This is like choosing which finger to cut off. There are so many fantastic lyrics. The easiest way is to give a countdown from five to one, identifying the four that it’s not, but why they are in the top five. To me, Bruce’s lyrics are poetic. They are expressive in a way that gives meaning to many, while being written from the perspective of one. Bruce is our modern American poet laureate, the common man’s voice; he’s blessed with the uncanny ability to tap in to the zeitgeist, transcending the rapidly changing American landscape, understanding the unique individuality we possess within our communal society. He is politically liberal; so am I, but his struggles, his fitful anger against his own unhappiness with himself, and his look at the American landscape as he sees it. So, while I don’t intend to make this a soapbox for my own brand of progressive politics, much of my connection to Bruce is that we see the world similarly, so there may be some political under/overtones.
5) “On the streets tonight, the lights are growin’ dim, the walls of my room are closin’ in, but it’s good to see your smilin’ face, and to hear your voice again. Now, we could sleep in the twilight, by the river bed, with a wide open country in our hearts, and these romantic dreams in our heads.” / “On the street tonight, the lights grow dim. The walls of my room are closin’ in; there’s a war outside still ragin’, you say it ain’t ours, anymore, to win. I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover’s bed, with a wide open country in my eyes, and these romantic dreams in my head.”
These are actually two lyrics, two versions of “No Surrender” from either the Born in the USA album (the latter lyric) or the Live 1975-1985 3CD/5LP album (the former). There’s something about this song, and it’s placement right before Bobby Jean, Bruce’s goodbye to Miami Steve Van Zandt, that gives it a melancholia belied by it’s upbeat tempo (this is the BiTUSA version of which I currently speak). By this time in his life, Bruce was mid thirties, and felt like the war was no longer his to win, let alone fight. Born in the USA is an inherently political album. The main song is not patriotic in the way that George Will would like to believe, and Bruce, it may surprise a more recent fan to know, was far more tight lipped about his political leanings at the time, would only offer cryptic responses to questions about Ronald Reagan’s request to use Born in the USA as his campaign theme for his reelection bid. You get a sense that this album is the end of Bruce’s younger days. After all, he got married soon after the album was released (it didn’t take), and he’s transitioning into a different stage of his life. To me, the song feels like an abandoning of something, a thing you can’t hold as important anymore. The live lyric is far more about coming home, and about familiarity, and about the comfort that brings. When I hear it, I think about my trips to my parents’ home, and how I spend time feeling comforted by the familiarity of the past.
4) “Billy felt a coldness rise up inside him that he couldn’t name, just as the words tattooed ‘cross his knuckles, he knew would always remain. At their bedside, he brushed the hair from his wife’s face, as the moon shone on her skin so white, filling their room with the beauty of God’s fallen light.”
This is from “Cautious Man” a song off of the “Tunnel of Love” album, which is pretty much all about the dissolution of Bruce’s marriage to Julianne Phillips. The narrator feels the coldness, and realizes it will always be there. The coldness in Bruce’s songs represents brokenness. Just like how in Hemingway’s stories, a coppery taste in a character’s mouth represents brokenness. Coppery tastes happen in several Hemingway short stories, and in The Old Man and the Sea. Coldness rears it’s ugly head in Cautious Man, as well as “Straight Time.” Your innards are supposed to be warm, and you’re supposed to retreat to your heart, your core, for guidance on how to love, and how to be a warm person. For Billy, that’s not the case. He is frozen, and broken on the inside. However, he can look to his wife, and her reflection of the radiance of the moonlight, itself a reflection of the Sun’s light – God’s light. He may be broken, but he does love his wife. He doesn’t understand the coldness, but understands that he can place his faith (the words tattooed on his knuckles are “Love” and “Fear” – it’s clear his fear is for the coldness, and the love is for his wife) in his love for his wife, and she can live with love in her heart for both of them.
3) “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive; everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide.”
This is a lyric that is so recognizable to me that I can quote it so quickly, it’s like I go into a fugue state. David Chase slipped it into an episode of The Sopranos. Christopher Moltisanti said it as an excuse for being late when Tony Soprano asked him “Where the fuck were you?!”
There was no chance I wouldn’t include something from Born to Run. I get upset when people don’t recognize the brilliance of BtR. In “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” Chuck Klosterman explains that “Piano Man” and “Born to Run” are Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen’s two most recognizable songs, and that Piano Man is a better song. Not only is he absurdly wrong, I get angry, because I consider him one of the better writers and essayists of our generation (way better than Malcolm Gladwell. I’m so tired of hearing how leather glove wearing men in the Northern Plains States are a good analogy for how Bernie Madoff was able to dupe and cajole his way to the largest Ponzi scheme since Mr. Charles Ponzi himself. Or some shit like that.) and it’s ridiculous to think that Born to Run is inferior to Piano Man. I like Piano Man. I like Billy Joel. I own several of his albums, both digitally and on vinyl. But it’s no Born to Run. Born to Run is a song that, when you hear it, you get that Phil Spector “wall of sound” as the song builds in crescendo from the opening drum riff to the fade out. It builds and builds with intensity to this one point, and then Bruce bursts the album wide open with this one lyric.
