100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Thunder Road

02 Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

03 Night

04 Backstreets

05 Born to Run

06 She’s the One

07 Meeting Across the River

08 Jungleland

In the summer of 1975 Bruce Springsteen saved rock & roll. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had made two albums for Columbia that had gained positive reviews but little sales. Springsteen, with some justification, thought that his third album was his last chance. If the record didn’t work he could look forward to a life of playing New Jersey bars. ‘The record closely mirrors a lot of things in my life that I was going through,’ he reflected in 2005. ‘That’s why everybody on Born to Run is out trying to get out. “Thunder Road”: trying to break free; “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”, “Backstreets”: somebody is out and somebody is left behind; “Born to Run”: trying to get out. Everything is filled with that tension of somebody struggling … trying to find some other place.’

Springsteen spent six months in the studio working on the title track alone. At the end of it he lost drummer Ernest ‘Boom’ Carter and pianist David Sancious (they were replaced for the rest of the album by Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan respectively). Recording the rest of the album continued for another seven months; month after month of overdubbing parts to create mini operas for the alleys. Clarence Clemons’ saxophone solo on ‘Jungleland’ alone took 16 hours straight.

Springsteen’s first two albums had been jammed with elaborate, colourful words and different styles of music, trying to tell the stories of the Jersey Shore. On Born to Run he stripped back the language. ‘The music was composed very, very meticulously,’ he said. ‘I wrote it and I rewrote it and I rewrote it. What I kept stripping away was cliché, cliché, cliché. I just kept stripping it down until it started to feel emotionally real.’

‘Born to Run is that feeling of that one endless summer night,’ says singer Patti Scialfa. ‘The whole record seems like it could all be different stories taking place in the course of one evening in all different locations on one long summer night.’ Each song begins with a brief instrumental theme. ‘I was interested in setting the scene that’s why the [instrumental] introductions,’ said Springsteen. ‘They set the scene. I was interested in writing these mini epics and the introductions were meant to make you think something auspicious was going to occur.’

Springsteen’s vision for the sound of the album drew on the epic romanticism of Phil Spector’s records. During the course of the recording the relationship between Springsteen and his manager/producer Mike Appel broke down. Music critic and record producer Jon Landau came on board and helped Springsteen focus his concept. ‘He got Bruce to look at himself and the band and the songs in a different way and it changed from that point,’ said Bittan on Landau’s input.

The final result was a new wall of sound that could reach the emotional heights to which Springsteen aimed (‘I wanna know if love is wild, baby, I wanna know if love is real’). ‘To me the primary questions I’d be writing about for the rest of my work life were in the songs on Born to Run,’ he said. ‘What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do when they don’t? Is love real?’