"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen
01:00:17 Share

Glockenspiel may sound like the name of a highfalutin orchestral instrument, but it's really just a xylophone with metal bars instead of wood. Those metal bars give a glockenspiel a piercing quality that can help it cut through the loudest orchestra or the loudest rock band. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I am your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you joined me for yet another season talking about music played on glockenspiel, xylophone, toy piano, thumb piano, and more.

This whole show is only made possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. Yes, you. I don't have ads on the show, I don't take on sponsors, and that's just the way I like it. If you'd like to support Strong Songs, go to patreon.com slash strong songs and sign up to become a patron. On this season finale, it's finally time to talk about one of the most widely requested songs by one of the most widely requested artists out there.

It helped define an era of rock and roll and still rings out in stadiums today. So let's plug in our telly, crank up the tremolo, and let it rip. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Every song tells a story. And while it's easy to focus on how those stories end in victory or defeat, triumph or tragedy, it's just as important to focus on how they begin.

I mean, some songs' entire purpose is simply to begin a story. The congregation is called together, but everyone already knows the story they're gonna hear. And that's the point! It's not about how the story pans out, whether the heroes prevail or fail. It's about all of us, both in the audience and on the stage, sharing in the story together.

The song I'll be talking about on this episode tells just such a story and makes just such a beginning. It's a tale of desperate love, of doomed dreams, of people trapped by circumstance who still dare to hope for something better. Because no matter where you are, no matter how bad things may seem, you've really only got two options in the end.

You can keep trying, keep dreaming, keep hoping for a way to get to a better place. Or you can give up. And this isn't a story about people who give up. This is a story about people who keep fighting, forget the ads, forget what everyone else says. This is a story about people who keep on going like they were born for it. And the day we spread out on the street.

On this season finale, I am so excited to finally talk about the one and only Bruce Springsteen. And what other song could I talk about than his immortal ode to the power of the American dream, however doomed it may be. His maximalist 1975 rock and roll classic that pay on to youthful passion and desperate dreams, Born to Run.

Oh man, okay. Let's do this thing. Born to Run was written, of course, by Bruce Springsteen for his 1975 album of the same name. Born to Run, the album produced by John Landau and Mike Appel, was Springsteen's third record and wound up being his breakthrough. Born to Run was written, of course, by Bruce Springsteen for his 1975 album of the same name.

Over the by-all-accounts arduous process of making the record, and in particular of making this recording of this song, Springsteen found the story that he wanted to tell, a mythic doomed world of fast cars and passionate love affairs filled with a cast of characters whose stories he would return to for decades to come. He also found the version of the E Street Band that would join him to help tell all those stories, though not all of those musicians wound up featuring on this specific recording.

Born to Run features Bruce Springsteen on lead vocals and both acoustic and electric guitars, with David Sanchez on piano and keyboards, Gary Talent on bass, Boom Carter on drums, Danny Federici on organ and glockenspiel, and the big man Clarence Clemons on bari and tenor saxophones.

It went through an unusually protracted mixing, overdubbing, and editing process, and as a result, there were a number more musicians on the recording who are as of now uncredited. String players, percussion players, some backup vocalists, some of whom made it onto the final mix, the string players definitely made it through on a few parts, but whose names do appear to have been lost to time.

My two primary references for this episode are a 2005 documentary directed by Tom Zimney called Wings for Wheels, The Making of Born to Run, as well as a very cool 2020 book called Bruce Springsteen, All the Songs by Jean-Michel Gridsen and Philippe Margueriteen.

Those are both terrific resources with a ton of information about this song and about Springsteen's whole career. I won't be able to get into everything in this episode, but I wanted to mention them up top, and I'll mention them whenever I'm directly citing or quoting them, since they both proved useful, and I definitely want to give credit where it's due.

Born to Run, the album, features a number of Springsteen's most famous songs like Jungle Land, Thunder Road, and 10th Avenue Freezeout. ♪

While each song tells a different sort of story about a different set of characters, there's certainly a unifying thread to the album. The spirit of the working class neighborhoods of New Jersey, where characters echoed Springsteen's own yearning to escape, to find freedom outside the bounds of their childhood homes, to find love and opportunity in the wide open world. ♪ Our nights busted open, these two ways will take us anywhere ♪

For me, Springsteen says at the end of Wings for Wheels, the primary questions I'd be writing about for the rest of my life first took form in the songs on Born to Run. What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do when they don't? Is love real?

