While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.
— Bruce Springsteen
My dad was young; he went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. It didn't seem to be in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really.
I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician.
There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.
Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult. Very, very difficult.
A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written.
I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.
The star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.
On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience.
I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.
After 'Born to Run,' I had a reaction to my good fortune. With success, it felt like a lot of people who'd come before me lost some essential part of themselves. My greatest fear was that success was going to change or diminish that part of myself.
Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.
I had tried to go to college, and I didn't really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus - I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.
The Jersey Shore is the kind of place where the policeman has a little cottage that might have been in the family for years and many other people call home.
That's what being a front man is all about - the idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime.
'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.
I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.
I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life, and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.
I looked at myself, and I just said, 'Well, you know, I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.' So I said, 'Well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.'
When you start talking about elections being rigged, you're pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do.
I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.
I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by.
You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.
I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in.
The first thing that I do when I come out every night is to look at the faces in front of me, very individually.
All I try to do is to write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.
If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance.
The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.
The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.
Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique.
For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
I never felt I had enough personal style to pursue being just a guitarist.
I was a pretty sensitive kid and quite neurotic, filled with a lot of anxiety, which all would have been very familiar to my pop, you know? Except it was a part of himself he was trying to reject, so I got caught in the middle of it, I think.
I don't think people go to musicians for their political points of view. I think your political point of view is circumstances and then how you were nurtured and brought up.
I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.
At the time, there was a great disagreement over 'The Wild and the Innocent,' and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn't do it, and they basically said, 'Well hey, look, it's going to go in the trash can.' That's the record business, you know.
You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.
I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music.
I'm interested in what it means to be an American. I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is.
You ask for your audience's investment in your music; you're in a relationship with them. And their relationship with the E Street Band is separate from whatever else I might do. I like the idea of us being something that people rely on.
You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.
I was real good at music and real bad at everything else.
All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records, but if you were a kid, you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.
I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate.
I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.
I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.
Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.
The name 'Boss' started with people that worked for me... It was not meant like Boss, capital B, it was meant like 'Boss, where's my dough this week?' And it was sort of just a term among friends. I never really liked it.
