Why Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" is a Perfect Album

Paying tribute to one of the greatest rock records of all time for its 50th anniversary.

This album review pays tribute to one of the greatest rock records of all time, the one that made Bruce Springsteen a global superstar.

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Genre: Rock, Pop, Singer/Songwriter

Label: Columbia

Release Date: August 25, 1975

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

Let me state the obvious up front: Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run is a perfect record. Eight songs, no skips among them, that not only made the mid-twentysomething from New Jersey a household name but also set the template for what it meant to be a paragon of the working class who could sell out stadiums. Some reviews from the album’s initial release criticize it for taking itself too seriously, but that’s part of its magic. Every lyric and melody overflows with the kind of bittersweet romanticism that comes with glorifying the dead-end places, vocations, and characters you come into contact with throughout a life well-lived. The word “cinematic” gets thrown around a lot when extolling the virtues of a specific brand 70s rock and roll Springsteen helped refine during the back half of the decade, but this record is so evocative in its imagery, so tender and poignant in its expression, that it’s the most appealing widescreen melodrama the genre has ever produced.

What’s been fascinating in researching Born to Run is how many fans and pundits alike equate its success to the supposed verisimilitude in his storytelling, rather than the dramatic license he takes with the stereotype of the average American. It’s all incredibly compelling, don’t get me wrong, but there’s precious little on this LP I’d consider an accurate reflection of a working-class life. Locales are twisted into knots with poetic surrealism, while the women he describes on “Thunder Road” and “She’s the One” in particular are idealized to the point where they couldn’t possibly exist. But none of that matters, really. You still want to inhabit this world and feel as deeply as the Boss and his cast of downtrodden dreamers feel. This LP’s power lies not in its ability to describe how the world worked and existed back then, but in how many imagined or hoped it could.

For what it’s worth, Springsteen has readily copped to the fraudulent nature of the “working class hero” label many have put on his music. Early on in his Springsteen on Broadway album, he says:

“I've never held an honest job in my entire life. I've never done any hard labor. I've never worked nine to five. I've never worked five days a week until right now. I don't like it. I've never seen the inside of a factory and yet it's all I've ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had - absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up. That’s how good I am.”

For as revered a rock craftsman as he is now, it’s easy to forget that, in 1974, Bruce Springsteen was already treading on thin ice with Columbia. His first two records, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, were both critical darlings (the latter in particular holds up remarkably well), but they weren’t big enough commercial successes to justify the “next Dylan” moniker the label had saddled him with. After a contentious back and forth on what the next step should be, Columbia agreed to foot the bill for one more album. If it failed, they’d drop Springsteen and his E Street Band. In no uncertain terms, Born to Run needed to be a home run.

Unsurprisingly, the recording sessions, which took place at 914 Sound Studios in New York, were a long, painstaking process. Springsteen was hell bent on creating an all-time American epic, one that married the intricacies of Roy Orbison songs with the towering Wall of Sound aesthetic pioneered by Phil Spector. “I had these enormous ambitions. I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard,” the Boss said of the title track. “I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.” After months of intense work, he nearly cancelled the whole project after hearing a mastered version of the LP and, hating it, famously threw it into a hotel pool.

Years later, Springsteen reflected on his reaction:

“I lost the ability to hear it clearly, certainly towards the end of the production. After the long period of time we spent on it, I could only hear what was wrong with it or what I thought was weak with it […] It was just really me not wanting to let it go and not wanting to admit that it was the best that I could do and that I was finished. To accept that our fortunes were going to rest on whatever this was, for better or for worse. That was a big responsibility at the time, and we were putting everything we had on what we’d done. So it was just traumatic. And you’re young, 24 or 25, and you don’t have the stability or the history to be able to put it in any kind of perspective.”

For a record with such reputational and historical weight, it begins on such a somber note. The iconic introductory bars for “Thunder Road,” featuring nothing but world-weary harmonica and piano, act as an immediate tone-setter before the Boss even utters a word. And, when he does, he sketches out a story full of aching hope and more than a bit of desperation. It’s arguably the most deeply felt examination of a theme that not only permeates Born to Run, but the dramatic tension that’s underpinned much of Springsteen’s career: the dream to escape versus the fear, guilt, and self-destruction that often stand in the way of realizing it. “It's a town full of losers,” he says at one point, “and I'm pulling out of here to win.”

Escape takes many physical forms for Springsteen. From the fast cars and pretty girls depicted in “Night” to the big payday that supposedly awaits the budding criminal in “Meeting Across the River,” nothing is without a catch. Something holding well-intentioned protagonists back from tasting the happiness or relief they craved so badly. Those barriers are much more complex on a song like “Backstreets,” a standout even on this no-skips tracklist. The lyrics tell the doomed tale of two friends with such emotionally charged language that it’s been increasingly interpreted as more than a platonic friendship. Their vow to stay close as they’re “hiding on the backstreets with a love so hard and filled with defeat” is equal parts noble and tragic. You root for them because you want it to work out, even though you know it can’t possibly turn out that way, whatever “it” really means to the two characters. This passage, towards the end, is particularly heartbreaking, no matter how you interpret their relationship:

Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
Well, after all this time, to find we're just like all the rest
Stranded in the park, and forced to confess

Born to Run leaves you with the best album closer of all time, “Jungleland.” It’s nine-and-a-half minutes of Americana that’s so cinematic in its drama, it’s made me cry on multiple occasions. I’ve read other critics compare it to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which, if you’re talking purely about its operatic nature, I can see to a point. But it’s a Springsteen song. It’s much rawer and sadder than that comparison could possibly encapsulate. It’s more like West Side Story in its scope and subject matter, featuring kids with switchblades and dreams of finding excitement and meaning in their lives. They all have a code that they live and die by. There’s no in-between. As a teenager, those meticulously crafted images touched me so profoundly that, in my mid-thirties, I get pulled into the memories of that sensation as much as any other element of the listening experience. I remember where I was, frozen in place, the first time I heard that Clarence Clemons saxophone solo, in all its bruised, breathy glory. Years later, I remember seeing this famous performance and being left speechless at how much wordless truth he expressed in that same solo. The way Springsteen looks at Clemons after the latter plays his final note tells you all you need to know.

In a culture saturated by irony, detachment, and digital overstimulation, Born to Run still hits like a punch to the gut. It’s not just that it’s romantic, it’s how defiantly it believes in the power of dreams—having them, chasing them, attaining them. His notion that something better still lies ahead if you’re brave enough to go looking for it still sounds daring and heroic, just as I imagine it sounded when it first debuted a half-century ago. The wall-of-sound maximalism of the production, combined with this distinctive lyricism, genuinely reshaped what rock music could be. The more I kept digging for artists this record influenced, the more I found. You can trace a direct line from Born to Run to the widescreen ambition of The Killers, Florence + The Machine, Arcade Fire, and even some of Taylor Swift’s less cloying material. Its DNA is everywhere.

When Born to Run dropped on August 25, 1975, it was the hit Springsteen and his people had been hoping for. The album peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart and landed the rock star cover spots for both Time and Newsweek in the same week, a feat I’m told was virtually unheard of back then. It sounds like his dreams of escaping rock’s commercial purgatory and landing on something greater than himself came true. But what matters more to me is how it feels now.

How it still sounds like revelation.

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What’s your favorite track off Born to Run? What moment gives you chills? Sound off in the comments.