this when I first heard it . However the types of modified cars he refers to (early 1970s) are also "suicide machines".
Very powerful and cornering averse.
I doubt he had bikes in mind when he wrote this
I think the wrap your legs stuff is also a clear metaphor for sex
The count-in at start of last verse is the greatest count-in in rock music
Yes!
Amy, I'm really surprised you didn't say a word about the glockenspiel & its prominence in the whole song. It's VERY unusual for a rock song, but its presence really enhances all the cinematic imagery in the lyrics & the composition.
They worked on this solitary song for 6 whole months, sorting through different versions & arrangements until Bruce felt they perfectly captured the sound that was in his head.
"Jungleland", from the Born To Run album is a "must-hear" for you! Devastatingly beautiful!
You also need to forge ahead deeper into many catalogues; David Bowie, Radiohead, The Kinks, Jethro Tull, Yes, The Who, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc.
I would LOVE to see your encounter with the title track to "Quadrophenia" by The Who!!!
The lyrics are larger than life teen romance. The music is pure energy. The setting is heartland USA with lots of car imagery.
This song is an anthem of the working class life as young people are coming of age. It speaks of the angst that we all go through growing into adulthood, while the driving beat and music describes the inevitability of being forced back into the working class life that young adults are all trying to escape.
Thunder Road and Jungleland next! Love It! 1,2,3,4!!
I agree especially regarding thunder road. One of the main themes of Springsteen is the hardship to escape from and the journey towards a better life. I think both born to run and Thunder road have this overall theme. But thunder road feels more personal and intimate espacially as it involves another person to be invites to take the journey together with all the commitment it needs. Another great one in this line of songs is "the River"
I think Amy would enjoy both, but especially the complexity of Jungleland.
Thank you for posting this. Bruce also wrote a book titled, BORN TO RUN. It's his memoir and its emotional waters run deep. He writes beautifully and openly about his struggle with depression, generational trauma, and what it means to come home again.
What makes this song work so brilliantly is the drive of the music contrasted with Bruce’s weary, almost dreamy vocal. Other than the “Whoa!” screams, he never belts. He’s caught up in the dream, in the vision before his eyes.
This song reminds me of a specific couple from my senior class in high school. Each of them was just itching to escape our medium-sized Northeastern industrial town. I picture them holding hands as they run down the steps of our school, then breaking into a sprint and running side by side across the parking lot to a motorcycle, peeling out of the lot and speeding away, as far as they could go before their hometown obligations suck them back in.
The song is about the youthful urge to break free, to escape the restrictions of childhood and one’s backwater hometown, to never settle for the humdrum lives of our parents, to leave behind all the local elders admonishing us to be patient, to be realistic, to conform to societal expectations.
Songs with similar themes of escaping the dreariness of blue-collar life include Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out,” or Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”…though these aren’t specifically youthful. “Jack and Diane” by John Cougar Mellencamp describes rebellious teenagers, but lacks the scale and drive to escape. Really, there’s no better anthem to youthful escape than “Born to Run” 👍
What became of them?
@@amitabhhajela681 🤷♀️🤷♀️ I myself left that town after graduation…as did my parents, a few years later 😂😂
this was an incredible take on a classic song. I first heard Born to Run in 1974 as a teenager living in New Jersey. It became my favorite song and still is, today at age 65. I have seen Bruce in concert over 80 times . Thanks Amy, I really enjoyed your analysis.
Growing up a teenager in the 70s was the best.All these songs that would later be called " classics ".To be there when they were played was awesome ! I can remember exactly were I was when I heard this song.
MISS "THE BIG MAN"..... CLARENCE CLEMONS WAS A FORCE ON THE SAXOPHONE!!!
His nephew Jake took over in the band… up to his uncle’s standards!
The whole E-Street Band is such a good fit to The Boss.
Clemons' son does a good job tough,
huge footsteps but he's indeed his father's son.
EVERY time Clarence comes in with his sax solo I'm engulfed with goose bumps.
