Who are the characters in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘E-Street Shuffle’?
When Bruce Springsteen heard Bob Dylan for the first time, he declared it a life-changing moment. Never before had he seen his country and the life people can build within it so perfectly personified in sound, for both the good and the bad. After that revelation, regardless of what Bruce Springsteen was writing about, he used people from his life and the real world as inspiration.
There are a lot of songs where this is more obvious than others. For instance, in a track like ‘Born In The USA’, Springsteen is clearly trying to evoke feelings about his country. For better and worse, he talks about the USA in detail and holds a mirror up to where he’s from, one that fans can’t help but stare straight into.
There are plenty of other instances throughout Bruce’s career where he has used the real world as an influence, even if it seems slightly more subtle. For example, the term ‘E Street’ appears multiple times, as it’s the name of his band, and he also has a song and an album named after it. ‘E Street’ is not simply a term Springsteen thought up and decided to run with; instead, it’s an actual street with a significant place in the heart of one of the band’s early members.
David Sancious, the original piano player for the band, joined when he was just a teenager. He still lived at home with his parents down E Street, a road in Belmar, New Jersey. Springsteen was a big fan of the name of the street and, as such, decided to appoint it as the name of the band. He also had the entire band contribute to the album The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, with every member ever present on the titular track.
‘The E Street Shuffle’ is one of the most unique songs about a dance ever written, as while it talks so excitedly about the craze, it doesn’t actually tell listeners how to do it. Instead, over a jazz-infused and upbeat backdrop, Springsteen references multiple characters all having a good time while doing a dance left up to the listener’s imagination. “I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps,” he confessed, “It was just the dance you did every night to get by.”
Staying true to his ability to reference the real world in his music, Springsteen has confirmed that the characters he talks about are based on people he grew up with. These include “The Boy Prophets” and “Little Angel”, who is responsible for driving “all them local boys insane”. Though he has never specifically said who is the inspiration for whom, those referenced are described in a way that they become easy to imagine.
There is certainly something to be said for this kind of songwriting. There are several tracks out there that tell people to dance, but the way Springsteen can put various characters into the track gives the song a bit more narrative, making it less of a blanket statement to dance and providing a motive behind the movement. Even when he isn’t making a statement about the world, Springsteen can draw from it to make the way he writes all the more human, and it’s what cements him as one of the greats.