Born to Run was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom. It was the dividing line. And of course, nowhere are those themes more evident than in the song that gave the album its title, so let's get into it. ♪

Born to Run is in the key of E major, the most guitar-y rock and roll key there is. And while it goes to some interesting harmonic places during its full run, during this introduction and opening verse, it is about as straightforwardly E major as you can get. It starts on an E major chord, the I chord, and then it cycles between A, the IV chord, and Bsus, the V chord, with a suspended fourth.

And I've talked about suspended fourths in the past, but it's a really important concept and sound for this song, so I will explain it again in a bit. For now, though, 1, 4, 5, in the key of E, about as rock and roll as you can get. ♪

From that opening drum fill onward, Born to Run rushes forward with this certain dark momentum. It's dense but not quite punchy in the way that I might expect from a more modern stripped down recording.

It has so much mass behind it, though. That density gives it power. There is no way that I could recreate the sound of this recording. I'm not even going to try on this episode. And I mean, Springsteen's own band doesn't recreate the sound of this original studio version of Born to Run, even though the song is an absolute anchor of his live set.

It'd be almost impossible to recreate the sound of this recording on stage, and that's because of the way the song was recorded. Every instrument was recorded multiple times with the goal to emulate that wall-of-sound technique popularized a decade earlier by producer Phil Spector and, by the mid-1970s, refined and perfected by a number of producers, including Landau and Appel.

The result is an often overwhelming listening experience. Longtime E Street drummer Max Weinberg puts it perfectly in Wings for Wheels. It's one of those records that there's a lot in there that you might not realize. You have the elements of what we recorded. You have the elements of what was put on top of what we recorded. And then you have this third element that...

Having spent the past couple of weeks deep in this recording, it really does begin to expand beyond what they even recorded. But while the whole is certainly more than the sum of its parts, it's good to appreciate what some of those parts are, particularly the more noticeable ones, because there are a few individual parts that, to me at least, define this song.

As it happens, the most identifiable and arguably most important part in the entire song plays right at the very beginning. That now legendary electric guitar riff, played by Springsteen himself and doubled by David Sanctius' Fender Rhodes and Danny Federici's Glockenspiel. ♪

So right there, one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time. And not only is it incredibly simple, its simplicity is key to what makes it work so well.

It begins with a simple E major chord, just an open E on the electric guitar. The riff starts on a B, the 5, then jumps up to the 4th, then resolves that 4th to the 3rd, G sharp, and then drops back down to a C sharp right as the song changes chords to the 4 chord, an A major. ♪

Pay attention to the directionality and you can feel how this riff moves. It surges like a wave, it crests up to the four, then resolves down to the three, floating so briefly up at the peak before dropping right back down next to where it started.

It's so simple, and that's precisely what gives it so much power. The only way to make a melody like this work is to mean it, and Bruce Springsteen has always possessed an unusual level of conviction as a writer, as a singer, and as a guitarist. You can hear it straight away with how he plays that riff from the start of the song. It's just a few notes, but he means every single one of them.

The guitar tone that Springsteen is getting also plays a big role in this riff's sonic identity. He's playing, as always, a Fender Telecaster guitar, and as far as I can tell, he's just in the middle position on a pretty down-the-middle amp with some delay and a pronounced tremolo effect.

That is a classic guitar sound to the point that a lot of classic amps have a tremolo knob and can do the effect right on the amp, and the riff would definitely lose something without that tremolo. The delay, not as big of a deal. I just think I hear a little bit of slapback delay on some of the electric tracks, but the tremolo is the whole sound. It's the vibe. ♪

So tremolo is a guitar effect that I've talked about in the past on the show, but just to quickly explain it, it's an effect that causes the signal to increase and decrease in volume according to a set frequency. You can make it subtle, just a little bit of motion and not a lot of depth, or you can make it really intense and dramatic. ♪

You can also use what's called a square tremolo, which essentially mutes your track according to a regular pattern and creates a pretty distinctive sound. That one's familiar, right?

But for the most part guitarists keep it fairly middle of the road. It's a very musical guitar effect and of course you've heard it in a million different songs because it can really fit into a lot of different musical styles and just kind of thicken up the guitar sound sometimes in a subtle way that you might not even notice.