A joyous and exuberant celebration of the freedom and fearlessness of youth by a true rock poet. ❤
Springsteen is so adept at metaphors. One of his most common in his lyrics is the inclusion of cars .... Along with roads and running. It's way more the aspect of driving or traveling. For the working class an auto can be one theor most valued if not only real possessions. The car represents their place on the social ladder, their means to escape their town, situation or mirror their feelings . They can reprsent the repressed potential or constraints needing to be shattered.
Racing in the street, Born To Run are a great paring back to back, like book ends to the same story. The early joy and jubilation in a relationship with no limits, transforming to the wesry need for escape from unfulfilled potential and promises. A lifetime of "Used Cars" can parallel the plight of the working class family and the judgement of their worthiness based on their income and possessions. And the desire to prove everyone wrong who said youll mever amount to anything. A Pink Cadillac is a extravagant luxury, only existing for the pleasue of those lucky to get to ride. Drive all night is crossing mountains and oceans to prove my devotion. Open all night is getting ready to have some fun and enjoy life .. working to live not living to work.
I'm sure we could write books on this topic..(I imagine people have at least written dissertationa.) i kinda think of him as the Faulkner of Jersey.
Saw hem three times in Barcelona, he always give all hi soul , powerful concerts first i've been i FC Barcelona Stadium was more than 4 hours concert. He is so generous with the audience.!!!
I like how the saxophone acts almost like a second bass.
It's because it's a core part of the band. RIP Big Man.
It's actually incredible how much is packed in a few vague verses. So much content and emotion.
As always, great analysis and reaction, Amy. I'm not the biggest Springsteen fan in the world but it's difficult not to respect his talent as a powerful lyricist. Many of his songs perfectly capture the imagery and essence of the New Jersey boardwalk environs he clearly experienced as a young person. Jungleland (off the same album) combines particularly vivid imagery, profound and poetical messaging, and very dynamic musical elements.
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE YOUR VISCERAL REACTION ON YOUR FACE EVERY TIME BRUCE GOES UP HIGH WITH HIS VOICE!
What's great about this song is that it's so filled with details that it almost feels over-produced and cluttered, but at the same time,
given that it's about dramatic teenagers who want to get out of their deadbeat town "before it's TOO LATE", it seems entirely appropriate.
This song, like few others, truly encapsulates the epic drama of the teenage mind for whom everything matters and small decisions seem
like life and death. You'd have to go to Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell to find something similar.
It's also interesting that when Bruce later on wrote about those teenagers who escaped their hometown, his songs were written with a sense
of regret, as if those former teenagers now wanted nothing more than to return home to their innocence and carefree lives.
But you can never return to what you left behind...
I love your reactions. It's nice to listen to an adult's perspective that addresses both the music and the message. So many great Springsteen songs. I encourage you to check out his songs Thunder Road and Jungleland. If you want an absolute short masterpiece, check out the song Meeting across the River.
Those were my 3 recommendations too! Great mind's... 😂😂
This song gets me every time. My throat clenches, my eyes well up at certain points. The lyrics are just so incredibly evocative of a feeling, an experience of longing and hoping and aching... to love, to be free, to prove yourself in a maddening, terrifying world surrounded by death and regret. My GOD what a fantastic piece of rock poetry.
So many fun facts about this song. But I won’t bore you with them. But one thing interesting is this album was the “make or break” album for him with his label. They were ready to let him go. He put everything he had at that time into this album. The rest is history.
As for the song is about a car 7:40, hahaha. A bit literal and too on the nose for Springsteen. The song is about breaking out of a town where dreams die. Asking his love to take that chance break free, all while perfectly and poetically describing the town - much thanks to Dylan for earlier doing so better than anyone else.
Lastly, having lived in NJ for my entire life and going to the shore for many summers, he paints a picture with not only the words, but the actually tones of the instruments. It’s sounds like the boardwalk. I can smell the cotton candy mixed with salt from the ocean and the hot tar on the boardwalk holding it together.
Love Bruce. Love this song. At the time, it kicked butt beyond anything else of the time. Listening to this warms my heart for rock music.
Pretty dang right on reaction/interpretation. Nice job on this review. It is a song to dig into. A lot there.
Not often you get to hear a rock song that features a glockenspiel.
