The 1960s singer Bruce Springsteen said was out of everyone’s league: “He did something nobody else did”
There aren’t many artists who can manage to capture the feelings that Bruce Springsteen could convey.
The best songwriting advice that he ever got was writing about what he knew about, and when listening to every single one of his records, he had done his fair share of living in New Jersey years before he turned those boardwalks into pieces of history on Born to Run. He understood what it took to make everything sound great, but he knew that the best writers were the ones who took the genre to a whole new level whenever they played one of their songs.
It may have taken him a while to see what the true Americana singers like Hank Williams were singing about back in the day, but he understood what Chuck Berry was going for the first time he saw him. ‘The Boss’ got a lot of his lessons by listening to the British Invasion, but when he listened to the way that Berry was jamming away on his guitar, he felt like he had a friend who seemed to talk about everyday life in the most natural way whenever he sang one of his anthems.
Springsteen wanted to do the same thing, but it’s not like he was blessed with a Freddie Mercury-style voice. He came by it honest whenever he sang, and while there was a lot of grit to what he did, he was willing to push himself whenever he made one of his songs. No rock and roll comes without a struggle of some kind, and a lot of Springsteen’s best work came from when he was trying to channel some of his heroes behind the glass.
Phil Spector was the blueprint for what he wanted Born to Run to become, but aside from having one of the greatest rock and roll producers to look up to, Roy Orbison was the one taking Springsteen on a different kind of ride. Orbison was singing some of the most lonesome songs that anyone had ever made, and even though not all of his tunes had to be the most cheery stories in the world, he had a great way of singing a song that could break your heart and hand it back to you.
Just the titles of his songs let you know what you were in for. No one goes to a song like ‘Only the Lonely’ and ‘Crying’ thinking they are going to hear the most uplifting thing in the world, but whenever Orbison sang, it felt like everything was going to be alright. And the fact that he could reproduce the same thing live made Springsteen wonder if he was looking at some strange entity onstage every night.
He was an enigma underneath those dark sunglasses, and in a world of giants like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, Springsteen felt that Orbison was almost superhuman in the way that he sang, saying, “He always had that feeling about him that if you went up to him and tried to touch him, your hand would go through him. It seemed like he’d fallen from another planet. He just did something that nobody else did. And he always had that loneliness.”
And while Springsteen thought enough of Orbison to namecheck him in ‘Thunder Road’, his songs took on a bit of a different tone. Every song on Born to Run sounds like it was coming from a lonely person, but by the end of the song, Springsteen needed to throw in a bit of hope. All the characters in that album don’t have their life cut out for them, but there’s always that flash of light letting them know that success is possible.
So while Orbison had trademarked the loneliness that he sang about, Springsteen didn’t take any of his songs for granted. The concept of feeling down and out after having your heart broken doesn’t feel good every single time it happens, but all it serves as is a reminder that you’re still human. Having to put your heart back together isn’t fun, but at least you still have a heart at the end of the day.
