Bruce Springsteen

The life behind the music

Bruce Springsteen’s music repeatedly returns to the tension between escape and belonging. Cars, jobs, family ties and hometowns become the settings for songs that can sound intimate even at the scale of a large rock performance. His 1970s and 1980s albums trace a remarkable change of perspective, from the rush of Born to Run to the harder questions of Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River.

Nebraska, recorded on four-track cassette in his New Jersey bedroom, strips the sound back to a stark, uneasy intimacy. Born in the U.S.A. then places troubled stories inside a much larger pop and rock sound. The contrast is a good starting point for this catalogue: volume and emotional meaning do not always point in the same direction. Listen to the words and the arrangement together, and the distance between them becomes part of the story.

A few turning points

Five ways into the music