He has written so many great songs that it hard for me to pick a favorite or the best song he has written and recorded. For a long time, I thought it was “Born To Run,” the title track of the album that got him on the cover of Time Magazine and made him a superstar.
It has everything a great song should have: In my mind it’s the anthem of a generation (my generation); it’s epic; it’s rebellious; it has great chord changes, multi-crashing crescendos, and hooks which rival anything that Lennon & McCartney wrote. It captures important human emotions: love, despair, hope, desperation and more, seamlessly interchanging between them.
However, with the passage of time, I am torn between it and “Thunder Road” from that same album. I was at one of the concerts in Barcelona when the “Live in Barcelona” music documentary was filmed and I noticed how connected the audience was to it. A 95% Spanish audience singing every word of a 35 year old American rock song. (The audiences sing along with some of the lyrics in Born To Run, but not all. On Thunder Road, there are times in concert where Springsteen stops singing and simply holds his microphone out toward the audience and lets it sing.) It too has an epic quality enhanced by multiple chord changes, along with perhaps Springsteen’s greatest line ever: “Well, I got this guitar and I’ve learned how to make it talk.”
I rank them #1 and #1A, but I’m not sure in what order. There certainly is no shortage of other contenders. Just wondering what others think.
For your enjoyment, here is the “official video” of Born To Run and the video of Thunder Road from the Live In Barcelona video, one of the 22 Springsteen concerts I have attended since March 1975, five months before the album Born To Run was released.
It has everything a great song should have: In my mind it’s the anthem of a generation (my generation); it’s epic; it’s rebellious; it has great chord changes, multi-crashing crescendos, and hooks which rival anything that Lennon & McCartney wrote. It captures important human emotions: love, despair, hope, desperation and more, seamlessly interchanging between them.
However, with the passage of time, I am torn between it and “Thunder Road” from that same album. I was at one of the concerts in Barcelona when the “Live in Barcelona” music documentary was filmed and I noticed how connected the audience was to it. A 95% Spanish audience singing every word of a 35 year old American rock song. (The audiences sing along with some of the lyrics in Born To Run, but not all. On Thunder Road, there are times in concert where Springsteen stops singing and simply holds his microphone out toward the audience and lets it sing.) It too has an epic quality enhanced by multiple chord changes, along with perhaps Springsteen’s greatest line ever: “Well, I got this guitar and I’ve learned how to make it talk.”
I rank them #1 and #1A, but I’m not sure in what order. There certainly is no shortage of other contenders. Just wondering what others think.
For your enjoyment, here is the “official video” of Born To Run and the video of Thunder Road from the Live In Barcelona video, one of the 22 Springsteen concerts I have attended since March 1975, five months before the album Born To Run was released.