I love this song, though it isn't my favorite from Bruce. I can't say that the theme is universal, but it certainly describes the way I felt as a young man, only without the cool car, lol.
agree, I dig the glockenspiel accenting the song....and yeah, as a youngster, I just had the public bus and the subway to "escape"
@@mojorider8455bless your children, give them names
I saw Springsteen and the E Street band 15 years ago when they played the entire Born to Run album, and it's still the greatest concert I've ever seen. He is a master storyteller.
After playing together since the 1970s, Bruce's band, the E Street Band, named for the street in Belmar, NJ the keyboard player's mother lived on, are one of the tightest bands one will ever hear. The classic lineup consisted of a guitar player (besides Bruce), a bassist, a drummer, a piano/keyboard player, a keyboard/accordion player, and a saxophonist. The first few years had different personnel but by 1975 had pretty much settled on the classic lineup. Since then a second guitar player has been added as well as various adjunct players such as a horn section, a violin player, backup singers, and Bruce's wife Patti who sings and plays acoustic guitar. Adding to that various guest players on particular nights, the stage can get pretty crowded some nights. There have also been two significant losses, keyboard player Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons (RIP gentlemen).
Thx for your enthusiasm with exploring this gem. Bruce deserves every bit of it. 😉😊🤘🏻
There's something extremely relatable that he's capturing about what it feels like to be a young man. I remember exactly what it feels like to be the guy in this song. I'm also from fairly near where he originally was from so I can literally picture exactly what he's talking about when he says stuff like "sprung from cages on highway 9".
Ironically, I've always associated this with riding a motorcycle. 😊
The lyrics have many levels. It starts off sounding like a typical boy meets girl song, but keeps expanding, deepening. You expressed this weii.
At long last! I've expectantly awaited your discovering Springsteen. Hopefully, the first of many.
The sax player, Clarence Clemons (known to all fans as The Big Man) was such an integral part of the band's song. He passed, too young, from a stroke. Springsteen gave a remarkable interview to Howard Stern in which he said he literally sang to Clemons as he died. The song was Land Of Hope And Dreams, a song about moving on to the next world (if you believe in such a thing). It would be worth checking that song out.
I associate this album with riding my motorcycle at night, I listened to it so many times that way. For us oldsters, many of us hold his first three albums as the best and most positive youthful songs he produced. This is his third album. What a master. What a poet, performer, he's The Boss.
On your own time, you should see a live version, when the E Street Band get cookin’, it is almost a holy experience. Most bands have singer and what I like to call “a person of intrigue (usually the lead guitarist.) In Springsteen’s band, there are so many characters that make up this conglomeration of sound in a communal experience with the audience. It’s something to behold.
Absolutely the goat of live performances and great lyrics and story teller
I would check out his official video and you will see the intensity and pure joy that Bruce and the band perform with! THE top notch performer!!
I love your Flapper Reminiscent Blouse with the heavy pearl Necklace! Simply Lovely!! Thanks for the lovely reaction, as well!
really loved your thoughts on this song. It's always meant a lot to me ,from when i first heard it when i was 13, until this day. Bruce really is one of the greatest ✌🏼✌🏼☮☮
Springsteen's songs remind us of rock's 1960s roots. They're virile and somehow essentially American. In 1974, a Rolling Stone critic caught a show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Springsteen and his E Street Band were opening for Bonnie Raitt. Discouraged by the sound-alike bands of the early 1970s, Jon Landau was ready for something new. This is what he told Rolling Stone's readers: "I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. I saw something else: I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." Springsteen eventually led pop/rock music away from gentle synthpop (Spandau Ballet, Roxy Music, Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, Soft Cell, Simple Minds) and back to its roots: wailing guitars, driving drums, maybe a sax accompanying a masculine voice that's heartfelt but not pretty through a simple three-chord progression
Springsteen's songs championed the hard workers and brave fathers of the suburbs, of the New Jersey he grew up in. It's music to listen to in a roadhouse somewhere as you drink cold beer, play pool, and dance with pretty girls who want nothing more than to escape to New York or L.A. - but who know they are destined to put their dreams away and make the best of marrriage to their high school sweethearts, their kids, and their struggle not to fall out of the middle class.
