#34, “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen (1975)

150 Favorite Songs: #34, “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen (1975)

Did you know that Bruce Springsteen was twenty-five years old when he wrote the line “so you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe you ain’t that young anymore”? If you’re old, and you’re well past twenty-five, that worry seems so silly.

But of course, the first time I heard “Thunder Road,” I was twenty-two or twenty-three, listening to it because I found an mp3 of Counting Crows interpolating it into a live version of “Rain King” and I thought fuck, what is that song? and it turned out to be a Bruce Springsteen song written decades earlier, one of his more famous ones at that, but I’d never really listened to Bruce Springsteen except for “Born in the U.S.A.,” which I knew because of pro wrestlers who used it as their entrance music when I was little. So I heard “Thunder Road” for the first time, younger even than the young man Bruce was when he wrote it, and heard him sing “so you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe you ain’t that young anymore” and I thought, “hey, that’s me!” and then I listened to the song again and he sang about Roy Orbison singing “Only the Lonely” and how he thought “hey, that’s me!” and I just found myself feeling like back in 1975, long before I was ever born, Bruce Springsteen was reading my mail.

I don’t know if “Thunder Road” is the greatest rock song ever written, though it’s certainly in the conversation. And I think a big part of why it’s there is because of that thing that Bruce is and always has been so incredibly gifted at, which is writing the most personal and intimate songs that are also somehow incredibly universal and anthemic. Other artists can write painfully revealing songs, and there is obviously a big place for the Elliott Smiths and Robert Smiths and just The Smiths, and all of that, but Bruce’s gift is that he writes those songs in a way that an entire soccer stadium can pump their fist to. When Elliott Smith or The Cure sing a song that hits like that, the feeling I always take away from it is that I can’t believe there’s someone else who feels that way, too, that they’re singing just for me. When Bruce Springsteen sings that sort of song, it’s that I can’t believe that apparently everyone feels that way. It’s an important distinction!

So I heard “Thunder Road” and I felt seen and understood by this guy I’d always kind of believed to be a big cornball, and then I realized that I was the twenty millionth person to have that feeling, and it became another point of connection. “Thunder Road” is the quintessential Springsteen song because it says “you are not alone” to all those boys with ghosts in their eyes who, like me, came from a place with haunted dusty roads with skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets, and who were desperate to escape them. It’s funny; it’s very much a song to a girl (her name is Mary, unless you’re listening to an early acoustic demo, in which case it’s Christy), but she’s the object of the song, not the subject. The subject of the song is the boy who’s singing it to her—that’s the character we’re invited to identify with. And identify with it I did. Despite how melancholy the song is in many places (you can hide beneath your covers and study your pain / make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain / waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets), it’s joyful in its expression of those sentiments, and it results in something really magical, a song that serves as both warning and invitation. You can feel the way the song’s lyrics feel, or you can feel the way the music feels, like there’s a saxophone and a Fender Rhodes dueling for the right to accompany you on your way out of that feeling. Well, shit. I know which one I’d pick. I know which one I did.

I love “Thunder Road” because it’s a first-person power fantasy that mostly uses its power to inspire, at least if you’re a young man who can easily identify with the character Bruce plays in the song. (I’ll admit to being curious how it sounds if that’s not who you are, if you’re the one who gets “the door’s open but the ride ain’t free,” which I think means you only get to be inspired if you are perhaps willing to blow Bruce Springsteen in the backseat of his car.) But even the tackiness of horndog Bruce making his plea to Mary to climb in and pull out of the town full of losers is, at the very least, true to the part of life that the song is clearly about, when you’re young but not quite that young anymore, and you know that if you don’t make some changes, eventually you won’t be young at all, and you don’t want to go alone, but you also will if you have to. I know that’s true—I know that it’s not just me—because the last time I saw him play this song, it was in an NBA arena, and everyone there was singing along. Sometimes that can make a song feel less special, but that’s not how Bruce Springsteen works, and that’s another part of what makes “Thunder Road” so great.