Book Excerpt: The Birth of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’

How the searing lyrics for the giant 1975 hit came to be (from my new book, ‘Tonight in Jungleland’)

Peter Ames Carlin

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Published August 06, 2025

Portrait of Springsteen recording a song

Bruce Springsteen was determined to make "Born to Run" one of the greatest rock 'n' roll albums of all time.

Leland Foster

Fifty years ago, after the commercial failure of his first two albums, Bruce Springsteen released his iconic album Born to Run. Born — bookended by “Thunder Road” and the epic “Jungleland” — leaped up the charts, and Springsteen was launched into superstardom. At the center of the Boss’s masterpiece was the gorgeously wrought summer anthem “Born to Run.”

Here’s its somewhat fraught two-year creation story, adapted from my new book, Tonight in Jungleland. (Editor’s note: Read our interview with Carlin for more on the birth of Born to Run.)

From 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run'

On a page in his notebook, the song was coming together. It was fall of 1973 and Bruce Springsteen was in Asbury Park, watching the street racers in their souped-up cars orbiting the Ocean Avenue/Kingsley Street circuit on a Saturday night.

The parade of muscular, lovingly detailed automobiles stirred something in him — the way the cars animated their owners’ spirits. The candy shades of red, purple, and blue, the racing stripes and hand-painted eagles, the dazzling chrome and shimmering glass. And the power of their engines: the low rumble as they idled, the jet roar of takeoff. Like animals pacing in a black, dark cage, senses on overload … / They’re gonna end this night in a senseless fight / And then watch the world explode.

Circling and revving, drifting slowly and then blasting off. Where were they going? It was an interesting question, just as compelling as where they came from and what brought them out into the night, to circle with their friends and rivals, to put it all on the line.

an illustration of bruce springsteen looking at a red car with 'born to run' painted on the side

Springsteen's inspirations were many — including a car painted with the words "Born to Run" that he saw one night while watching street racers in Asbury Park.

Leland Foster

One car had words running down its flank, a chain of cursive letters canted forward as if pulled by the finish line off in the distance. A dare, a philosophy, an explanation. Did he actually see it on a passing racer? Or did it simply pop into his head? Bruce wrote it into his notebook, in case he forgot it. He’d never forget it.

Born to run.

By the end of 1973, Bruce Springsteen was in a tough spot. His first album on Columbia Records, Greetings From Asbury Park, N..J., had been released that January. Critics and a small cadre of fans had loved it, and his second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, released that fall, won the same acclaim, but also the same weak sales. That hard fact, along with a shift in Columbia Records’ upper management, meant that Bruce had fallen increasingly out of step with his record company. It was taking longer and longer for his manager, Mike Appel, to get his calls returned. Especially now that he was trying to figure out when they’d be getting the money they’d need to fund recording sessions for Bruce’s next album.

When he finally got an answer in the early weeks of 1974, the news was frustrating, at best. Go make a single, they said. If it sounds like it could be on the radio, we’ll pay for the rest of the album. Appel tried to protest: Bruce isn’t a singles act, he argued. It’s all about albums; that’s been the plan all along. But that hadn’t worked, the executives said. So this is your chance. Go make a single.

Bruce, then 24, was particularly close to Appel and trusted him so implicitly, he barely read the contracts his new manager gave him to sign. The two made an unlikely but surprisingly well-matched pair. Appel was a few years older, with shorter hair, neater clothes, and the restless energy of a man who was trying to get somewhere else. Bruce was just as ambitious but moved through the world more quietly. He talked less, tended to the edges of the room, and kept watch. When something caught his eye, he reached for his notebook and clicked open his pen. You never knew what he was seeing, what he was thinking, not until he stepped onto the stage, saw his musicians around him, and counted to four.

But Bruce knew he had in Appel an advocate, a protector, and a record producer. “His heart was in it, and everything else,” Bruce told me. “That’s part of what attracted me, because it was all or nothing.” Now that the executives at Columbia had made it clear that his recording contract was on the line, Bruce wanted to make certain his new songs had the economy and drive to fit on the radio. He would need to hone his style to make his songs sleeker, faster, and more powerful. Like the singles Phil Spector made in the early 1960s. What did he need to do to get there?

Appel had thoughts. Spector songs had lyrics that were direct, first person, conversational, he told Bruce. They left plenty of space between for the melody to come through. Bruce’s songs, like “Blinded by the Light,” sounded like lyrical Gatling guns: words upon words upon words. “But you can’t do that with a Phil Spector production,” Appel said.