In that Wings for Wheels documentary, Springsteen tells a really funny story of how the riff was almost very different in a small but actually huge way that would have changed the entire sound of the song. And his guitarist, Steven Van Zant,

helped him change course. Van Zant, of course, famous as a member of the E Street Band and a member of the cast of The Sopranos, though he is not actually on this recording. He was just joining the band, and Springsteen played all the guitar parts. But Springsteen played the recording for Van Zant, and apparently Springsteen was originally playing the riff down to a C natural and then bending the note up to a C sharp. ♪

And you know what, actually, I'll just let them tell it. First you'll hear from Springsteen and then from Van Zant. I brought him in the studio after the song was just about done and I played him the whole cut and he goes, "That's great, that's great." This is really a very cool riff. I said, you know, it's like a Beatle-y kind of Roy Orbison kind of riff. He's hearing this.

Well, he was bending up to that last note, so it was like... The way I played the riff was I bent up to the major note. I went... But we had so much crap on the track by that time that you could no longer hear the note being bent to the major. That's what came to my ear, you know.

He's like, what? That's not the riff. I said, Steve, what are you talking about? He said, no, no, that minor. I said, no, no, no, that's not a minor. That's a major. So he says, no, no, no, you can't hear that. And he was right. I started to listen to it. I couldn't hear it anymore. All I heard was...

Very different, very different. Now, I love a four minor chord as much as the next guy, maybe even more than the next guy, but it is very funny to imagine a version of this song that goes to the four minor chord and that doesn't even do it because Springsteen decided he wanted to play a four minor chord, but just because he was bending the note, but it got lost in the mix.

It's a good reminder to always play your mixes for people who haven't heard them before, because your own familiarity with each piece of the mix can actually cause you to lose perspective on what you can actually hear once everything is playing at the same time. So that may seem like a lot of time to spend on a single riff, but I would argue that this riff really is the heart of the song.

And there's a lot going on in this intro in addition to the riff, but we'll talk about each of those elements as we go. So let's get into the verse. In the day we sweated out on the streets of a runaway American dream, at night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines. That's one way to start a song.

This first verse is all mythic scene setting, painting a picture of the where of the thing before the second verse gets into the who. But, well, I say verse, but this is yet another song that doesn't adhere tightly to verse, chorus, bridge song structure. Each verse just kind of has an A and a B section, and the B section ends in a descending refrain that

that functions like a chorus. It's where he sings the title of the song, Baby We Were Born to Run, but it's really just a refrain at the end of this section. So let's map the whole thing out. These first few lines play out over a very simple rock groove and chord progression, just palm muted bass and guitars underneath on a one, a four, and a five chord. You hear it?

It goes one, four, five. And then...

Well, things get a lot more exciting really quickly. So I think of this as the B chord progression. It's a descending progression that goes from A major, the 4, to C sharp minor over G sharp, to F sharp minor 7, back up, resolving to E major, with a very cool transitional chord coming next, which sets up a repeat of the second phrase. A D major over E, which is a really neat suspended sound. ♪

But while that's a nice chord progression, and at this point, hopefully, you're always thinking about directionality, and you can hear how it's descending and then ascending and has this kind of grandness to it. As always with this song, it's not the chords, it's the arrangement of the instruments that makes it come alive. So let's take the vocals out of the original recording and just listen once to this B section and see what all you can hear. ♪

It's pretty good, right? So that descending chord progression repeats and then the refrain.

So to me, this section is all about the keyboard and glockenspiel parts. Those instruments are playing these arpeggios that descend along with the bass, and they add this chimey texture that marks a subtle but distinct transition out of the realm of traditional rock instrumentation and into the realm of something more orchestral. ♪

The glockenspiel, of course, a metal mallet instrument, basically a xylophone with metal bars, and it is an invaluable instrument. I actually have a glockenspiel and I use it all the time. There's this category of instrument that I tend to talk up on Strong Songs, the triangle, the tambourine, high-pitched metallic instruments that cut through a mix and can act as a crucial seasoning on top of an otherwise full arrangement. Glockenspiel is a

Glockenspiel certainly falls into that family, and the instrument turns up on a lot of recordings, especially a lot of modern recordings. And this is certainly one of its highest profile appearances. This moment on the B section is when it first becomes clear that Born to Run is going to be more than a straight-ahead rock recording. And then comes the turnaround.

