Bruce Springsteen: Songwriting Secrets, Revised and Updated

Introduction

In the 1973 song Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), a twenty-four-year-old man from Freehold, New Jersey, declares ecstatically to his inamorata that his record company has just given him a big advance. For half a century since, Bruce Springsteen has recorded songs and thrilled audiences with impassioned concerts. When Letter to You came out in 2020 and reached the Top 5 all over the world, it meant he had achieved the feat of having such a high chart position for a new album in each of the past six decades. In that time, he has released approximately 350 songs and written hits for other artists; and, although about 80 previously unreleased numbers were gathered on the four-CD Tracks box set and The Essential Bruce Springsteen, further archival releases drawing on sessions for past albums such as Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River have been able to add still many more to his canon. And it isn’t over yet. There are rumors of further lost albums to come, including one that immediately predates Letter to You, and, as I write, hints of a possible sequel to Tracks. And in December 2021 came the news that he had sold his music catalogue for $500 million—a figure that outstrips even the sale of Bob Dylan’s. Behind that price is an expectation that his songs are valuable because they will continue to excite people for a long time into the future.

Springsteen is a rock legend who has forged an abiding connection through his music with the lives of millions, and he has sustained this rapport as both he and his original audience have grown older. YouTube comments beneath his songs reiterate this theme. To take one typical example, a fan named Betty Costa wrote under the video for House of a Thousand Guitars: Bruce’s music has been with me since childhood, through the long days working at the farm in Portugal, through all the victories and defeats, broken marriages, relocations, and every album always matched my state of mind. Now, at 50, once again, perfect timing. Thank you for making my life’s soundtrack. This relationship with his audience—and his fans’ sense of how his music has affected their lives—was the subject of a two-hour documentary film directed by Baillie Walsh, Springsteen and I (2013), painstakingly assembled from hundreds of hours of photos, videos, and reminiscences. It also formd the substance of Safraz Manzoor’s 2007 memoir Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion, and Rock ’n’ Roll and the film derived from it, Blinded by the Light (2019), which significantly demonstrates how Springsteen’s music has connected with non-American audiences.

There is much that aspiring songwriters can learn from Springsteen, on many levels. His art works on a big canvas. His music has responded to a number of political and social issues and significant historical events for many decades. Being able to follow the events of 9/11 with the album The Rising is one example, but there are earlier instances too. In his study Rocking the Wall: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World (2013), journalist Erik Kirschbaum claims that Springsteen’s concert before a massive audience in East Berlin in July 1988 contributed to the eventual bringing down of the Berlin Wall—a view also supported by Gerd Dietrich, professor of history at Humboldt University, who has argued that the concert made people more aware of social restrictions and more desirous of changing them. It is hard to think of another rock star with the stature, credibility, and articulacy to make a book out of conversations with a recent US president, as Springsteen did with Barack Obama in Renegades: Born in the USA (2021). His belief in the power of music also ran eloquently through the speech he gave in 2005 to induct U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Springsteen has spoken in broad terms about the themes of his lyrics. He published a commentary beside his lyrics in the book Bruce Springsteen Songs, and has discussed the links between the songs and his life onstage, first in his 2005 VH1 Storytellers performance and then in the hundreds of shows of Springsteen on Broadway. His interviews have occasionally touched on how his albums were recorded, but he has not said much about the nuts and bolts of songwriting—how he thinks about purely musical issues such as song structure, chord patterns, melody notes, and so on. Perhaps, like many creatives, he is wary of looking too deeply in that direction, lest he muddy the inspiration with too much selfconsciousness. Certainly, in the VH1 Storytellers film, he acknowledges the spontaneity and subconscious magic that come into play in songwriting.

That’s where this book comes in. Songwriting Secrets: Bruce Springsteen is a handbook of techniques observed in the music of one of the most successful songwriters of the past fifty years. It provides insights into both the formulae of songwriting and what Springsteen does with these ideas and patterns in his songs.

These musical patterns and strategies are not exclusively his, nor did he invent them. Nor would he necessarily think consciously about his music from this angle. Most songwriters working in popular music are intuitive, trusting their ear as to what sounds right. This book traces, after the event, the fingerprints left on a body of musical work. These ideas rise from the tonal language shared by songwriters, regardless of genre. Each impresses their personality on these ideas and articulates their own feelings and concerns through them.

Basic musical ideas are amazingly flexible and fertile. Lock 100 songwriters in a room with guitars and a directive to compose a song with the chords D, G, and B minor, and you will get 100 songs with a variety of styles and characters. If Springsteen were among this 100, he might produce If I Should Fall Behind. Think of it this way: everybody’s handwriting is different, even if they write with the same alphabet.