Bruce absorbed it, nodded, picked up his notebook. He had a new song that felt different from what they’d done before. He wasn’t done with it yet, but the bones, and the essential feelings, were there. The chords for the song, and the melody of theverses, found their shape nearly immediately. In one early draft, titled “Wild Angels,” the verses describe a litany of modern urban catastrophes. Murderous junkies turn shotguns on soldiers on leave from Fort Dix.

Them wild boys did it just for the noise.

Not even for the kicks. Roads crumble, drivers are crushed beneath their own cars. The game is so rigged, it’s murderous.

This town’ll rip the bones from your back. It’s a death trap.

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You’re dead unless you get out when you’re young.

He wrote more drafts, filling notebook pages in hotel rooms in the wee hours after shows, or while lounging on the musty sofa in the little bungalow he’d recently rented on the Jersey Shore. The lyrics evolved, but the darkness persisted. Baby, tonight I saw the fast rebel / Crushed beneath the wheels of his own hemi, began one verse. By the end we see the rebel breathing his last, clutched in the arms of his “beautiful surfer girl.” In another version the narrator witnesses the death of all his heroes, crushed beneath the weight of / Their own Chevy Six. / And what of the beautiful surfer girl? … Dead on a beach in an / Everlasting fix.

It feels unexpected, nothing like the songs on Bruce’s first two albums. But as he was watching the world and absorbing the culture that reflected how it felt to be alive in that moment, it had the ring of truth. “I was naturally close to a sort of rock ’n’ roll gothicness,” says Bruce now. “That was just where I was coming from, from all the B movies I saw, and from growing up in Asbury Park with the hot rods, you know, spinning around the circuit on a nightly basis.”

Bruce kept working, filling his notebook. Eventually the words began to lose their hysterical edge. The gloom and the sense of danger persisted. Still, by the start of the spring, Bruce’s words identified something glimmering on the horizon. A potential end point for the one phrase that could be found in every draft: Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

He showed Appel a draft of lyrics for “Born to Run.” A week or so after that, he had another revision. Then another, and another. “He had five different versions,” says Appel. “And finally I said to him, ‘Don’t ask me anymore which one I liked the best. I like all five versions. If you’re gonna ask me again, I’m just gonna look at you and stare until you get the picture that you’ve gotta decide, not me.’”

Bruce was trying to fulfill his record company’s demand for a song that might appeal to more than his small cult of fans. But he also knew what he could do when he set his mind to it. “I’m not going to be defined by what other people are telling me, who I was or what I should be,” he says. Who he wanted to be, what he hoped “Born to Run” would help him become, was this: a rock star.

an illustration of a nighttime winter scene with a band practicing in a garage

Springsteen and his band labored over every note while perfecting what would become their album's title track.

Leland Foster

He wasn’t shy about this ambition. “I was concerned about one thing, which was making an absolutely great rock ’n’ roll record,” he recalls. “Whatever happens after that I don’t have control over. But I do have an opportunity to make a record. And I want to make the greatest rock ’n’ roll, man. I want to make the last rock ’n’ roll album you’re ever going to need to hear."

He introduced the song to the band at a rehearsal in January 1974. They were set up in the garage outside bassist Garry Tallent’s father’s place near Asbury Park. It was cold out there, the musicians wore sweaters, coats, and hats to ward off the chill, but the new song cut through the frosty air. Tallent clocked it immediately: “I just thought, Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a keeper, really.”

They ran through it a few times, Bruce explaining the song’s pace and feel, slowing down to play the dozen or so chord changes in the bridge section.

“I think we had the song, or the bones of the song, and I was interested at first in getting the sound right,” says Bruce. “So we went up and recorded the song with very few lyrics. And because we didn’t really know how to get the sound we wanted, it took us a long time.”

He eventually got it to the point where the music felt right, the simple chords on the verse contrasting with the head-spinning changes in the bridge, the tension building with every upward step, then rocketing downward again, only to speed off into the final verse.

We gotta live with the sadness.

Drive to this madness

Oh burnin’ off the radio.

Oh well maybe someday girl I’ll get us somewhere.

We’ll get to that place we really wanna go

And we’ll walk in the sun …

The darkness was still there, along with the doubt and fear.

“I was a romantic at heart, you know,” Bruce says. “So a dark romantic, I guess.”

Eventually the labor on the “Born to Run” single came down to recording overdubs and the vocal. Ensconced in a recording studio in the wee hours, Appel and Bruce seemed to try every idea that occurred to them. A string section. An ascending guitar riff repeating through the verse. A chorus of women chiming in on the chorus. An even bigger chorus of women oooh-ing behind the third verse. They’d work out a part, hire whatever musicians or singers were needed to get it on tape, then mix it all together to see what they had. Sometimes it would stick, sometimes they’d just laugh, shake their heads, and slice it out.