That turnaround chord that I mentioned, that D over E, it's such a defining moment in this song for me. The midpoint of this B section. First, there's this downward organ rip. The bottom just falls out as the organ notes drop, and then the whole band crashes together on that chord, with Springsteen wailing out this primal yell on a high F sharp as only he can do it.

And then comes the refrain, where Bruce sings the title and the song finds its anchor point. This song goes to a lot of pretty cool places after this point, but I mean, at the same time, that much, what we just heard, that

That could be a whole song. That would be enough. That descending chord progression in the B section gives way to this third progression under the refrain. It's a simple 1, 6, 4, 5 chord progression resolving to 1 for the return of the guitar riff. But over those chords, the arrangement changes. The keyboards and the glockenspiel take up a new figure that's grander. It's a little bit more drawn out than those descending arpeggios they were playing in

at the beginning of the B section, and it's so powerful in its simplicity. Just a descending E major triad that, to me anyway, has always sounded like church bells. Springsteen often describes Born to Run like a communion, and the bells here are calling the flock together in common cause. Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. Suicide rap, we're gonna get a wall Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run

It's so perfectly suited to the song. It sets the stage so effectively that it feels like it must have sprung fully formed from Bruce Springsteen's head. So it's hard to believe, but important to remember that this song went through a bunch of different iterations before they settled on the version that we know and that I'm talking about on this episode.

At one point in that Wings for Wheels documentary, Springsteen listens to some isolated string section and backup vocal tracks that, as far as I can tell, didn't make the cut for the final version of the song. He laughs in this way that'll be familiar to anyone who's done iterative creative work.

It's often kind of funny to revisit a midpoint in a process that you've now completed, and there's a sort of relief in it as well.

As he says later in the documentary, once they got the guitars in, they knew the song had to be darker and more driving than that string-heavy arrangement and those lush backup harmonies allowed. But I think that it's helpful for any creative person out there listening to this episode to bear that process in mind. By all accounts, this recording of this song took more than a year to make.

months to complete and was a real challenge for everyone involved. And while they wound up with one of the all-time great rock recordings, that fact was far from assured from the outset. And at least one point, Springsteen considered scrapping the recording and just starting fresh with his new band, who had already been playing the song live before the record was even finished.

I'm glad they didn't do that since the final version of the song turned out to be such a special recording, but I do think it's good to keep in mind just how touch and go it was for a while, considering how Born to Run can now feel like such an immutable part of the bedrock of 70s classic rock and roll.

So with all of that in mind, let's just listen back to that first B section one more time. And I want you to keep an ear open for all of that, for those descending arpeggios in the glockenspiel and the piano, that organ drop into that suspended chord with Springsteen's holler on top, and that final refrain as the keys in glockenspiel transition into a confident, descending, church bell-like figure calling us all together in communion, all of us born to run. ♪

Ears on, here we go.

So that first verse was all about setting the stage. The second verse follows the same form, but lyrically it's about establishing the characters and the song's central love story.

Born to Run isn't quite what I would call a love song, but it is a song filled with romance, a deep love.

tragic romance as the unnamed narrator exclaims his passion for his girl, Wendy, and his desire to take her and run away from this place to find something, anything better. It's not so much a story as it is the beginning of a story, and that's a big part of what makes this song tick. It's all potential and dreams. It's hopes and wants and desires, but none of them are quite actualized.

I've never thought that the characters in Born to Run actually make it out of their cursed little death trap of a town, but that's a big part of what makes the song so poignant, at least for me. That part of the story kicks off with a humdinger of a set of lyrics. Wendy, let me in. I want to be your friend. I want to guard your dreams and visions. Just wrap your legs around these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines. Okay.

It's such a great set of lyrics, and while your attention is doubtless drawn to the unsettled imagery of the second half, I actually think those opening lines are more important.

Wendy, let me in. I want to be your friend. I want to guard your dreams and visions. Is there a better expression of what love should be? For starters, I've always liked how the narrator's love interest in this song has a name. She's not just some girl, she's Wendy.

