Bruce Springsteen: The Songwriter Who Rewrote the Same Song Until It Was True

Bruce Springsteen spent roughly six months writing and recording a single song, the title track of Born to Run, chasing a sound he later described as wanting to hear "Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spector." By the time he finished, so much had been layered onto the recording that a guitar bend he'd worked out specifically as a nod to Duane Eddy got buried entirely. "We had so much crap on the track by that time that you could no longer hear the note being bent," he said. He kept the song anyway. It became the one that made his career.

If you've ever obsessed over a single line or a single bend of a note until it nearly disappeared under everything you piled on top of it, that's a very Springsteen kind of problem to have.

A working-class kid from a town he needed to leave

Springsteen was born in 1949 in Freehold, New Jersey, to a bus driver father and a legal secretary mother, in a household without much money and without much patience for a son who wanted to play guitar instead of get a real job. That tension, between the place you're from and the pull to get out of it, became close to the single organizing idea of his songwriting for the next fifty years. He signed to Columbia Records in 1972 with John Hammond, the same A&R man who'd signed Bob Dylan a decade earlier, a comparison that dogged Springsteen's first two albums and that he spent years trying to write his way out from under.

A review that raised the stakes before the record existed

In 1974, critic and future manager Jon Landau saw Springsteen perform and wrote a line that became both a blessing and a weight: "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen." Springsteen hadn't even finished Born to Run yet. The sentence meant the album had to be extraordinary before a note of it was locked, and it's a large part of why he spent so long on it, six months on the title track alone, the whole record fighting, in his engineer's words, for its life. It worked. Springsteen appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week in October 1975, something almost no rock musician had done before.

Writing until the mood was right, not until the calendar said stop

Between Born to Run and its follow-up, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen wrote somewhere between fifty and seventy songs, an enormous surplus for a three-year gap. Most of that gap wasn't creative silence, it was a legal dispute with his former manager that barred him from recording at all. He kept writing anyway, and when he finally got back into the studio, he threw out song after strong song because it didn't fit the specific, bleaker mood he wanted Darkness to carry, giving several away to other artists, including Southside Johnny and Gary U.S. Bonds, rather than force them onto an album they didn't belong on.

That's a discipline worth sitting with: having more good songs than you need isn't the same as having the right ten. Springsteen was willing to let strong material go rather than dilute what the record was actually supposed to say.

A song about a broken man, sung as an anthem

Born in the U.S.A., released in 1984, is a song about a Vietnam veteran who comes home to a country with no place for him, no work, and no acknowledgment of what he'd been through. Springsteen wrote it as what he later flatly called "a protest song." The booming chorus, hollered over the loudest arrangement he'd ever recorded, ended up read by most of the country as a flag-waving anthem instead, so convincingly that Ronald Reagan invoked Springsteen by name on the 1984 campaign trail as an example of the American dream in action. Springsteen refused to let the campaign use the song and, days later on stage in Pittsburgh, laid out what the American dream actually meant to him: a place where "the strong can help the weak ones, the rich can help the poor ones," not a slogan for any particular candidate.

It's one of the starker lessons in songwriting available anywhere: how a song sounds and what a song says can pull in completely different directions, and once it's out in the world, the writer doesn't get the final word on which one wins.

What's worth taking from his career

Springsteen's catalog is built less on individual clever lines than on obsessive revision toward a specific emotional target, working a song for months, discarding dozens of others that almost fit, writing the same handful of subjects, escape, work, home, disillusionment, from more angles than most songwriters attempt in a lifetime. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 as well, and he's still touring and recording new material more than fifty years after Greetings from Asbury Park.

If you've got a song that keeps almost working and you're not sure whether to keep pushing or let it go, Springsteen's six months on one title track, and his willingness to throw away dozens of others that weren't quite right, is a fair model either way. If you need someone else's ear to help you find which one it is, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Vintage King: The Making of Born to Run, American Songwriter: Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Conversation: Born in the U.S.A. at 40, The Ringer: Red, White, and Misused, Salon: The Concert That Sparked a Political Firestorm