He may call himself ‘The Boss’, but the secret to the mass appeal of Bruce Springsteen has always been his work ethic.
This may sound strange on the surface. After all, being able to write ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Thunder Road’ is surely more important than that? A fair assumption, one that definitely helps, but that ignores the way Springsteen is beloved by his fans. He is so much more than another legendary rock star who wrote a bunch of incredible songs, and when people said, “he’s just like us”, they meant it.
There was a relatable streak to the guy that carried on when he became the biggest name in rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1980s. The feeling that this was our guy made good, who took a skill set that anyone could put together with enough work and made it into the big time. A humble, genuinely blue-collar guy from Long Branch, New Jersey, who didn’t just carry himself like one, but looked out into the audience night after night and saw not a screeching mob of faceless fans, but people just like him.
One can see this in the uproar caused by Springsteen’s recent ticket prices. If this were Paul McCartney or The Rolling Stones, few people would think twice about a ceiling of four to five thousand dollars for their concert tickets. Few but the one per cent of the one per cent would even think twice about buying them, but that’s who they are in the modern day. When Springsteen charged that much, the backlash was from people who weren’t just angry; they expected better from their idol.
That’s not parasocial behaviour either. They had every reason to believe that Springsteen, of all people, knew his fanbase better than that. That they weren’t the kind of people who could just drop five grand on concert tickets. Just as they had every reason to believe they knew him better than that. He’d spent most of his career talking about how, at no point, did he feel entitled to the devotion of his fanbase, but that he continuously had to earn their love and respect through sheer hard work.
When did Bruce Springsteen find songwriting difficult?
Not just on the stages of his live show, either, a dazzling firestorm of a rock concert that could only come from a group of people who had cut their teeth putting in their 10,000 hours at the grindstone of rock ‘n’ roll. If anything, that was the easy part. The hard part came in the quieter hours, where ‘The Boss’ actually put the songs that make up the said live show together.
Often, songs that blossom to life as heart-bursting, deafening calls to action begin life as haunted pleas for help. Look under the hook-laden surface of ‘Dancing in the Dark’ and ‘Thunder Road’ and you’ll find songs that speak to the fractured psyche of the artist he tried to hide away for decades. However, they did always come easily, save for one infamous time in his professional career.
When discussing his songwriting process with NPR, Springsteen said, “After Tunnel of Love, I had some years which seemed, felt like [songwriting] was coming kind of hard. Now, I feel the other way. Instead of feeling like it’s hard to write songs, I think I feel these days like it’s easier, it’s relatively easy to write.” Tunnel Of Love is an album whose darkness is barely hidden, depicting a failing marriage and a man on the edge of creative and personal burnout, so his saying this makes sense.
It makes sense that he would find the period after that album difficult to create in. Tunnel of Love was a commercial misfire despite following one of the biggest records of the 1980s. It would have been the first time where Springsteen, a man who lives and dies by satisfying his audience, would have second-guessed them, unaware of what it was they wanted from him. Fortunately, he was able to pull through it and, musically speaking, ‘The Boss’ has never looked back since.
