“Anything I wanted”: The album liberated Bruce Springsteen as a songwriter
No artist is designed to make the same record every time they go into the studio. Even though it would work well for the record company to get the same results whenever they get new material for their artist roster, most fans don’t know what they need in their lives until someone takes a risk when they’re behind the glass and pulls out a piece of their heart for the world to see. Although Bruce Springsteen had been doing that kind of soul-wrenching rock and roll for years, he felt that it wasn’t until this album that he earned the right to do what he wanted.
But if all you heard of ‘The Boss’ was his first two records, most people would be shaking their heads, wondering what all the fuss was about. He certainly had a command of lyrics, but the lion’s share of his songs sounded closer to an in-tune version of Bob Dylan, who happened to have a killer horn section behind him. That is until people got a look at the cinematic scope of Born to Run.
Compared to every one of Springsteen’s later projects, this album felt like it had a linear story structure throughout the whole record, as if he was trying to make some grand epic movie with the characters that he ran with while living in New Jersey. And even when he started to embrace the comedown of everything on Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was still looking to document people’s lives on ‘Racing in the Street’ and ‘Badlands’.
That formula wasn’t broken by any stretch, but listening back to The River, Springsteen knew he needed to switch things up, he had made something bold by putting out a double record, but by ending things off on a track like ‘Wreck on the Highway’, fans probably knew they would be in for something different on Nebraska.
Granted, no one was expecting ‘The Boss’ to be this open. This is the kind of warts-and-all record that most artists only get to make when they are at a certain point in their lives. Compared to his life as a rock god, Springsteen still had a lot of dark sides to him, and all of them come out to play across every track, whether it’s the lone police officer on ‘Highway Patrolman’ or watching him get into the mind of a serial killer on the title track.
Even though this record could have sunk his reputation as someone who thrives off hope, Springsteen said that the record freed him to take more chances on his records, saying, “Once I did Nebraska, I had plenty of room to do anything I wanted. I’d made my point. Nebraska gave me a lot of license to do anything unapologetically commercial.”
While Born in the USA eventually gave him some of the biggest hits of his career, there were still some pieces left over from those dark days. No matter how many times people like to sing along to tracks like ‘Glory Days’, hearing the desolate spirit on a tune like ‘Downbound Train’ is still one of the greatest moments in Springsteen’s career.
While that creative freedom did lead to some records that didn’t sit well with fans, like Human Touch and Lucky Town, half of the reason Springsteen endured is his need to evolve past his first records. Anyone could spend time trying to write a million more versions of ‘Born to Run,’ but The Boss knew that his career would be much more fun if he followed his muse wherever it went.