When Bruce started, they didn't use synthesizers only pure music. The bands you name came half/end '80.
@@hermannus3894 I agree, it’s a bit off-putting to read about a song from the early 1970’s as a progression beyond the synth pop of the early 1980’s.
If you move the initial sentence to the end of the post, however, and drop in a reference to “Born In the USA” - then it becomes quite accurate 👍
Perfect analysis.
@@goosebump801, she just changed her reaction completely.
@@hermannus3894 Great! Thanks for letting me know 👍💐
Good analysis! Springsteen has struggled with "inner demons" all his life. Still has this dream about one girl, a new beginning, all over his texts. Leaving the old behind him.
You should watch and react to a live version of "10th Avenue Freeze Out", to comprehend what he has meant to fans and audiences all over the World! 😍
I've been listening to Springsteen for over 50 years, so when this came up for me on UA-cam, I was insanely curious. And at first, when you started listening and were talking car song fun, American stuff.... I'm going, no, no no! It's a METAPHOR! But I kept watching and the idea of the feeling the song is bringing came to you for sure. The influence of Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound from the 60s is very much an influence on this whole album. His music has been, over the years, filled with great imagery and stories.
As a native of the state of New Jersey I thank you for listening to this amazing song!!!😄
Yesm, you nailed it on Springsteen.
I've listened to the Boss for forty plus years, and you dialed everything in on your first shot.
Bravo and God bless.
In October 1975, Bruce appeared on the covers of the two largest news magazines in the US at the same time - Time and Newsweek. This of course was long before social media. No modern musical figure had ever done this.
Nice, Amy. I enjoyed your ( always insightful) review. This was Bruce’s defining moment. From a musical standpoint, his most interesting work came early in his career. I would recommend the following two songs, that I think are closer to your musical interest.
1. “ New York City Serenade “
2. “ Jungleland”
A "constant level of intensity" is a great way to describe Springsteen!
As to arrangement features, never underestimate the creative genius of Roy Bittan on piano (known in the band as The Professor/Prof). His contribution to the Boss' music is significant.
We worked hard to get out and never got out. The broken American dream. This was our life in New Jersey, life across the USA.
To be played at my memorial party. (My entire high school time. Bruce was my first concert.) It brought a tear or two to my eye in this year, re-feeling the song's power and even poignancy.
He's known for his live concerts. Born in the USA was a song of the feeling of the time. Your Home Town was a song about how Americans consider their communities... Bruce Springsteen is a superb observer.
love bruce! I get why this is his iconic song (and born in the usa) but I love "brilliant disguise"
Escape, Romance, longing for freedom and a hope for fulfillment of dreams.
You encapsulated it perfectly. It seems like a fun song but it is profound and serious. Bruce is brilliant and profound and has a beautiful heart and is such a gifted songwriter and musician. And a beautiful human being. There is a lot of complexity to his music.
You have done a great job of analyzing the lyrics and meanings behind this piece of music. The analogy of driving / highways equaling the process of an life is spot on. The progress of time from adolescence to adulthood.
Oh she should cover Meatloafs Objects In The Rearview Mirror which is definitive car as a life journey song
He was like 24 or 25 when he wrote this. Pretty incredible.
Awesome song with great dynamics. Pure rock music 🎶
One of the greatest songs. Thank you for your analysis. Love Bruce!
Bruce and E Street ...
the GOAT of live performance.
I am going with Iggy Pop, but Bruce is great!
Frankie Goes To Hollywood did a cover of this song on their 1st album, which also was the version I heard first 😊
Do you think she will play the Frankie Goes to Hollywood cover?
That is a great cover too.
I love the little vignette in the dole office, followed by Holly's "Hah!"
@@MelissaP. - Nah, probably not 🙂
@@hadz8671 - Yes! 😀👍
'Or at least, medals applied by two presidents.' LoL. I loved that.
Incredibly evocative song, nay an anthem for American youth trying to break free of their shackles....'I've seen the future of rock n'roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen..."
I have loved this song from the beginning and after listening to your reaction I appreciate even more.