And that's unusual for this kind of song. Most of the time when a guy is singing about a woman he loves, she's either nameless, just a you or a she open to the projections of the listener, or her name is so prominent that it usually becomes the name of the song itself. Your Sarah's, your Allison's, your Cecilia's.

Wendy in Born to Run is just Wendy, and I really like that. Springsteen would return to this device over his songwriting career. Mary and Jane are both recurring characters in several of his songs, but Born to Run is Wendy's song. I also like that he says he wants to be her friend and that he wants to guard her dreams and visions.

I don't know. It's just, it's not, I want you so bad. It's not, I'll kill anyone who threatens you. He wants to be her friend and he wants to guard her dreams. He wants to protect her ability to become who she wants to be. There are a lot of ways that Springsteen could have written this lyric introducing the song's love story. And I think he picked his words carefully. And I love the words he chose. When you let me in, I want to

This second B section is, again, all potential and promises. Together we could break this trap. We'll run till we drop, we'll never go back. Will you walk with me out on the wire? Because he confesses he's just a scared and lonely rider.

I want to know.

If you're gonna go big, go big. And this part of the song goes so emotionally big. It's this naked plea. I gotta know how it feels. I wanna know if love is real. He's desperate and disarmingly vulnerable, considering that he is, one would presume, a guy who outwardly appears like a tough, young street racer. He wants so much, though. And above all of those things he wants, he wants to know if love is real.

And his final question for her: "Can you show me?" And we have to presume that she says yes, since the very next instrument is the big man himself playing the rock and roll equivalent of a soft focus sax scene.

In rock and roll and beyond, the saxophone has long been associated with carnal desire. There's just something so gutsy and sensual about the instrument with its rich overtones and bending, swooping pitches that bring it in such proximity to the human voice.

Clarence Clemons, known for all time as The Big Man, made rock and roll saxophone famous. He is synonymous with this kind of saxophone solo for all of his work he did over the years with Bruce Springsteen as a long-running member of the E Street Band. And in addition to this solo, he played an untold number of overdubbed ensemble parts on this recording on both tenor and baritone saxes, though the solo is very much a tenor saxophone solo.

And this solo is one of the most famous rock sax solos ever recorded, certainly, but that's kind of funny since it's actually a very specific and kind of unusual solo. ♪

And I'll actually stop myself right there, as fun as it was to learn to play this saxophone solo, because that's the part of the solo that's always stood out to me, that opening gambit. We're in E major here, which is F sharp on the tenor sax. It's a rock and roll key that every tenor player could solo on while half asleep. But this opening melody that Clemens plays is actually pretty far from more standard blues rock saxophone vocabulary.

Like, what is that? It's such a weird and specific melody when you think about it. It sounds more like a fiddle jig or something than a saxophone rock solo. And he really commits to it, too. He commits to the idea. He plays that melody a second time and develops it. The second half of the solo is more straightforwardly bluesy, ending with this long build up to a final screamed high E. ♪

Saxophone is fun. So taken as a whole, it's honestly a really peculiar solo, and it's one that's become iconic in the truest sense of the word. Clemens would step forward to play this solo at countless live shows over the decades, and each time he played it, he played it the same with that same fire.

This is from a live performance at Madison Square Garden in 2000, and this is an incredible show. Clemens died in 2011, and his nephew Jake took over the sax chair in the E Street Band. And when they play Born to Run, and he steps forward to take that solo, you can bet he plays it the same. Carrying on his uncle's legacy night after night after night.

With that sax business out of the way, it's time for The Bridge. On the palace, any barge don't scream.

The bridge to Born to Run is a big energy shift for the song, and so it requires the band to sort of regroup and refocus. That means the transition into the bridge is really important. And anyone out there who's written this kind of a transition to a very different sounding new section of a song knows what a trick it can be to get the transition right. So I want to call out this musical moment here, this transition between the end of the sax solo and the beginning of the bridge.

Because it's cool and unusual, and it has the feeling to me of something that took a lot of work and iteration and fine-tuning to get it to work as well as it does. So first, just listen to that transition from Clarence Clemons' last glorious high E into the bridge. ♪

So for starters, there's this false cadence that happens at the end of the saxophone solo. As Clemens builds up to this high E, the band goes from four to five, and then instead of going to one, they go to the relative minor, C-sharp minor. Upon hitting that C-sharp minor, something cool happens. The bass and the piano, played by Gary Talent and David Sanctius, both play this nice little figure. ♪

Listen for that in the recording. It's such a tasty little figure and it's also doing a little foreshadowing. It is previewing the keyboard figure that is about to take over on the bridge. This quickly becomes this. To complete that transition, first they resolve to E major, but then out of nowhere they play this nice lush B minor chord that segues into the bridge.

