This Opinion was published in Dutch on NieuwWij, 19 October 2016. I translated it in English on Saturday 18 September 2021. …I hope you will forgive me for the mistakes and failed translations…I know they exist, daily I work hard to improve!
Order Born to Run in Dutch in this LINK
Order Born to Run in English in this LINK
The American singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen wrote an autobiography in which his philosophical quest through musical imagination makes a powerful appeal to readers’ self-reflection.
There are probably few people who do not know who Bruce Springsteen is. His music can still be heard almost daily on various radio shows and YouTube shows many recordings of live acts when you type in his name. Moreover, he became world news last spring (2016) because he cancelled a performance in North Carolina due to an anti-gay law that was passed there. Engagement has marked his character from an early age. But why read his autobiography Born to Run if you are not a diehard fan of his music? Please, give it a try. This man can not only make music but also write about his absolute dedication to music and the way it empowers his love for life. The Boss, Springsteen’s staging name, unfolds how his philosophy of life grows through imagining reality in music. His music already has found its way to millions of souls, including mine. For example, the album ‘The River’ (1980) becomes more meaningful as Springsteen reveals its underlying driving force in Born to Run. Springsteen’s authentic voice touches again, right from the first page.
OUT OF THE SUN
Springsteen wrote Born to Run in three chronologically ordered volumes. Book one unfolds how he became triggered and captivated by music at a young age when his mother turned on the radio station with Top 40 songs every morning. “Songs that would stay with me in the end were those where singers sounded happy and sad at the same time. […] Songs that longed for an honest place, a place of your own […] ‘Under the boardwalk (out of the sun)’ (the Drifters), out of sight, somewhere above or below the callous gaze of the adult world.” Springsteen grows up in the provincial town of Freehold. It is here that his view of life develops through music: “Who am I, who are we, what and where is home?” What does it take to build a meaningful life, and how to become a participant in contemporary history? Youth, an interval in a unclear future, searching for the thin line of the horizon. Springsteen wonders if, as a musician, he can positively influence that horizon line. Early on, he also experiences the downside in depressive periods. Deep doubts about his next steps and pure motives regularly haunt him. Because in the development and propagation of your passion, “you also encounter the limits of the limitations of music and those of yourself”, states Springsteen. Self-examination, self-expression and connecting with listeners in local bars go hand in hand: “I decided that the streets of my hometown were the beginning of my purpose, my reason for being, my passion. I found, with Catholicism, in my family’s community experience, my other ‘Genesis piece’, the beginning of my song: home, roots, community, responsibility, stay unyielding, stay hungry, stay alive.”
BRUCE AND DOUGLAS
Springsteen writes with a raw uncompromising love about the difficult relationship and often painful confrontations with his father, Douglas, in part two. As a boy, Springsteen feels unseen by his father, who struggles with mood disorders and dampens the pain with alcohol. But the tragedy of not being seen as a son does not cause Springsteen to despair. He fights his way into life by writing song lyrics, often with biblical references, rooted in his Catholic upbringing to which his imagination is indebted. Springsteen states that we all ate from that apple and are part of “God’s plan to make us men and women, to give us precious things: earth, soil, sweat, blood, sex, sin, goodness, freedom, unfreedom, love, fear, life and death, our humanness and a world of our own.” Springsteen refers to songs like ‘Adam Raised a Cain’, but also ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’. He calls them ‘lofty titles’ in which desire, resilience and resistance compete with each other. Personal transformation is often found when you can’t go on, Springsteen says. Fighting his invisibility is what he experiences as the greatest motivation to adapt his musical identity. It becomes his instrument to build a meaningful life in which the search for a balance between alienation on the one hand and connection and intimacy on the other is leading. Springsteen shows how loyalty to music improves relationships, including those with his father. His account of an unexpected visit from his father, later in life, just before Bruce himself becomes a father, is striking in this respect.
DEVOTION AND VOLITION
Springsteen connects making music to his inner identity, where feelings lead the mind through the power of intuition. “This is simply the grounds of my vocation, this strange place where I enter into this conversation with myself.” Additionally, composing and singing connect him to his loved ones in the world around him. Making music protects him from slipping into a frightening no man’s land. In ‘Dancing in the Dark’, he describes how alienation, tiredness and the desire to disappear from life at times occupy him. But the vitality of creating music becomes more visible in book three. In it, Springsteen underlines that he wants to show his audience how music can enrich their lives. “You can’t tell people anything, you have to show them.” Springsteen elaborates on the effect of his musical efforts in the final part of Born to Run. He outlines how music gives willpower to deepen intimate relationships, such as with his father, and to confront pain points. “[…], when it’s necessary during a gig, when you think it’s over, when the vultures are circling above us and our blood is smelled and tasted, my will, the will of my whole band, our never-ending dedication, comes back to kick your ass and try to resurrect the day.” Springsteen says he learned that “from the very best”: his mother. She wanted them to remain a family without alienating each other and without losing self-respect and respect for each other. That is what they continued to be. Moreover, she was the one who acknowledged her son’s passion. She gave him his first guitar. Springsteen also describes how he and his wife and fellow band member Patty built a family with three children from the late 1990s onwards. “We honour our parents by taking the best from them and leaving the rest,” he writes.
HOPE
Born to run testifies to Springsteen’s strength of life with resounding passion. To him, life is more than a “song, a story, an evening, an idea, an attitude, a truth, a shadow, a lie, a moment, a question, an answer, a restless figment of my and others’ imaginations…Work is work…but life…is life…and life outweighs art….always.” For Springsteen, making music acts as a bridge between him, his loved ones and his audience. Born to Run reveals his intuitive soul force that grows through music. He merges soul consciousness and life’s challenges in characters he introduces in his lyrics. They are all part of phases in his own identity development. Springsteen enriches reality, by inviting us to tap into our own imagination and inner vitality. What are our own personal issues? Springsteen’s autobiography is a document of hope through reform, day after day. The Boss, a heartfelt ‘born to run’, touching everyone who feels engaged.
THANK YOU SO MUCH, SIR BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
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Cora Westerink (1965), alumna Tilburg University and Arts Academy