Springsteen is one of the greatest lyricists of all time. He's in the league of Bob Dylan. To see a Springsteen concert is a religious experience if you're a long-time fan. He and the band exemplify what it is to be a rock and roll band. They are legendary in concert. His music and his lyrics made him a billionaire.
Commenting before I watch. Excited to see your reaction to this one, it's an all time classic!
Born To Run is the intentional distillation of every aspect of the dream of rock & roll, and Springsteen spent months and months recording it, trying to squeeze everything of the music he loved and was liberated by into a single four minutes of perfection. He wanted the voice of Roy Orbison, the poetry of Bob Dylan, and the Wall of Sound of Phil Spector. And through the sweat of his brow and refusal to compromise, the miracle is he got them.
This single song, along with Patti Smith's 'Horses' album, made around the same time, were the first works to treat and articulate the phenomenon of rock & roll as something more than just disposable teenybopper music, but rather something genuinely and unprecedentedly transcendental, explicitly reaching for something beyond human grasp and sometimes, once in a lifetime, brushing against it. And so Born To Run is a holy song, a poetic text up there with "Howl", and one of the greatest achievements in song of all time.
I was at first a bit dismayed at your rather literal interpretation of the song being about "cars," etc.--glad you realized it was about a HELL of a lot MORE than that as the song overcame you, and you came out the other end with your resulting, rich interpretation. Here's mine:
THE FIRST ROCK & ROLL SONG I can remember hearing was The Four Season's "Big Girls Don't Cry" in summer camp in 1963, when I was five years old (but I thought the lyrics were "Big girl, small fry"). My next seminal rock & roll childhood event was The Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of '64; my older female cousins introduced me to the album Meet The Beatles, and I was hooked by its infectious sounds, so upbeat, so positive, so joyous on songs like "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Hold Me Tight."
The Beatles opened up the world of AM Top 40 mid-’60s radio, and from those transistors came the wonderful potpourri of sounds and voices and rhythms that we have come to look back upon as the Golden Age of AM Radio: the one-hit wonders of garage rock (like The Music Explosion's '67 hit, "Little Bit o’ Soul") to the more established Motown acts, to Phil Spector's various Wall of Sound groups, to the Beach Boys to the Stones (and the rest of the British Invasion) to Dylan ("Like a Rolling Stone," the first Dylan hit I can remember, because it was on AM radio).
But by the end of the decade, AM radio had given way to the album-oriented world of FM "rock" (as opposed to "rock & roll"), as exemplified by the rush of all the huge, “heavier” bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, etc. (Unfortunately-or fortunately?-this whole shift in taste passed me by, as I didn't get a real stereo system 'til I was fifteen, in '73; up ‘til then, I had to rely on my mom's AM car radio and a 45-rpm turntable for my musical education.)
By that time, I was already nostalgic for the sounds of my childhood, the early Beatles compared to the later, druggier Sgt. Pepper’s-era Beatles. By the early '70s, AM radio was truly a musical wasteland, as most of the great one-hit garage songs were gone, replaced by crappy bubblegum pop hits like "Precious and Few" or "The Night Chicago Died." The mellower sounds of Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and the whole LA-based singer-songwriter, country rock establishment effectively killed what I remembered as “real” rock & roll.
Every now and then, though, a song would cut through the AM-pablum and remind me in some way of the sound and style of music I used to love. I can recall being electrified by the classic opening guitar riff of the Raspberries' debut hit in '72, "Go All The Way.” Don McLean's concurrent hit "American Pie" had the sound and beat of the more old-fashioned-sounding AM radio I remembered (he even used the phrase "rock & roll" in the song, which, by '72 had become a forgotten sobriquet-the genre had been called "rock," or "hard rock," for years). George Lucas’ breakthrough film, American Graffiti, released in late summer '73, resuscitated interest in oldtime, ‘50s-style rock & roll, but didn't really do anything for that early-‘60s, pre-British Invasion sound, as represented by Phil Spector or glorious one-shots like "Telstar."
