Released on 25 August 1975, "Born To Run" was the third studio album by the US singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. Co-produced by Springsteen with his manager Mike Appel and the producer Jon Landau, its recording took place in New York. The album marked Springsteen's effort to break into the mainstream and create a commercially successful album. The album spawned two singles "Born To Run" & "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" the first of which became a radio and live favorite.
The album incorporates musical styles including rock and roll, pop rock, R&B, and folk rock. Its character-driven lyrics describe individuals who feel trapped and fantasize about escaping to a better life, conjured via romantic lyrical imagery of highways and travel. Springsteen envisioned the songs taking place over one long summer day and night. They are also less tied to the New Jersey area than his previous work. The album cover, featuring Springsteen leaning on E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons's shoulder, is considered iconic and has been imitated by various musicians and in other media.
Born to Run would go on to become a critical and commercial success. It propelled Springsteen's career and, perhaps more importantly, helped solidify the musical voice that he would carry on for decades to come. Bruce Springsteen's groundbreaking album, Born to Run, came out 50 years ago this month, marking a turning point for rock and roll — and for Springsteen. Before he recorded that album, Springsteen's record label, Columbia, was on the verge of dropping him because his first two albums, though critically acclaimed, had sold poorly. Biographer Peter Ames Carlin describes the making of Born to Run as an "existential moment" for Springsteen.
Carlin Said: "If this didn't work, he was done,". "And if he was done, who was he? What was he? Music was the only thing that he had really projected himself into. And it was everything to him. And the prospect of losing his career was terrifying."
Every year, Springsteen marks the anniversary of the album's release by getting in his car and listening to the record while driving around his old stomping grounds in Asbury Park, N.J. "And when he realizes it's getting close to the end of the second side of the album, he drives to the street where he used to live and the little bungalow he rented, and wrote those songs on the little piano he had there," Carlin says. "And he parks outside that house and listens to 'Jungleland.'"
Its success has been attributed to capturing the ideals of a generation of US youths during a decade of political turmoil, war, and issues facing the working class. Over the following decades, the album has become widely regarded as a masterpiece and one of Springsteen's best records. It has appeared on various lists of the greatest albums of all time and was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2003 by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The music on Born to Run includes styles such as rock and roll, pop rock, R&B, and folk rock. The album captures "the essence of fifties rock 'n' roll and the beatnik poetry of sixties folk-rock, projected onto the battered spirit of mid-seventies USA". Springsteen wrote most of the songs on piano, which Kirkpatrick felt gave them "a particular melodic feel". Springsteen later said Bittan's piano "really defined the sound" of the album. The record's production is similar to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, in which layers of instruments and complex arrangements are combined to make each song resemble a symphony. Springsteen said that he wanted Born to Run to sound like "Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Spector". He used Orbison's style for his vocal delivery and Duane Eddy as inspiration for his guitar parts. The writer Frank Rose emphasized Springsteen's homage to girl groups from the 1960s, such as the Shirelles, the Ronettes, and the Shangri-Las, ones who embellished themes of heartbreak and doo-wop sounds produced by Spector.
Springsteen envisioned the album's songs as taking place during one summer day and night. The album is centrally driven by "loneliness and the search for companionship". The characters are regular people who are lost and feel trapped in their lives; different places, such as streets and roads, offer a way out but are not ideal places. Described by Treble's Hubert Vigilla as a "four corners approach" to album sequencing, both sides of the original LP began with songs that were optimistic and promised hope and ended with songs of betrayal and pessimism.
Across the album's eight songs, Springsteen writes about the night and the city: "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", "Backstreets", and "Meeting Across the River"; an irresistible real or imaginary woman: "She's the One"; the enslavement of the working class "Night"; and the highway as a means of escape and coming-of-age journey "Thunder Road", "Born to Run", and "Jungleland".
Springsteen's hopeful songs, containing ideals such as that a road can take you anywhere, were "stunning" during a period marked by assassinations, war, political corruption, and collapse of the hippie subculture. Springsteen worked a "very, very long" time writing the lyrics because he wanted to avoid tropes of "classic rock 'n' roll clichés", turning them instead into fully developed and emotional characters: "It was the beginning of the creation of a certain world that all my others would refer back to, resonate off of, for the next 20 or 30 years." The songs are largely autobiographical, inspired by the noir-like B movies Springsteen enjoyed at the time.
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