The album that helped Bruce Springsteen recover from depression: “I’ve got to do something about it”
Art has always been a companion in hard times. Some of the most incredible art ever made has been created as a form of therapy to process tough feelings or complex emotions. For those creatively inclined, making things is a way of unknotting the mind, figuring out how you feel or even just providing a distraction or a sense of purpose when things feel untethered. For Bruce Springsteen, music has always been a way of making sense of the world around him, but on one album, it was a life raft.
When thinking about Bruce Springsteen’s music, we generally think of big, bold anthems musing on the world around him. Typically made alongside his band, the E Street Band, he usually goes all-out with high production for perfected and polished hits.
It brought him major, major success. From his breakthrough in the 1970s, when songs like ‘Born To Run’ made him a global star, he was on a run of powerful albums that only levelled him up and up. But when he hit the mid-1980s, he was overwhelmed with it all.
“I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there,” he told CBS News. With so much going on and his life suddenly looking so different from the humble beginnings he’d started out with, a moment to freak out was, realistically, inevitable. Wouldn’t everyone have one? With his success being so fast-paced and so all-consuming in those early years when he suddenly was ‘The Boss’ rather than just the musician from New Jersey, it was bound to catch up with him.
But when it hit, it hit in a way he’d never experienced before. Despite all the joy that his career brought him, the singer fell into a depression. “It was my first real major depression where I realised, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something about it,’” he said.
And what else would an artist do other than make art? Springsteen started writing in the depths of some heavy emotions and some big questions about his life.
“I think in your 20s, a lotta things work for you,” he explained. “Your 30s is where you start to become an adult. Suddenly, I looked around and said, ‘Where is everything? Where is my home? Where is my partner? Where are the sons or daughters that I thought I might have someday?’ And I realised none of those things are there.” It was these questions that ended up fueling Nebraska. Channelling the darkness of his mind into the stories on that album and the difficulties faced by the characters that inhabited it, his sixth album became the incredible result of that hard era.
For him, though, darkness and light have to go hand in hand in life and in art. He’s aware that hard times help us appreciate good ones, just as how joyous music often requires a deeper depth. “If the triumphant part of the song was going to feel real and not just hacked out, I had to have something I was pushing up against,” he concluded. “I just understood that balance. It comes out of gospel music, which is the music of transcendence. I wanted my music to be a music of transcendence.”
