Bruce Springsteen: Backstreets

Concluding my focus on the music of 1975, today’s selection is from my favorite album of the year. I first listened to Bruce Springsteen in 1980, when I was twelve, after my older cousin (a different cousin than the one who introduced me to the album In Trance by Scorpions) introduced me to the album The River. My mother was born and raised in South Jersey, and my cousin still lived there when she sat me down to listen to a new album by her favorite musician. I won’t say that I listened to The River and walked away thinking it was the greatest music I had ever heard. I had no idea at that moment that my love of Springsteen’s music would grow for years until, as an adult, I would consider him my favorite artist, but I did immediately go out and buy the single for “Hungry Heart” (with a picture sleeve and the B-side “Held Up Without A Gun” – which I still own).

Now, when I think back to my teenage years, I can’t imagine them without the music of The Boss playing on my car’s cassette deck. I bought the album Born In The U.S.A. when it was released. I bought every single so I could hear the always incredible Springsteen B-sides (unreleased tracks and not album filler). I discovered his first two albums, and his acoustic masterpiece Nebraska, and his ode to the working man Darkness on the Edge of Town. All of it was new and exciting to me.

However, it was his 1975 masterpiece Born To Run that made the greatest impact on me. I am not a hopeless romantic who looks back at those years and thinks that my life was forever changed by that album, but I definitely know that when I first heard songs like “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” I felt the same desire as Springsteen’s characters to get out of the crappy small town I lived in because there had to be something better out there. These weren’t new feelings for me, but I had never heard anyone sing about them in such a powerful way. One of my favorite movies of the 21st century is Blinded By The Light, a film about a British/Pakistani teenager dealing with racism in Luton, England during the 1980s who finds salvation in the music of Springsteen. That feeling of salvation – that there is more to life than the small-minded views of a one’s parents or town or even country – has been the strength of Springsteen’s music for over 50 years. It is definitely the strength of Born to Run, which was his first album to truly tackle those ideas.

I am now much older than Springsteen was when he originally wrote the songs on Born to Run, but I still find the message of that music timeless. It is impossible to name exactly one album as your favorite, but Born to Run is on my very short list of favorite album of all time candidates (with Abbey Road, Cosmo’s Factory, and Songs in the Key of Life). More than any other artist, I have grown up and aged with the music of Springsteen, and his 1975 masterpiece has been there beside me the entire time.

If you are interested in other years, check out my Year in Review series.

To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.

• Best of 1975