In the music of Elvis Presley, the young Springsteen heard ‘a joyous demand made, a challenge, a way out of this dead-to-life world, this small-town’. The Beatles, The Drifters, and later, Bob Dylan all spoke to a longing for truth, ‘for some honest place, some place of one’s own’. Springsteen dedicated himself to playing the guitar, first on his own and then with a series of New Jersey bar bands. He achieved modest success with a band called Steel Mill, building loyal fan bases in New Jersey and Virginia and opening for Roy Orbison and Ike and Tina Turner. Nevertheless, after a tour to California, he arrived at an important conclusion.

I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me – my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness – night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in ... I knew when we got back home, there would have to be some changes made.

From that point on, Springsteen would set the standards. Band members who failed to meet them were given no quarter. The Bruce Springsteen Band, later the E Street Band, was a ‘benevolent dictatorship’, with Springsteen as writer, lead singer, guitarist, and bandleader.

Bruce Springsteen in Berlin, 1988 (photograph by Thomas Uhlemann)Born to Run devotes chapters to each studio album and Springsteen’s major tours. An absorbing journey through the creative origins of Springsteen’s music, it offers insight into the craft of producing brilliant rock and roll. Springsteen’s singular perspective and his gifts as a writer prevent the volume of detail from becoming prosaic.

Paradoxes emerge from the intersection of Springsteen’s life and music. Unusually self-aware for a rock star, he worries that his success distances him from the working-class lives he describes with such felicity in his songs. There are frustrations too. Springsteen calls ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – a song that helped launch him into super-stardom – ‘one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music’. Conceived as the protest of a soldier returning home from the Vietnam War, it became a kind of patriotic anthem. Springsteen notes wryly: ‘Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear what we want to hear.’

Similarly, Wrecking Ball (2012) – a searing critique of the Wall Street firms that caused the crash of 2008 – was the number one album in the US and around the world without having a deeper impact. Springsteen has ‘been following and writing about America’s post-industrial trauma, the killing of our manufacturing presence and working class for thirty-five years’. Yet as blue-collar tribune, he has always been more popular than politically effective.

In Born to Run, Springsteen tackles his own personal demons with a candour that is compelling. Describing his often-troubled relationships, he writes:

Part of me was rebelliously proud of my emotionally violent behavior, always cowardly and aimed at the women in my life ... [T]here was a part of me, a significant part, that was capable of great carelessness and emotional cruelty, that sought to reap damage and harvest shame, that wanted to wound and hurt and make sure that those who loved me paid for it.

Likewise, Born to Run does not shy away from the too infrequently discussed subject of mental illness. Springsteen, who has been in therapy for more than thirty years, describes the struggle as a war that is ‘never over’ and has ‘no permanent victories’.

Bruce Springsteen receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016 (photograph by Pete Souza)

By the end of Born to Run, there is a sense that Springsteen has matured on the pages – a masterful effect achieved through the subtle evolution of his voice and perspective. Overall, the book is thoughtful, lucid, and conveys the visceral emotion captured in so many of Springsteen’s songs. It is, in short, an exceptional autobiography.