It's another nice new flavor that only drops in this one place in the transition between the sax solo and the bridge. Listen for all of that. ♪

It's such a lovely transition and such a nice four bars of music. I want to highlight it just as an example of something that this recording has in spades. Those extra little flourishes and touches that, to me at least, seem like the remnants of all of those earlier iterative passes that this song went through to get to its finished state. Sometimes those fingerprints are subtle, sometimes they aren't, but this recording is covered in them. On the palace, any barge don't scream

This bridge is incredibly dramatic, and it moves in a way that feels pretty different from the verse. It's all about sus chords, specifically sus4 chords, that certain dramatic kind of chord that turns up so often in this song. It's a cycle of chords that plays two times through in full. So the bridge starts on Dsus. Then it goes to Gsus. Then up to Asus. And then Csus.

Then back to D. And so on. In one recounting, Springsteen says he wrote the first parts of Born to Run on guitar and the later parts of the song on piano. And that makes sense to me. The song here has departed from the 1-4-5 blues rock and roll feel of the verse and gone somewhere much more harmonically complex.

Now I keep talking about sus chords, and just to quickly explain what they are, sus is short for suspended, and in this case it means the chord has what's called a suspended fourth. And you can think of it as the fourth scale degree being suspended in the air above the place where the third would otherwise be.

So an ordinary major triad goes 1, 3, 5. So in the key of D, which is the first chord of the bridge, you'd get a D, an F sharp, and an A. A sus chord raises that 3, that middle note, up a half step and turns it into a 4. So instead of this sound, you get this sound.

It's a familiar sound, right? That is the sound of a sus chord. And often in rock and roll, you'll hear a sus chord resolving to a major chord, since it's just a matter of dropping the middle note of the chord down a half step. And one of the reasons that you'll hear it a lot in rock and roll is because a sus resolving to a major chord really is easy to play on guitar. It lends itself to the instrument.

And sus chords are all over born to run. Obviously, you can hear them on this bridge. Every chord is a sus chord resolving to a major chord. But the five chord in the verse, that B chord was also a B sus. The sung melody actually, la-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Those first two notes of the melody are the four to the three, which is a sus four resolving to a major third. And even that main melodic riff, those top two notes of that riff...

That's a four resolving to a three, or a sus chord resolving to a major chord. So it seems safe to say that Springsteen was enamored of that sus sound when he was writing this song. This bridge is also where the orchestration comes in at its most elaborate.

With the vocals removed, you can really hear how the second time through, the ensemble really blooms, with Clarence Clemons' baritone sax ringing out on these sonorous low notes. And that string section finally making itself audible. There's also a cool phaser effect on the electric piano over on the right, which adds a nice bit of motion to that part.

Listen for it phasing away there on the right. Now here come the berry and the strings. It's all fairly subtle, but it makes a big difference in how soaring and dreamlike this bridge sounds. And that's crucial because this music has to support the most questing cinematic lyrics in the song. On the palace, hemi-fart drones screamed, girls come here.

So

When I describe this as cinematic, I don't just mean that as a turn of phrase. There is a camera here. It swoops up and outward as Springsteen describes what amounts to a cinematic montage. Beyond the palace, hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard. The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard. The amusement park rises bold and stark. Kids are huddled on a beach in the mist.

And amid all that, I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss. Bam. The amusement park ride before the sun. Kids are up on the beach in the mist. I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.

This instrumental interlude and guitar solo after the bridge is one of the song's most notable climactic sequences, and it's interesting in part because of what key it's in. This bridge has actually functioned as a subtle modulation, moving the song's key from that rock and roll E major where it started through a logical sequence of resolving sus chords from D to G to A to C, and then that C naturally resolves to F.

And it's in F major, up a half step from the song's initial and primary key, that this instrumental explosion in the middle of the song takes place.

