Born to Run

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading (and really enjoying) Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run.

The Boss made a name for himself in the decade before I was born, and when Born in the USA catapulted him to the upper echelons of rock ‘n’ roll fame, I was a toddler in Guatemala. Needless to say, reading this book has been an exercise in filling in the blanks.

It’s given me a newfound appreciation for some of Springsteen’s earlier work, which had never done it for me before. Now that I have a better feeling for where those songs came from – the stories, the desires, the people and places, the heartbreak – I can better appreciate the diamonds in the rough (and some of those songs are rough).

Springsteen writes with an endearing mix of whimsy and bravado as he briskly recounts bad decisions, big breaks, and countless forks in the road. Then, suddenly, he slows things down, pulls back the veil, and nearly brings me to tears. Like this line, as he rides off in a pickup truck, away from the only home he’s ever known: “I felt filled with the freedom of being young and leaving something, of my new detachment from a place I loved and hated and where I'd found so much comfort and pain.”

The Boss feels things deeply, and if you make this book part of your summer reading plans, you’ll feel things deeply too.