STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Bruce Springsteen is a musician. He writes, composes, and performs songs - and he is quite successful at that. He was awarded with an Oscar; by some, he was called The Boss; he was hailed as the Future of Rock'n'Roll; and yes, he was...

Born in the USA

More specifically, he was born in Freehold, New Jersey, on September 23, 1949. His childhood was not what most people would call a happy and carefree experience. He was raised in comparative poverty - several times young Bruce went to the local butcher to beg bones for a (non-existent) dog of which his mother would prepare a soup (of the bones, that is; not of the dog). Springsteen later described life in Freehold in these words: [...]

In school, he was never one of the good students. He would rather rely on memorizing than on really understanding. His teachers, apparently, did little to encourage him to seek for things he would be good at. Instead, he began to feel what he later called The Big Hate - which became an important source of inspiration for his songs...

At the age of nine, Springsteen made contact with music: he heard an Elvis song. From that day on, music was his passion. He is quoted as saying how he could not understand why anybody would not want to become a rock star. However, when he graduated from High School, he did not mention music in his description of himself: I was shy + cars.

His carreer as a musician began in Ausbury Park where he played with several other gyus. Some of these early experiments lasted only for a few nights. However, it was during that period when Springsteen hooked up with the musicians who would later become the E-Street Band.

Images

Over the years, Springsteen has written more than a hundred songs. While these cover a diversity of subjects, there are recurrent elements that can be found over and over again in his works.

Cars

Probably most prominently, there is his fascination with cars. A biographer once said that Bruce owned anything with wheels. Another indication of how important cars are to Springsteen are the pictures on the albums: Nebraska shows a grey road, in Tracks, a 4 CD compilation of unreleased songs, there is a picture of wheel caps and a photograph of a rear-view mirror, on Tunnel of Love, Bruce stands in front of a car...

His first hit, Born to Run, tells the story of youth in America, where the only thing worthwhile is racing across the highways in „suicide machines". In The Promised Land, Springsteen uses the image of driving through the Utah dessert to open his account on how he believes in life. Racing in the Street is a story about a man, a woman, and, of course, cars. His obsession with cars takes him so far as to describe the troubled life of the heroin of one of his songs in terms of Spare Parts.

Rivers

Most notably, there is the song, The River. A young couple make their (short-lived) escape from the depressing life in a suffocating city by going down to the river. But as the years go by, the relationship goes bad, and the river becomes the symbol of this failure: the river goes dry. In many of Springsteen's sad songs, some reference to rivers is made. In Stolen Car (also on the River album) a man goes to a river to let his dreams haunt him; Shut Out the Light describes a man who returns home (most likely from Vietnam) to find himself unable to cope with life - it is near a river without a name that he seeks comfort.

However, rivers do not only serve to create a melancholy mood. In If I Should Fall Behind, a river will be the site of a future wedding, and in This Hard Land, Springsteen resorts to plain Cowboy romanticism when he dreams of riding horseback down to the Rio Grande.