Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run At 40 (According To Those Who Made It)

The album’s title track was the first song to be recorded, and actually first surfaced (albeit in a slightly different form to the final album) on US rock radio in early November of 1974. It ramped up expectations of the forthcoming record, but even that recording was not how the song had initially sounded.

“The first version of the song was written during recording of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle in 1973,” said former E Street Band keyboard player David Sancious. “I think Bruce wrote three sets of lyrics at least. It got a lot of treatments — he doesn’t let go of things until he’s happy.”

Some within The E Street Band were dubious about their chances of even finishing the song properly, due to how long they were spending refining it. "Anytime you spend six months on a song, there's something not exactly going right,” admitted Steven Van Zandt. “A song should take about three hours."

There were endless overdubs and reworkings, and organist Danny Federici revealed that there were even non-musical sounds added at one point, ostensibly to add colour to the song. “On some of the early takes,” he said “we had street cars or drag racing in the middle of the song."

Those were eventually removed, and after a good six months in the studio, Springsteen finally hit gold. The album version of the song still retains a vast number of the extra instruments, with some of them even multi-tracked to a ridiculous degree. “It’s one of those records that there’s a lot in there that you might not realise,” Max Weinberg would later say.

One thing it’s impossible to miss though is the lyrics. Unusually, these actually came after the song had a title, and that was something which Springsteen thought had a filmic quality he wanted to explore further. “One day I was playing my guitar on the edge of the bed, working on some song ideas and the words ‘born to run’ came to me,” he said. “At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I’d seen on a car spinning around the circuit. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama that I thought would work with the music that I’d been hearing in my head.”

When the lyrics of the song did come, there was one line in particular that seemed to resonate with many people. However for Springsteen, it’s a different lyric that he sees as the core to the song’s message: “The real question that Born To Run asked...it wasn’t really ‘tramps like us baby we were born to run’, the real question that I asked is ‘I wanna know if love is real’.”