WHICH SPRINGSTEEN?

So, does this book show you how to write a Bruce Springsteen type song? Yes, it does . . . but which type of Springsteen song? He has composed songs in many styles. There’s a long, hard road from the joyful funk of The E Street Shuffle to the eerie ballad Empty Sky, or from the extended drama of Jungleland to the haunted short story of Western Stars. For some, Springsteen is the acme of American blue collar or heartland rock—a guy who apparently sings about cars, girls, and not much else. Springsteen knows this, and, in his autobiography (Born to Run) and his Broadway show, he has sought to dismantle this myth and these preconceptions. At a conference in Paris in 2012 to promote Wrecking Ball, he memorably said, I spent most of my life as a musician measuring the distance between the American Dream and American reality. That crucial measurement was often missed in the 1980s by the global audience he momentarily reached with Born in the USA, an album that had the Stars and Stripes on its cover. He was seen only as an arm-pumping, sweaty, populist stadium rocker; a sort of Rambo of the electric six-string. This is a caricature. He has in recent times spoken about how the onstage Bruce Springsteen the public saw was, in part, an attempt to construct a self that would win the admiration of his father. Uneven as his work may be (and, in a long career, whose isn’t?), there is a core of greatness to his best music that puts him among the true giants of popular music and gives it a dignity rock has often lacked. This core goes beyond the totting up of chart positions, platinum discs, and Grammy awards, and the idea that music is only entertainment.

Born in the USA was only a short phase. In fact, Springsteen has made some starkly contrasting music. The Woody Guthrie–like folk tales of The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust could not be further from the raw rock of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Wrecking Ball; the synth-pop of Dancing in the Dark is a long way from the gritty adventurous funk of Kitty’s Back; and the modern productions of The Rising and Magic are not the Spector-esque Wall of Sound of Born to Run. Some of his recent studio albums have taken a new approach to arrangements in their handling of rhythm, drum loops, and vocal samples. Western Stars (2019) was a further experiment, evoking the baroque late-1960s countrypop of artists such as Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb, while its liner notes have probably the longest list of instrumentation of any of his albums.

Lyrically, from having previously celebrated the mythic romance of the American Dream and an imagined motorized escape to a paradise at the end of a freeway, he has gone on to expose its limitations and the plight of those who crawl at its margins and under its shadow. This change of emphasis happened quite early in his career, seemingly provoked by first-hand experience of the limits of the rock lifestyle and fame and his own struggle to find roots. Having had his ambivalent feelings about American society in Born in the USA distorted and co-opted (by Ronald Reagan and others) into a simplistic, ungrounded patriotism, he responded to the events of 9/11 on The Rising in a manner that was mature and considered and avoided easy slogans.

There is also a persistent vein of existential fear that falls darkly over songs such as Stolen Car, Moonlight Motel, and the more recent One Minute You’re Here, which relates to Springsteen’s struggle with depression and concern with the theme of being rendered invisible, about which he writes in his autobiography. Very recent songs such as Ghosts and I’ll See You in My Dreams are elegies, reflecting on the loss of friends and how the living and the dead connect.

Commercial and critical acclaim have not always coincided. The populism of his Born in the USA period alienated some, even if they knew his earlier music. In the 1990s, critical praise greeted albums like The Ghost of Tom Joad, which repositioned Springsteen in an older tradition of American folk songwriting—since added to by Devils and Dust and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and many individual acoustic songs. These albums reached a smaller but nevertheless respectably sized audience. The one-man-and-a-four-track-cassette Nebraska has been favorably reassessed, having wrong-footed many on its initial release as the follow-up to The River. This repositioning was expressed with the more mumbled vocal delivery of his folk voice, a singing style supplemented by a more measured style of declamatory singing in the new century. These two new voices contrast with his two earlier vocal personas: the Van Morrison/Dylan-esque soulful/funk wide boy of the second album and the raw, bold Presley/Orbison vocals of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. As a singer, then, Springsteen has developed four recognizable voices with which to present his songs.

Of course, the deeper energy that makes Springsteen write in the first place and compose in the way he does cannot be turned into a formula. That energy is indissolubly part of him, channeled through the boundaries of his musical knowledge, craft, experience, desires, and other aspects of the music business that affect the options an artist has when making music for so large and loyal an audience. This is true of all composers: the inaccessible songwriting or composing secret is what makes them unique. When Springsteen writes a song, he brings to it every experience he’s had since he was born. It’s a matter of fundamental identity. However, there is a layer of songwriting knowledge through which that identity is expressed. And that’s what this book sets out to illuminate.

