The "garbage" album Bruce Springsteen always hated (2024)

For every legendary artist, there is a defining moment when everything aligns, and their star is launched into the stratosphere. For some, this happens right away—a single catches fire, and the whole world latches on. For others, it’s a slower burn. Bruce Springsteen’s moment came with his album Born To Run—the record that made him The Boss.

Although it was his third album to date, Born To Run was the project that helped introduce his name to audiences all over the globe, all of whom fell in love with the Jersey boy and his unique brand of down-home Americana. However, despite its unavoidable greatness, Springsteen initially hated everything about the album and, for a period of time, didn’t even want the seminal record to be released.

Following the commercial failure of his previous two LPs, Born To Run was seen as a make-or-break moment for Springsteen’s career. Greetings from Asbury Park N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle may now be considered some of Springsteen’s finer work; they were released to a tepid response. The world hadn’t quite clicked into gear with Springsteen’s blend of Bob Dylan songwriting and Rolling Stones showmanship.

Thankfully, Born to Run was a commercial success, allowing Bruce Springsteen’s journey to continue. However, the story could have been dramatically different if the album had failed to land. Columbia Records, recognising Springsteen as a generational talent, stuck by him despite the financial losses from his first two albums. For Born to Run, they went all in, giving him a substantial budget for what was essentially his last shot at making a commercially viable album—and career.

If the response to the record was anything like his first two, then Springsteen would have been dropped by Columbia and wouldn’t have grown into the stadium-filling behemoth he is today. All too aware that this was his last shot at mainstream success, Springsteen was in no rush to waste this final opportunity. Instead, he worked day and night in the studio for 14 months in an attempt to get the record in perfect condition, but, in truth, all that did was make him grow to resent the material, focusing deeply on perceived flaws in his work.

The title track was released six months before the album, as the label assumed Springsteen couldn’t tinker with the record any longer—though they were mistaken. However, the early release of the single helped generate excitement around the upcoming record. ‘Born to Run’ became a mainstay on radio stations across America, building anticipation for his third album—or adding extra pressure, depending on your viewpoint.

When it was finally released, Springsteen knew that his life and career rested on the strength of the eight songs which, over the prior year and some months, he had poured every fibre of his being into. This sent him into a state of worry and anxiety about the LP and he had seemingly convinced himself that Born to Run was a piece of trash that nobody in their right mind would enjoy listening to.

“After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it,” Springsteen would later admit. “I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard. I told Columbia I wouldn’t release it. I told ‘em I’d just go down to the Bottom Line gig and do all the new songs and make it a live album.”

He later expanded on this feeling to Rolling Stone in 2015, “I’ve always had a bit of an ambivalent attitude towards… what was I afraid of? Change, I don’t know [laughs]. Also, it was a moment when your music was the totality of your identity, and so you were so caught up and so invested in it.

“To accept that our fortunes were going to rest on whatever this was, for better or for worse. That was a big responsibility at the time, and we were putting everything we had on what we’d done. So it was just traumatic.”

Springsteen’s career truly hung in the balance, and he felt as though he didn’t have anybody else to blame but himself if it didn’t become a success. Columbia even spent $250,000 on a marketing campaign for the record, which rescued the album after it charted at 84 in the first week of sales. This campaign helped rocket the record into the top ten the following week, and it soon went gold and became a mainstay of Springsteen’s rich canon.

The stress that Springsteen felt around the release of the record, coupled with the relentless examination of every detail across a 14-month period, led to him to grow to hate the record, an unusual position for any artist. It’s especially strange considering that Born To Run is the sound of Springsteen spreading his wings.

Born to Run represents a climactic moment for Springsteen as he finally achieved the superstar status he so badly craved. The Boss only really took his title after the album sold thousands and thousands of copies across the globe. An album propped up by legend-making hits is a critical moment in Springsteen’s impressive career. Though he kept his lyrics deliberately squared at the working man’s everyday struggle, he also began to add an air of optimism to his sound, and an album full of radio-ready rock songs meant the singer was looking toward American mythology for his greatest inspiration.

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