His ambitious vision for Born to Run involved combining the elements that made his earlier work compelling - poetic lyrics with a heart of classic rock ‘n’ roll - while adding big, multi-layered arrangements.Īs Springsteen famously put it in 1987, “ I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan, that sounded like Phil Spector‘s productions, but most of all, I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison.” Born to Run features many of The Boss’ best-known songs, including “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “Jungleland” and, of course, the classic title track, a top-40 hit in 1975.Īt the time Springsteen recorded Born to Run, he’d released two critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing albums and was worried about being dropped by his label, Columbia Records.
It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen's promise, and though some thought it took itself too seriously, many found that exalting.Today, August 25, marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Born to Run, the album that helped catapult Bruce Springsteen to stardom. If The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was an accidental miracle, Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. To call Born to Run overblown is to miss the point Springsteen's precise intention is to blow things up, both in the sense of expanding them to gargantuan size and of exploding them. Nevertheless, he now felt removed, composing an updated West Side Story with spectacular music that owed more to Bernstein than to Berry. If Springsteen had celebrated his dead-end kids on his first album and viewed them nostalgically on his second, on his third he seemed to despise their failure, perhaps because he was beginning to fear he was trapped himself. But where he had been affectionate, even humorous before, he was becoming increasingly bitter. The overall theme of the album was similar to that of The E Street Shuffle Springsteen was describing, and saying farewell to, a romanticized teenage street life.
Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums - Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it. The result was a full, highly produced sound that contained elements of Phil Spector's melodramatic work of the 1960s.
Springsteen's backup band had changed, with his two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg. Bruce Springsteen's make-or-break third album represented a sonic leap from his first two, which had been made for modest sums at a suburban studio Born to Run was cut on a superstar budget, mostly at the Record Plant in New York.
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