The album that terrified Bruce Springsteen: “My greatest fear”
Bruce Springsteen usually has nerves of steel whenever it comes time to deliver onstage. Although it’s one thing to be able to put something together in the studio that makes millions of people want to sing at the top of their lungs, Springsteen was always more at home when he was directing the crowd rather than sitting behind the glass. For someone who seems like nothing gets in his way, Springsteen admitted that the reaction to Born to Run was a traumatic experience for him.
Then again, the road to getting something like Born to Run in the first place is enough to scare the hell out of anyone on principle. Regardless of the amount of blood, sweat and tears someone can put into any song, it only comes down to the number of people who actually like it, and Springsteen’s ability to paint pictures in works like ‘Thunder Road’ is enough to leave people with their mouths on the floor.
Whereas his debut album had similar tales of people who never had their luck turn around, this was the first time that kind of story was taken to this grand of a scale. Listening back to the record, you can hear traces of everyone from Phil Spector to Roy Orbison to Bob Dylan in Springsteen’s delivery, especially when someone like Clarence Clemons screeches in with his glorious saxophone solo.
It’s every artist’s dream to get to the place that Springsteen was after the record blew up, but sometimes success can be just as off-putting as failure. Even though Springsteen was happy to finally make ends meet and put together songs that people loved, it was a different story when he went back to make another record.
Speaking with The Guardian, Springsteen said that the album scared the hell out of him when it came to working again: “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.”
That’s not exactly that far off, either. For many artists of Springsteen’s calibre, it’s hard to try and get to the same headspace of writing songs when you can barely relate to those struggles you faced in the past. So when it came to recording Darkness on the Edge of Town, the best thing Springsteen could do was address those feelings.
Most of his follow-up was about people who were now unsure of themselves and wondering if that youthful energy was slipping away. Even for a song that sounds as triumphant as ‘Badlands’, it’s easy to see that Springsteen is not as sure about himself anymore, talking about the hardships of life that you have to live through every day just to make sense of the world.
No matter what he may have been singing about, though, fans were more than happy to take that journey, usually seeing Springsteen as an everyman speaking for what they stand for whenever they face their own troubles. ‘The Boss’ tended to have his own insecurities even when being the biggest rock star in the world, but no one can touch you once you open yourself up like this.
