What is the best Bruce Springsteen lyric?
How do you define an artist like Bruce Springsteen, the man who took to stages around the world and started a back-and-forth with the president because of the power of his words. A rockstar? No, Springsteen is a lot more than that.
Let’s break down how he got to where he is. There are two major contributing factors that have led to Springsteen becoming the musical icon that we know him as. At risk of oversimplifying things, they are: his music and his lyrics. It’s more than a melody; it’s something you can latch onto and ride. Equally, his words aren’t just something you hear, but they resonate with you, of which you cut corners off to keep with you forever.
These exciting aspects of his music didn’t happen by accident. Have you ever heard a song so good that it made you cross a busy road, narrowly avoiding cars, just so you could call your girlfriend and get her to turn on the radio to listen before the song ends? Springsteen has. What you’ve just read is exactly what ‘The Boss’ did when he stumbled across The Beatles for the first time.
“The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving,” he recalled, “I immediately demanded that she let me out, I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the bowling alley into the bowling alley. Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”
Not only was Springsteen inspired by the Beatles, but he was also inspired by the source of what turned the Fabs around creatively. When the foursome first heard Bob Dylan, who was the man responsible for kicking them off the top of the charts following their rise to fame in 1964, they understood just how much weight lyrics could carry. Yes, his unique vocal tone, play of melody and minstrel mystique all contributed towards his success, but it was Dylan’s use of conscious poetry that really got people excited about his work.
“I was very influenced by Dylan,” said Springsteen, “I always say he’s the father of my country. He initially provided me with a picture of a country that I recognised. One that feels real, feels like the truth”.
Bruce Springsteen put great music and great lyrics at the centre of everything he did, desperate to give people something they could move to and be moved by. He succeeded in this regard, and people are still dancing to his classics, and his lyrics are inspiring tattoos, social media captions and being shared as quotes of wisdom around the world. It begs the question, digging into this bottomless sack of genius, what is the best lyric Bruce Springsteen has ever written?
This is one of those classic questions that, at its very nature, contradicts what is so important about not only Springsteen, but art in general. The subjective nature of music, and the way it touches us all differently, is what’s so moving about it. As such, there is no such thing as the greatest Bruce Springsteen lyric; there is just this writer’s opinion, which is both fundamentally flawed and equally iron-clad in its certainty. You may agree with me, you may not, but the breadth within those two options is what makes his lyrics so great.
Anyway, let’s stop messing around: what’s my answer? Well, it comes from his classic ‘Thunder Road’, a song which I would describe as one of the greatest rock songs of all time, immortal in its influence and something that stirs me regardless of when I hear it. It represents the beauty of rock ‘n’ roll unlike any other track, highlighting the paradoxical nature of the way it resonates with the hopeless but also inspires hope. I have never found myself in a hole deep enough that rock ‘n’ roll hasn’t been able to pull me out of, and this song embodies that perfectly.
There are plenty of lines in the track that highlight the way it embodies rock music, but the one that always stands out the most is the final line: “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win”. If those words don’t embody the spirit of rock, which continues to defy time, then I don’t know what does.
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