11/6/2022 0 Comments Songs like run boy run![]() ![]() Only by taking that risk can you hold on to the faith that you have something left to lose. ![]() It is an old tattoo: "Born to Lose." Springsteen's songs - filled with recurring images of people stranded, huddled, scared, crying, dying - take place in the space between "Born to Run" and "Born to Lose," as if to say, the only run worth making is the one that forces you to risk losing everything you have. But "Born to Run" is uncomfortably close to another talisman of the lost kids that careen across this record, a slogan Springsteen's motto inevitably suggests. "Born to Run" is the motto that speaks for the album's tales, just as the guitar figure that runs through the title song - the finest compression of rock & roll thrill since the opening riffs of "Layla" - speaks for its music. He has touched his world with glory, without glorifying anything: not the unbearable pathos of the street fight in "Jungleland," not the scared young lovers of "Backstreets" and not himself. With that sound, Springsteen has achieved something very special. For all it owes to Phil Spector, it can be compared only to the music Bob Dylan & the Hawks made onstage in 1965 and '66. Rolling Stone contributing editor Jon Landau, Mike Appel and Springsteen produced Born to Run in a style as close to mono as anyone can get these days the result is a sound full of grandeur. In one sense, all this talk of epic comes down to sound. One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new. One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago. Springsteen's singing, his words and the band's music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic - an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in Rebel without a Cause. What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love. Their familiar romance is half their power: The promise and the threat of the night the lure of the road the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price girls glimpsed once at 80 miles and hour and never forgotten the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier. It is the drama that counts the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. The song titles by themselves - "Thunder Road," "Night," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," "Jungleland" - suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of Springsteen's new music. And it should crack his future wide open.
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