There is a lot to love about this instrumental section. Springsteen's guitar playing here is this super fast, very low, like surf guitar solo. And I think he might actually be playing this on a baritone guitar, but you can also play it by going way down to the bottom of a Telecaster. And then Boom Carter comes in on the drums like...

He plays this wild polyrhythmic thing. Listen for it.

Carter actually left the band in between the recording of this song and the completion of the album, and he was replaced by Max Weinberg, who still plays with the E Street Band today. And Weinberg says he could never learn that drum part, that he tried it, and eventually he just said forget about it, and he played something more straightforward during this instrumental section. I don't know quite why Carter's part works, but it really does. It's one of many unique peculiarities about this recording that make it special. ♪

So from here, they need to build it. They need to go somewhere. So they just go up another half step. And then... They cap things off with one of the greatest chromatic scales in rock history. ♪

This breakdown, a dramatic full band descent, one B down an octave to another B, as though all that momentum they've been building is finally too much, and the car falls apart on the road. The band crashes to pieces. ♪

It's just a big chromatic scale, a B down to a B down the octave, playing every white and black note in between.

And let that be a lesson to anyone out there who still thinks that there are rules to songwriting. You think there are rules? There are no rules. If you want to build to a huge climax and then bring your whole band crashing down, just get everyone in the band to play a big, dramatic, descending chromatic scale together. And if you all really mean it, it'll work. It'll really work. ♪

And that brings us at long last to the end of the bridge. And what a journey that bridge is. Can you even believe how far we've come from those constantly shifting dramatic sus chords repeating with an ever more elaborate orchestral arrangement, then culminating in a key change up to F major with ripping fast surf rock guitar solos paired with jazz fusion drum polyrhythms,

And then at the end, seemingly because there was nowhere left to go, a massive full band chromatic scale comes crashing down and leaves eighth notes and guitar strings strewn across the highway. Let's listen to the whole thing and just try to take that all in. Ears on, seatbelts buckled, here we go. ♪ The other fellas, semi-frored drums screamed ♪ ♪ Girls combed their hair and ears in the forest ♪ ♪ And it looked so fine ♪

The amusement park ride before we start. Kids are up on the beach in the mist. I want to dunk a Wendy on the street tonight at a never-lasting kiss.

I love the chaos of this section too, the detritus in what we're thinking of as the aftermath of this crash. Among other things, you can hear the piano is just grinding away. He's got the pedal down and is just laying his forearms across the keys. It's such a distinct sound there in the background, and it plays a big role in why this section sounds the way that it does.

But while they may have crashed, don't count them out just yet. Like all good American heroes, Springsteen's band is just one count off away from a comeback to even greater glory. My waist jam was broke, my last chance power tried. Everybody's nice, but there's no place left to hide.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Everybody's out on the run tonight, but there's no place left to hide.

Born to Run has built to a number of climactic moments in the course of its run, but this moment at the start of this final verse, this is the true peak of the song. And a lot of that comes down to the arrangement, the ways that this verse differs from the earlier verses. Springsteen is up the octave here, which makes for a huge increase in intensity compared with how he sang the first two verses. Compare the vocal intensity here. ♪

To the vocal intensity here.

The rest of the band is doing their part as well. Under the vocals, the full wall of sound is in play, and you can even hear a reprise of that opening guitar riff being played under the vocals, primarily by the Fender Rhodes and the Glockenspiel, but also by the strings, which you can hear more clearly if we take that lead vocal part out. It's a crucial confluence, and the first time that happens in the song.

But for now, the riff and the vocals each had their own space. And while the octave in which Springsteen is singing is certainly contributing to the intensity of this moment, the words he's singing surely contribute even more. To me, this is the moment when the song fully acknowledges how unlikely it is that our protagonists will actually make their escape, how doomed all this dreaming is.

He fully voices the desperation at the core of this song. This is it. This is our last chance. There's nowhere left to hide. And if we don't go now, we'll never get out. I always jam with promos on a last chance power drive. Everybody's a nice book, there's no place left to hide.

There's something so powerful about that, this heroic, impassioned performance that makes you want to believe that maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time they'll get out. Everybody's so nice, but there's no place left to hide.

But they don't get out, and all our protagonists can do is beg Wendy to stay with him anyway, to live with the sadness while dreaming of a better life. It's a sad ending, you know?