Bruce knew exactly what he wanted for the saxophone break. Then he spent ages working on it with Clarence Clemons, eight, ten, maybe twelve hours, playing the same notes over and over again, Bruce looking for a slightly different feel, a slightly different tone, a tiny adjustment to the rhythm of this passage, this pair of notes, this portion of that note.

While work on the instrumental track went on for weeks, it still didn’t rival Bruce’s laboring over the lyrics. He had always put energy into his narratives, but the pressure he felt to get “Born to Run” exactly right pushed him to a whole other level of perfectionism, determined to get every word, every nuance, every syllable flawless. Sometimes he’d be in the midst of a take, sing a few lines of a verse, shake it off, then take his notebook to a folding chair. He’d find a pen, open the book, look at the page, and just … think. He’d be there for a while. An hour, two hours, maybe more. Meanwhile, in the control room, Appel would be at his place at the board, recording engineer Louis Lahav in his. Impatience was not an option.

“There was a certain amount of self-punishment and self-thrashing for no good reason except for that was the only way I knew how to do it,” Bruce explains now. “I didn’t know how to do it some other way, so everybody got stuck with it.”

Still, for all that pressure to create, Bruce says he knew he was realizing the life he’d set out to have since he was 14 years old. “All I know is, hey, I’m on the road, I got a great band. We’re having the time of our lives. I’m not working 9 to 5, and I’m traveling around, staying in places that are nicer than my apartment. We’re meeting girls. You know, I felt like I was as good as anybody out there ... but I was just taking it a day at a time.”

the cover of the book 'tonight in jungleland'

Carlin's new book describes how the iconic album's title track was shaped. Billboard would later call "Born to Run" "simply one of the best rock anthems to individual freedom ever created."

Penguin Random House

Meanwhile, the nation in 1974 spun crazily toward some kind of doom. We’ve gotta get out while we’re young, Bruce sang, and the urgency in his voice was echoed by every note and drum stroke, the hard edge in the guitar, the cry of the organ, the growl and wail of the saxophone.

Finally the song felt finished.

Now it was August, right around the time of President Nixon’s resignation. The denouement of the Watergate scandal — what the freshly anointed President Gerald Ford called our long national nightmare — lifted at least a part of the nation’s psychic burden. Suddenly, the breeze carried a sense of new beginnings. A propitious time to move forward. They made a final mix of “Born to Run” and dubbed it onto a cassette.

Appel and Bruce walked from the manager’s midtown office up to the CBS building to play it for a record executive with their label. Bruce decided to wait in the lobby downstairs while Appel carried the tape up to the executive floor. When Appel returned to the lobby, he gave it to him straight: The music exec had only sort of listened as he took multiple phone calls, then said he hadn’t been able to absorb it.

Fifty years later, Bruce says, of the executive’s response, “I guess it wasn’t an easy song to absorb when you first heard it. Now people have heard it a thousand times, so it all sounds perfectly natural, right? But at first people said it sounded noisy.”

Still, as far as Appel was concerned, Bruce Springsteen shouldn’t have to take no from anybody. A new plan of attack revealed itself. It would require them to take a leap, and to risk aggravating the very executives who could help, or hinder, them. A career-sized risk, in other words. With Bruce’s record contract already in jeopardy, news of an unauthorized leak from a nonexistent future album might well have spurred the company to cut the rocker loose. But that possibility didn’t trouble Appel. The only question in his mind was how quickly he could get it done.

The manager made a list of all the radio DJs who’d played Bruce’s records, who’d had him on the air and/or attended his shows and/or professed their adoration for him. He arranged to make several dozen duplicates of the “Born to Run” master tape and wrote a cover letter for radio programmers and disc jockeys so they knew exactly what it was and why they had been chosen to play the song on their air.

Word of the new song sifted across town and then to Bruce-friendly stations in dozens of other cities. “We had stations all over the country,” says Appel. “Primary, secondary, tertiary markets, it didn’t matter; we had the nation covered.”

The plan worked. He quickly began to hear from the Columbia executive floor, whose occupants wanted to know what the hell Appel thought he was doing. But he was happy to weather the abuse. Now, at last, they were ready to listen.

Editor’s note: Partly as a result of Appel’s audacious marketing effort, Springsteen and his band finally received financial backing from their label to record the Born to Run album. After a year of intense studio work, the album was released in August 1975 to massive acclaim, with Billboard declaring the “Born to Run” track a “monster song with a piledriver arrangement … simply one of the best rock anthems to individual freedom ever created.”

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Writer Peter Ames Carlin contributes to such publications as The New York Times Magazine and People and has written several related biographies (on Brian Wilson, Springsteen, and Paul McCartney, among others).