I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.
You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it.
You need two things to remain very, very present. You need to continue to write well and engage yourself in the issues of the day. And you have to continue to make good, relevant records.
In America everything's about who's number one today.
It's always felt natural, because I'm generally very comfortable with people.
When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.
I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.
Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.
I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.
I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.
The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.
Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out... The other two aren't quite into that yet.
While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.
Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield.
There is something about the melody of 'Thunder Road' that just suggests 'new day.' It suggests morning; it suggests something opening up.
I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life, and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.
Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.
I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.
I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off, so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly.
You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.
But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.
When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.
At the time, there was a great disagreement over 'The Wild and the Innocent,' and I was asked to record the entire album over again with studio musicians. And I said I wouldn't do it, and they basically said, 'Well hey, look, it's going to go in the trash can.' That's the record business, you know.
Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.
I had tried to go to college, and I didn't really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus - I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.
Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.
An outgrowth of having a long career is that I have a lot of interesting things around that I get to revisit, and someday get to the place where they become something that I want to do next.
The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
I was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles.
On any given night, what allows me to get to that higher ground is the audience.
I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street.
Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier.
The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.
I didn't know if it would be a success-ful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter.
And whether you're drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.
I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician.
In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.
I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.
This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.
That's what being a front man is all about - the idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime.
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.
The release date is just one day, but the record is forever.
I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns.
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
Anyone who's grown up or lived on the Jersey Shore knows the place is unique.
I'm always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music.