Live, the song reaches a crescendo of noise. Bruce drops to his knees and allows the crowd to pluck his guitar. Nils Lofgren hammers chords on his guitar. Max Weinberg looks like a madman, angry at his drums. The Professor starts pounding on the ivories, pushing down on whole blocks of keys with his splayed palms. Bruce stands back up, his guitar likely halfway out of tune, wanders back to the Mic stand, and then gives his guttural count off, as the crowd joins him with glee: “One! Two! Three! Four!” Then, the band snaps back to the sheet music (though, let’s be honest. They don’t need it – this is laser-tattooed onto their frontal lobes by now) and away we go, the audience one giant voice, Bruce’s amplified voice the other, shouting this lyrics so the whole world knows.
The lyric itself might be a bit overwrought (screw you, Klosterman!) but they are the lyrics that I will forever remember, every time I’ve heard Born to Run played live (fifteen times and counting!), and for that, I will always love this moment in Born to Run, and these lyrics.
2) “Your burnin’ wind fills my arms tonight.”
From The Rising; song and album. This one is tough, because it is from The Rising, which is a song that leaves me just raw every time I hear it. It’s pitch-perfect in my eyes. It doesn’t make it my favorite Bruce song (it’s near the top…) but it’s message, seen through the eyes of a fireman as he ascends one of the two towers is so difficult to hear.” It angered me greatly to read this article: http://gawker.com/5837967/against-the-rising about how Springsteen’s the Rising is a failure. That’s complete bullshit. It looks at our likenesses, our differences, our frailties, and our strength, and it puts it altogether in a way that somehow humanizes the suicide bomber, the grieving widow, and the worlds between the two, connected in their grief and the firm belief that their loved one’s death is not in vain. Oh, by the way, did you catch how the writer of that post gave an alternative to Springsteen’s the Rising? Good idea in theory, except when you consider that the album plugged was by the writer’s co-author on a book they did together? Funny how that works…
But I digress. This lyric is what gives me goosebumps when I listen to “The Rising.” The burning wind could be the fire in the tower as it implodes upon itself, or it could be the warming embrace of the firefighter’s spouse that will never be felt again, either way, they are getting fused together, as this lyric comes at a point where the narrator is seeing flashes of earthly life, ending with “sky of fullness, sky of blessed life” – the ascendance to heaven. You go from the ground and up into the tower, and then you die with this firefighter. But the song’s upbeat melody gives it a sense of purpose – this is a celebration of the earthly delights and pleasures that the firefighter experienced, both when they happened, and now, at the hour of death. In the right mood, I can cry just thinking about this lyric.
1) “At night, sometimes, it seemed you could hear that whole damned city cryin’”
I don’t know if you know this about me, but I like to write. I have gone back, and looked at my writing from before I listened to Bruce Springsteen and read Ernest Hemingway, and I’ve cringed at the campiness of it. It’s plot driven (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and never really goes into much exposition about the why behind the what. Short story: I took a class in undergrad called Faulkner and Hemingway. We read two stories one week (among many other) in the Hemingway short story collection; the first was the two part “Big Two-Hearted River” which I was so excited to read, because it sounded like a Bruce song. It’s been some time since I’ve read it, but I remember not liking it. It was boring, if memory serves me. The other song was called “The Killers” about a guy in a small town in Illinois who is being hunted by some of Murder Inc’s tough guys. (This short story is NOT where the band The Killers got their name.)
They tie up Nick Adams (a few parts Hemingway, and a few parts imagination) and the black short order cook, and then discuss killing the man they are hunting, a man by the name of Ole Anderson. Anderson, who was supposed to show, doesn’t. The short order cook unties Nick and sends him to the boarding house where Anderson is staying. Nick warns him about the goons. Anderson doesn’t react, and tells Nick there is nothing to do. Nick tells the short order cook, Sam, he is going to leave town. My professor, Professor Cirino, asked the class “Does anyone know the song ‘Thunder Road’ by Bruce Springsteen?” This was a seminar class, so I blurt out, “Oh, it’s my favorite song!” He says, “What’s the last line of that song?” Without missing a beat, I say “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pullin’ out of here to win.” And it clicked. I knew why I liked Ernest Hemingway’s writing. He is minimalist in a way that reminds me of the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen.
Ever since then, I’ve tried to write in a way that gets the most use out of my words. I am prone to bombast, but my words are selected in a way that makes me remember that they have multiple meanings, and can mean so much to so many. It made me realize that, once I write something, it is simultaneously mine, as I grouped those words together in that way to create that story – something no one else will ever do, unless they copy it and publish it – but it is the reader’s story to interpret. Their meaning derived is as equally valid as my meaning intended. I’ve written things where someone read it and had a completely different idea as to what happened. I always tell them they aren’t wrong, because they aren’t.
So why, then, this lyric? I had never given myself a prompt when writing, so I decided to listen to Born to Run, and pick out one lyric to make into a story. I listened through, assuming that something out of Jungleland, or Born to Run, or even Thunder Road would spark my curiosity. It didn’t. At least, not as much as Bruce howling in the latter half of Backstreets “At night, sometimes it seemed, you could hear that whole damned city crying” – it gave me a sense of the enormity of a city, and the dust speck that is my narrator. I realized that the howls and moans and sirens, the pops and cheers and claps of the city that we tune out to focus on our own existence are the million candles of other lives, flickering and dancing under the same moon, with a million spiderwebbing, interweaving stories all creating the finest mesh that is the city. That was like listening to the electric guitar for the first time – it kicked down the door to my mind, and it has kept it open this entire time.
Tomorrow’s writing prompt: A Bruce Song that Makes You Sad
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