Danny DeVito’s favourite Bruce Springsteen song: “Boy, I can really relate to this”
The latter stage of 2025 is certainly shaping up to be soundtracked by Bruce Springsteen if the reaction to the new biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is anything to go by, so no doubt we’ll soon be seeing hundreds of men in their early 30s wearing black leather jackets and flannel shirts on Shoreditch high street, looking pensively out through the window of Costa coffee.
One of those men is unlikely to be Danny DeVito, he doesn’t live in Shoreditch for one thing, but he is a huge fan of ‘The Boss’ nevertheless.
And that’s not just because the two legends are both from the state of New Jersey, although that probably doesn’t hurt matters. Both men also found fame in the 1970s, Springsteen for his breakthrough album, Born to Run, in 1975, and DeVito for his part in the all-time great movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, although he really began to get noticed a couple of years later as the irascible dispatcher Louie de Palma on the hit sitcom Taxi.
Talking about Springsteen and his favourite song, DeVito told radio station KCRW: “He made his start at the Stone Pony in Asbury, down by the boardwalk. When I was a kid, we lived in the little town of Asbury but on the outskirts of town there were really big homes and we used to go out there on a hot night and a few of us would sit out there on the car, on the road and off in the distance there was a beautiful house, in the middle of a field.”
Adding, “There was a roadway and a gate and everything and way, way down in the distance, there was this mansion on a hill. We would see the lights in the windows and people partying. It was a long way to that mansion. There was water in between – there were obstacles. And when I heard this song on Nebraska. I thought, boy, I can really relate to this.”
That song was ‘Mansion on the Hill’, the third track on Nebraska, the album which is now, finally, getting a huge amount of attention more than 40 years after it was released, and the recording of which is the focal point of Deliver Me From Nowhere. It was the 1983 album seen as commercial suicide for Springsteen by angry record execs, who wanted a big, radio-friendly album from the singer packed full of hits.
Springsteen, despite being more than capable and having the songs to do exactly that as he proved a year later with Born in the USA, instead armed himself with a four-track recorder and decamped to his bedroom to record an album that featured nothing more than his voice, an acoustic guitar and the occasional harmonica.
DeVito and Springsteen would become fast friends in the 1980s and have remained so ever since. They’re even in what’s described as a ‘Grandpa group chat’ on WhatsApp, with DeVito publicly stating he is a ‘groupie’ for Springsteen and his music.
When Springsteen was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008, it was DeVito who did the honours, and then two years later, when it was DeVito’s turn, Springsteen returned the favour, even inviting the diminutive actor on stage for a rendition of the singer’s hit ‘Glory Days’.
