“Two extremes, same songwriter”: The agony behind Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’
An artist without internal conflict can never be truly great. Oftentimes, it is that conflict and struggle inside a person that inspires groundbreaking art and music rather than something safe, sanitised, and largely uninspired. In the case of Bruce Springsteen, so much of the American songwriter’s greatest work has risen from difficult themes and periods in his life. Even some of his most recognisable tracks, like ‘Born in the USA’, are set with a backdrop of agony and internal struggles.
The duality of ‘Born in the USA’ is, by this point, incredibly well-documented. Penned by Springsteen as a protest anthem in 1981, the song’s narrative follows a Vietnam veteran who feels disenfranchised by the country he has returned home to. Unable to find a job or any support after witnessing the horrific actions of his nation in a foreign land, the song paints an undeniably ugly picture of the United States. That has not stopped countless individuals over the years from using the track as a patriotic anthem.
After all, the Heartland rock anthem seems pretty celebratory if you only listen to the song’s chorus and have no propensity for critical thought. The effect of this misunderstanding, spurred along by the stars-and-stripes marketing the song received from Columbia Records, is that Springsteen has had to repeatedly clarify the song’s true meaning and inspiration. This conflict is reflective of a wider struggle which centres around the smash-hit single, seeing The Boss torn between two different avenues of songwriting.
Springsteen’s writing always had the potential for mainstream appeal, but some of his finest efforts arose from deep, personal songwriting, which rarely had the same impact on the charts. Take 1982’s Nebraska, for instance, which is among Springsteen’s most accomplished and personal efforts, featuring timeless classics like ‘Highway Patrolman’ and ‘My Father’s House’. Despite the undeniable songwriting genius at the heart of the record, Nebraska never had mainstream appeal in mind.
During the same period that he was writing Nebraska, however, he was also writing material which had a much clearer hit potential. As producer Jon Landau once revealed, “Bruce kept doing this dance between questioning and embracing the album he was making […] I’d heard ‘Born In The USA’, and I felt it was some kind of hit. I didn’t know if it was a Top-40 hit, but I knew it was going to get people’s attention. ‘Glory Days’? It felt like a smash.”
Although most songwriters would be pleased to find that their work was climbing up the singles chart, Springsteen was conflicted. “He knew, in my opinion, that, on one hand, he was on to something that could be really explosive and raise his profile as a mass artist. He had reservations about that. No secret,” Landau recalled. “He’d written this other collection of songs, the Nebraska material, that was very independent, certainly not geared toward mass appeal.”
Summarising the diversity and genius of Springsteen as a songwriter, the producer concluded, “Two extremes, same songwriter, same time. It’s like he had his Star Wars and his art movie in his hand at the same moment. And he went to Nebraska first.” As it turns out, Nebraska had a considerable degree of mainstream appeal, too, reaching number three in the US and UK album charts, although it could not compete with the groundbreaking success of Born in the USA, which became a definitive record of the 1980s.
For Springsteen, these two very different albums represented his internal struggle between mass appeal and emotionally vulnerable songwriting. For virtually everybody else, though, the disparities between the two albums evoke the endlessly broad range of Springsteen’s songwriting talents. Few other artists could achieve such diverse records within such a short space of time, but then The Boss has always been different to most.