This book is not primarily a critical appraisal of Springsteen’s music. It doesn’t discuss his lyrics at length, or their socio-musical context. It is a hands-on guide to his composing in the context of popular songwriting. So, how did Springsteen emerge, and what musical context did his talent grow in?

THE ROAD FROM FREEHOLD

Born in 1949, Bruce Springsteen grew up in Freehold, New Jersey, and Asbury Park, a seaside town fifty or so miles from New York. Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, broadcast when Springsteen was nine, inspired him to ask his parents for a guitar. Like many youngsters, he found it hard to learn; he put the guitar aside, but the latent musical urge never quite left him. At thirteen, he bought his second guitar from a pawnshop and joined a local band, the Castiles, with whom he played his first professional gig in nearby Woodhaven in 1965. They made a demo in 1966, with two songs co-written by Springsteen; he included one of them, Baby I (along with a Castiles live cover of a Willie Dixon tune), on his Chapter and Verse CD in 2016.

Springsteen absorbed the sound of the British Invasion bands—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who—and then Motown and Atlantic soul. This variety of influence, like a human jukebox, stood him in good stead; he has never forgotten the magical immediacy of mid-1960s pop and rock. Dave Marsh called Springsteen the living culmination of twenty years of rock ’n’ roll tradition. In 1980, Springsteen listed his influences as including Elvis, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, the Beatles, Fats Domino, and Benny Goodman.

Moving with musical trends, by the late 1960s Springsteen had embraced the Clapton guitar hero archetype. A long-haired Bruce played heavy blues-rock on a Les Paul in bands like Earth, Child, Clearwater Swim Club, and Steel Mill, whose lineup included future E-Streeters Vini Lopez (drums) and Danny Federici (keyboards). The Mill gigged in California (on the first of two ventures into the West that the young Springsteen made) and were even offered a recording contract, but they returned to Asbury Park instead.

Steel Mill split in 1970 and were succeeded by short-lived outfits such as Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, and the Bruce Springsteen Band. All the while, Springsteen was gaining vital experience as a live performer. Miami Steve Van Zandt had noted from the early days that his friend was always a talented writer, even if he wasn’t always able to find audiences willing to listen to original songs with any attention. Recalling what happened after the trip to California, Springsteen told Mojo in 1999, I moved from hard rock to rhythm-and-blues-influenced music, and I began to write differently.

By 1971, Springsteen knew it was time for a change. He made progress with his own material, partly by default. The main reason I started doing my own arrangements and writing my own songs was because I hated to pick them up off the records, he said in 1974. I didn’t have the patience to sit down and listen to them, figure out the notes and stuff. He then ran into one of the perennial challenges of playing originals, rather than contemporary covers: Nobody would book us [in the early 1970s] because we never did any Top 40, he told the Aquarian in 1978. Never. We used to play all old soul stuff, Chuck Berry, just the things we liked. That’s why we couldn’t get booked. We made enough to eat, though.

INTO THE STUDIO

When Springsteen signed a management contract with Mike Appel in 1972, he had no band. He played solo for noted A&R man John Hammond at CBS in May 1972; consequently, Hammond saw Springsteen as a new Dylan folksinger type. But when the sessions for his first album started in June 1972, Bruce insisted on having a band on the record.

By this point, Springsteen had seven years of varied songwriting behind him. His lyrics were gloriously wordy and full-sprung with multiple rhymes, their vivid urban landscape and characters giving the songs a cinematic quality. Some of the songs were long: Springsteen was experimenting with forms that might work well live. He had plenty of experience as a front man of winning over audiences, which was an important facet of his songwriting.

Springsteen later described his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., as an acoustic record with a rhythm section. He was confident enough as a songwriter to come up with Blinded by the Light and Spirit in the Night after Clive Davis, head of the record label, said there were no obvious singles on the LP. (Anyone interested in how the apparently madcap lyrics of Blinded by the Light contain many allusions to real-life characters and places should watch the exegesis Springsteen supplies on the VH1 Storyteller film.)

There is a large audience that didn’t pick up on Springsteen until The River, and another crowd that got on board for Born in the USA and then drifted away shortly after. If only they had heard the albums Springsteen made before his breakthrough with Born to Run (1975). Like the first four Rod Stewart longplayers, Springsteen’s first and second albums have the