Tag: books

PUBLISHED IN INEWS, 30th September 2016

Born to Run

By Bruce Springsteen

Simon & Schuster, £20

The first word of this powerful memoir is “I” and the last word is “home”, and in the 500 pages in-between Bruce Springsteen charts with wit and wisdom how home – the desire to leave, the yearning to return and ultimately, to build a sense of home in music – is at the core of his extraordinary musical journey.   “My writing was focusing itself around identity issues – who am I, who are we, what and where is home”, he explains, of the creative fermentation which led to the song, album and now book entitled Born to Run.  


Born in the blue-collar neighbourhood of Freehold, New Jersey where his family scrambled to make ends meet, he realised that “there in the streets of my hometown was the beginning of my purpose, my reason, my passion”.  Place is so powerful a setting in many of his songs, in which he exquisitely captures that paradoxical tug to both “run” from and return.


Springsteen entertainingly traces his journey from “an outcast weirdo misfit sissy boy” to a rock’n’roll legend, from watching his grandfather repair radios scavenged from junk piles to hearing his own song played on a radio (his “number one rock’n’roll dream come true!”).  First falling in love with guitars as a youngster, he practised until his fingertips “were as hard as an armadillo’s shell” – early evidence of a work-ethic which persists to this day.


He passionately chronicles his musical influences including how Bob Dylan inspired him and gave him hope, asking questions in his songs which struck a chord with the young Springsteen (“How does it feel…to be on your own?”), and capturing so poignantly the sense of being “internally homeless”.  Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie also fuelled his desire to meld the personal and political, and Springsteen would go on to empathetically explore social, economic and racial injustice in many songs.


“I’m a repair-man. That’s part of my job”, writes Springsteen and he sheds moving insight into how repairing the emotional damage passed down between generations is a creative purpose.  He vividly evokes growing up in a home which became “a minefield of fear and anxiety” shadowed by his father’s battle with alcoholism and mental illness, and unpicks the “legacy of pain and misunderstanding”, which he determines not to pass on.


Springsteen writes with great acuity and candour about his own depression and anxiety.  For years, performing music was his “surefire medication”.  Helped by his long-time friend and manger Jon Landau, he also tried therapy and anti-depressants. The most revelatory passages detail his battles to quieten his “self-doubting, flagellating inner voice” and transform potentially “malignant power” into creative fuel – indeed, Born to Run is a tour-de-force about how destructive impulses can be alchemised into creativity.


 “You can’t tell people anything, you’ve got to show ‘em”, is one of Springsteen’s guiding philosophies.  He concedes that he hasn’t shown us everything (“discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it”).  But what he does show is always engrossing:  those streets which made him; how his legendary E Street Band saxophonist Clarence showed him “the possibilities of friendship”; and how he learnt to reconcile writing about people seizing life with doing so himself.


Springsteen is a masterful songwriter and fascinatingly lays bare the nuts and bolts of the song-writing process including harnessing personal emotion (“Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical”) and transforming it into something transcendent and universal (capturing the “human longing for life and love” and the “primal need for justice”).  He is a masterful storyteller, too, able to sweep up the listener in “narrative-driven story songs” – powers which shine off these pages.

So resonant does Springsteen make his life-story that it’s a book I felt born to read.