The Truly Hopeless Task of Choosing Five Springsteen Songs That Perfectly Define Me

I knew it was a fool’s errand when I started

Yesterday I published a piece titled “The Five Non-Springsteen Songs (Plus One) That Perfectly Define Me” in response to a challenge from Pierce McIntyre. The actual challenge (which I will link to at the bottom of this article) was “Five Songs That Define Me,” but as I said in the first piece, for me it had to be two lists, one totally Bruce and one not. And since I promised a part two, I might as well tackle the impossible now and get it out of the way.

Anyone who knows me knows the impact that Bruce has had on my life since 1975, when I heard “Born to Run” for the first time at nine years old. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, he has been the one constant as I wandered through this odd pilgrimage called life. Navigating the hell that was junior high and high school: Bruce was there. Joining the Army during wartime: Bruce was there. Marriage, kids, divorce: Bruce was there. Even as I traversed from cradle Catholic to Buddhist to Baptist and back to Catholic again, he was always there. Oddly, he’s taught me as much about dying as he has about living. Five decades of watching over my sad, sorry self; the man deserves a medal.

I say all of that to give you just the slightest idea of why choosing five of his songs that help you get to know me is an almost hopeless task from the start. According an article on Vulture.com, Springsteen has recorded 340 songs over the course of a five decade career, and at some point nearly all of them had some impact on who I am as I sit here typing away today. But I took the damn challenge, so here we go.

“Born to Run.” Shocking, I know. It’s not like I’ve posted a different live version to Facebook at the start of each month for years, or that I drop in a reference to the song in articles where it logically has no place. But how does it help you get to know me? Besides clearly showing what I consider necessary to be classified The Greatest Song Ever, it is in no small part one of my missions in life. Admit it: if you’re a regular reader of mine, when you hear this song mentioned, you think of me. Since spreading the gospel of Bruce has been my not-so-secret goal since I was a pre-teen, I couldn’t ask for more.

“Thunder Road.” The only song that can even begin to challenge “Born to Run” for the title of The Greatest Song Ever, “Thunder Road” taught me more about what makes good poetry than any number of stupid English Lit classes. Just consider:

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets They scream your name at night in the street Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet And in the lonely cool before dawn You hear their engines roaring on But when you get to the porch they’re gone on the wind, so Mary climb in It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win

I may be biased (of course I’m biased), but no Shakespearian sonnet can begin to match this. Then again, the Bard didn’t have the E Street Band backing him up.

“No Surrender.” This song makes the list for two very different reasons. First, it contains a verse that may be the truest thing Bruce ever wrote: “We learned more from a three-minute record baby, than we ever learned in school.” I can’t remember even a fraction of what my teachers threw at me decades ago, yet somehow I quote “Rosalita” almost daily (“someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”). Second, almost from the day the album was released in 1984, the two main lines from the chorus of this song became a call and response between me and my late sister whenever one of us was faced with some overwhelming situation. Most often she would give the call while I gave the response (she being the more level-headed of the two of us): “No retreat,” she would say, write, or text, to which I would respond “No surrender.” I still hear her saying it almost four years after she sailed for the far shore.

“Sherry Darling.” In the non-Bruce list, I included the Smiths song “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” as a window into my parenting style because I taught it to my girls when they were toddlers. I taught them this frat-rock gem from The River at the same time, and their wee falsetto voices would belt out the line “Your mama’s yapping in the backseat, tell her to push over and move them big feet” with such glee that the angels in heaven would have difficulty competing. The fact that their mother hated Springsteen (which to my shame I knew before I proposed) was just an added bonus. We still cackle at the line 20 years later, and it remains the one song that will lift my mood in any situation.

“Jungleland.” There is no question that this is the most epic, most cinematic piece of songwriting in Bruce’s fifty-year career, but it makes the list for a masterpiece within the masterpiece. For two minutes and thirty seconds in the middle of the song, Clarence Clemons lays down the finest saxophone solo ever recorded on a rock album, one that if pulled out of the song to stand on its own is worthy of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. The Big Man had countless solos on Springsteen records that helped define the E Street Band’s sound (“Born to Run,” “Bobby Jean,” Prove It All Night,” “Spirit in the Night,” and “Independence Day,” to name just a few), but from the moment I heard the solo on “Jungleland” I developed a fascination with Clarence that has never faded. He is the yin to Bruce’s yang, the Sundance Kid to Bruce’s Butch Cassidy; you can’t think of one without seeing the other. When Clarence died from a stroke on June 18, 2011, I cried more than I had since my grandmother passed away twenty years before (though not for the three days my kids now claim). I also learned that people you’ve never met can impact your life in ways you would never expect.

What am I leaving off? More than I can count: “The River,” Growin’ Up,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “Backstreets,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Reason to Believe,” and so many more. But this is a list I can live with, even if it should have been fifty instead of five. And are three of the five from the Born to Run album? Yes, and that shouldn’t be a surprise.

Many others have taken on the challenge, and if you’d like to join in, here the original prompt:

All lyrics by Bruce Springsteen and found on www.brucespringsteen.net.