“Redundant by definition”: the Bruce Springsteen classic he didn’t want to release
No songwriter wants to find themselves in a rut every time they pick up their guitar. Even though it might be easy to coast by with a sound that everyone loves, there comes a point where even the most diverse artists start to think that all of their songs sound the same after a while. At that point, anyone would need to switch things up, but even when moving into uncharted territory, Bruce Springsteen felt that some of his songs were getting by on easy mode.
As soon as ‘The Boss’ got famous, though, he already had some suspicions about what he was even in the business for any more. The whole point behind Born to Run was to depict the lives of regular working-class people, so now that he had achieved the kind of dreams that went far beyond anything in his native New Jersey, it’s hard to pinpoint where to go from there while still being tied to his roots.
And so began one of the darkest chapters of Springsteen’s career. Although The River became a major highlight from post-1975 success, Darkness on the Edge of Town felt like the sad comedown after achieving his dreams, and Nebraska was practically the sound of raw nerves being picked at for 40 minutes. So, to go from something that intense to Born in the USA should have been a massive bait-and-switch, but that’s not really what happened.
Yes, the album was one of the poppiest offerings that ‘The Boss’ ever made, but he hadn’t forgotten about the harsh realities of the world. Behind all of the shiny sounds of the title track, Springsteen was talking about the cruel side of America that people like Ronald Reagan refused to accept, and a lot of the album’s later passages double down on that morose feeling, whether it’s loneliness on ‘Downbound Train’ or turning tragedy into comedy in ‘Glory Days’.
If there is one song that feels like a callback to his own glory days, though, it would be ‘No Surrender’. Based on the three chords that built rock and roll and hearing the E Street Band in full force, this was everything that Springsteen used to sound like when he had nothing else but a dream in his heart to be the biggest rock star in the world. In fact, it might have been a little bit too on the nose.
When talking about the song later, Stevie Van Zandt remembered Springsteen wanting to change the song because of how similar it sounded to his early years, saying, “It had a little bit of the ‘Born to Run’ swagger, if you will, and he was concerned he was being a little bit redundant with it. I just said, ‘Look, there are certain things, certain themes, certain emotions that it’s OK to be redundant with… Rock & roll is redundant by definition, to be honest.’”
It’s not like Van Zandt is that far off the mark in his last assessment. All great rock and roll is based on something, and even if people were going to take jabs at Springsteen for reliving his greatest hits, it only served to show the next generation of rock and roll fans who he was at the height of his fame.
If Darkness on the Edge of Town was the sad aftermath of Born to Run, though, Springsteen would spend a few years unpacking his emotional state, eventually releasing the divorce album Tunnel of Love before taking a bit of a beating when the one-two punch of Human Touch and Lucky Town left fans with nothing much to talk about. But whereas the latter two albums were torn through the mud for sounding too happy, ‘No Surrender’ is the kind of tune that captures the kind of hope that he had when he was barely making any money on the streets of New Jersey in the early 1970s.