At about the same time, Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" shot to #1, and like Graffiti, reminded us all of that forgotten era in AM radio, with its Farfisa organ / Del Shannon "Runaway" sound. For better or worse, I became an Elton John fan, because at least he could rock out on songs like "Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting," and album cuts like "Elderberry Wine." His rollicking, Jerry Lee Lewis-influenced piano style on songs like those was catchy and upbeat (his albums, along with The Four Seasons’ Greatest Hits, were the first albums I purchased when I got that stereo in '73). Elton was my only sustenance through the dark days of the early-‘70s, from "Crocodile" up through his last great AM radio single, "Island Girl," late in the summer of '75.
I turned seventeen that summer and was finally able to drive my mom's '74 Plymouth Duster. I was driving that car when a song leapt out of the tinny AM radio and stone-stunned me. It was like nothing I had ever heard before, yet was also strangely familiar. The booming, opening drum fill sounded like Little Eva's "Locomotion," but set to thoroughbreds charging out of the starting gate, introducing a guitar riff that simultaneously evoked "Telstar" and, later on in the song, the James Bond guitar theme!
There was a dense wall of sound like Spector's, an orchestral grandeur that, in some skewed, pop-cultural connection, also evoked the great soundtrack music of the NFL Films of the ‘60s; bells and keyboards that recalled everything from Motown to the Spencer Davis Group; a banshee-like sax solo that made me feel like I was hearing saxophone for the first time (and I played the alto sax from 4th to 6th grades!); a bridge to the final verse that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before; and finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, a singer who was singing like he really meant it, like his life depended on it, vocals with a passion, a reckless abandon that was obviously influenced by Dylan's naturalistic, talking-singing delivery, but, in his thrilling, soulful final wails also seemed to echo those of Frankie Valli's at the end of all those Four Seasons songs I loved. Those wails rekindled in me the positive, uplifting, joyous spirit my favorite early Beatles music once inspired.
I was so moved, so absolutely overwhelmed by the totality of this four-and-a-half-minute masterpiece that I had to literally pull over to the curb to collect my thoughts. I was shaking my head in disbelief-I just couldn't believe what I had just heard. This amazing, unbelievable song seemed to contain bits and pieces of everything I had ever loved about rock & roll. It was almost like a theme song for rock & roll itself. Even the song's title had an inevitability about it, something that summed up the whole, entire, grand, escapist nature of rock & roll, of youth, of America:
"Born to Run."
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It's a love song my good lady " I want to die with you on the street tonight in a everlasting kiss" Pure romance.
"Together Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul".
Yes. Absolutely a love song.
@@joepegeldoesn't he also sing "Wendy let me in I want to guard your dreams and visions" it's fuel injected romance
I was at a birthday party as a teenager and this album was playing on the turntable. I sat by the record player and listened to it again and again. I was mesmerized.
This is a stadium crucher. I saw him and the E Street Band in 1985 at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the stadium was actually shaking so much that they had to close it down for two years to rebuild and stabilize it.
Love the way you break down the songs. Bruce is a legend with many hits and is one of my all time favorites. You should watch a live performance video. No group has as much fun performing for a huge audience.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are almost in a category of their own, they're as strong on record as they are on stage and they're VERY strong on stage. Springsteen has a varied back catalogue, it ranges from anthemic rock to depression-era folk. It's impossible to sum up Springsteen in one song so I hope he's revisited in the future, a song from the Nebraska album would make a good comparison.
Roy Bittan didn't get the credit he deserved.
David Sancious was still with the band for the recording of this track.
This isn't A driving song. This is THE driving song. BTW, your description was perfect. This is youth, and vehicles, and motion. It's a young man heading out of town on a rumbling new Harley with a backpack on behind, riding out into the unknown, knowing that it's going to lead to hurt because it's life. It's the knowing first steps on the unending arc of life and death.
The best Springsteen performance IMHO is : Thunder Road (Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, London '75). It is absolutely jaw dropping.... one of the best live performances i have ever heard.... and i am not a huge Springsteen fan.....God bless the BBC engineer that recorded THAT SOUND in 1975! It is hard to get sound that good today! BTW - a lot of really old BBC videos of concerts are exceptional in quality. Neil young Old Man is sooooo goood.
Yes, when you look up up Road Trip, the dictionary plays this as background