Our heroes are thwarted. It's a bitter disappointment when they dreamed so big. But it doesn't feel like it, does it? And that's the magic of Born to Run. Even in the face of defeat, the hope lives on. And as long as it does, we kind of won anyway. What a day!

While the studio version of Born to Run has become an immortal piece of recording history, it was really just the first page in a story that would spool out for the next 50 years. Next year will mark Born to Run's 50th anniversary, and Springsteen and the E Street Band are still performing the song live at stadiums around the world.

When they play it live, and they always do without fail, they turn up the house lights so everyone in the audience can see one another. The song begins and a cheer rings out, and without fail, tens of thousands of people sing every word of the song together. ♪

Over the years Born to Run has largely stayed true to the original recording, though it has evolved in some ways, expanding to hold the power and the possibilities of live performance. This is once again that turn of the century performance at Madison Square Garden, and it captures the energy of this song so perfectly. I really recommend taking the time to go and watch it.

The live power of this song is never clearer than after the breakdown, that extended full band cacophony that takes place after the chromatic descent. The energy is so electric. You can feel it through your screen. Bruce is holding his guitar down to the audience and those close enough to the stage reach out and touch his fretboard, adding their own notes to the dim.

They milk it for all it's worth. They draw it out until finally, finally, he counts it in for that last chance power drive. And in this moment, even diluted through the lens of a camera and the passage of more than two decades of time, you can still feel it. The unity of the crowd, just a bunch of broken heroes all in it together.

Near the end of Wings for Wheels, Springsteen talks about what Born to Run has meant to him over the years. And he puts it so perfectly that I'll let him have the last word.

I think today it provides on stage for us a great communion without sounding too hokey about it or blown up about it. It is a bit sacramental, you know, and it falls like that in the course of the evening. And it's just a lovely feeling, you know. It's a lovely thing to experience.

to have as a part of my life. I'm like a lot of the rest of the audience, you know, it's sort of once you write it, after that you just sort of listen to it, you know? And so, it was just a little blessed part of my work life, you know?

And that'll do it for my analysis of Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. And that'll also do it for season six of Strong Songs. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode and this season. I had such a great time making season six these past six months, and I'm really proud of it. I think it's my best work ever. So thanks to all of you who came along for the journey. Hopefully you learned as much listening to it as I learned making it.

Thanks to all of the guests who lent their time and talent to the show this season, Frederico Barros, Sam Howard, Caitlin and Laurie Shook, as well as to my vocal teacher Nevada Jones and my guitar teacher Scott Pemberton, both of whom have given me so much new language for helping explain various vocal and guitar techniques and concepts on the show.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with questions or comments or occasionally corrections about the show. And of course, to everyone who has financially supported Strong Songs on Patreon. And one final thank you to Emily Williams, my amazing wife and partner, who stepped in as a producer for this season and helped me chart out and organize my production process so much. She played a huge role in why this season turned out as well as I think it did.

As I know a lot of you know, my father died about a month and a half ago now, as I record this in late June. It was a total surprise, we didn't even know he was sick, and it made the completion of this season a lot more difficult than it otherwise would have been. It was actually nice to make time to work on the show in the midst of everything else, and that's because I knew it would have made him happy to know that I was working on it,

He was a big fan of Strong Songs and was so supportive of me and my musical career over the years. It's no exaggeration to say that Strong Songs would not exist if it were not for him and his wonderful musical heart. So I want to dedicate this season to him, to my dad, Ogden Hamilton, Augie, to his friends and former bandmates. This one's for you, dad.

Thanks to everyone who sent along a note of support just after it happened or who shared stories of their own parents, it really meant a lot and it reinforced a new sort of kinship that I feel with everyone out there who's been through something similar. Strong Songs has always been a bright spot for me amid turbulent times, and that's certainly been the case these last couple of months. I do need a break, though. Season 7 will likely come out sometime in the fall, but I'm going to need to recharge a bit in order to make it as good as I want it to be.

I'll have some odds and ends in the feed for you all in the downtime between seasons, but for now, it's time to go and find some new music, to write some new songs, learn some new solos, and to open ourselves to the endless rebirths and reawakenings that music can bring. I hope you all embrace that along with me. Let's go practice and play and perform together, and as we do all that, please remember to take care and keep listening. ♪