Baby, we were born to run.

August 24, 2025

The Bruce Springsteen Archives will host “Born to Run” 50th‑anniversary celebration September 4-7, with talks and exhibits exploring the album’s place in American music history. The album’s actual 50th lands Monday, August 25.

When I was young and in my so-called natural prime, as Tom T. Hall once said, no music cut through to me like Bruce Springsteen’s. From Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) to The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), his records felt like chapters of my own story. They were soundtracks that reflected the hardest years of my jacked-up, turbulent childhood and youth.

There was no greater anthem for my childhood than Used Cars off the Nebraska album. It was never released as a single, so it didn’t chart or get much mainstream radio play. Nevertheless, in the Gen Z vernacular, I felt so seen.

Now the neighbors come from near and far
As we pull up in our brand new used car
I wish he’d just hit the gas and let out a cry
And tell ’em all they can kiss our asses goodbye

Used Cars, 1982

Meanwhile, the title track, Nebraska, resonated in a different way. Like the protagonist’s girlfriend, I stood in the front yard twirling my baton every single day. I was always hoping something big would happen to me. It would be years before I discovered that the song took its cue from Charles Starkweather’s killing spree across Nebraska in 1958 with his girlfriend Caril Fugate, 14. The story inspired Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, with Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen.

Thunder Road

No song resonated with teenage me more than Thunder Road. Given the chance, I would have jumped into that burned-out Chevrolet and pulled out of the town of losers, which was my life.

I was no stranger to burned out Chevys. In addition to the frequent junkyard excusions where we searched for spare parts to fix our busted up lives, there was that time when I scraped the absolute hell out of my legs playing in a burned out Chevy. I was six years old and rode the Greyhound from L.A. to Colorado Springs to visit my dad. He lived in a rundown apartment in downtown Colorado Springs, and turned me to loose to play with all manner of strangers. He warned me before I traipsed off into the great, glass-littered alley of the unknown to stay away from what he considered the real danger: that faded red and rusted out car. Damn, if it didn’t call my everloving name:  Jenni, climb in back! Heavens waitin’ there on the tracks… Thunder Road would not be released for two more years. lol.

The Center Holds

I’ve written a lot about Springsteen over the years – probably more than anyone wants to read. I’ve said all I have to say about his music, and yet, here I am, saying it again. Around 2000, a major newspaper interviewed me about my devotion. A close friend dismissed the piece as performative, even bullsh*t. Maybe she couldn’t believe how much of my story really did live inside his songs. It sounds like moronic teenage melodrama, but I like to think the center holds on this one.

The themes in his songs were the themes in my life: Cousins who fought in Vietnam and came home messed up in the head. Boarded up main streets, shuttered factories, dead ends. Poverty, longing, restlessness. Forever the dark side of the American dream. Also, faith, redemption and always, generational conflict.

The River

In The River, I saw Joe and me riding out to the banks of the Caney River after the school bell rang. It was the early 1980s, and I loved that valley, and I loved Joe. He was in a car accident in 1988 and never woke up. He died in 1994. Our friend Johnny told me Joe was talking about me the night it happened, joking that I was probably off covering a war somewhere. That thought, that he had me on his mind just hours before leaving this world, is something I’ve carried in my heart for more than 35 years. You never really get over those losses.

…Me and Mary, we met in high school
When she was just seventeen
We’d drive out of this valley
Down to where the fields were green
We’d go down to the river…
The River, 1980
Independence Day

Born in East L.A. and raised in the Heartland, I grew up in a working-class home. Our father was a violent, fire and brimstone preacher and Sunday poet. My brother left at 17 after he threatened to kill him over not hopping to it on the dirty dishes. He joined the Marines, and all of that pain later found its echo in My Father’s House and Independence Day.

Well Papa go to bed now it’s getting late
Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now…
Independence Day, 1980

Tougher Than the Rest

I wish I could say my devotion to Springsteen lasted forever, but it didn’t. I left his music in 2002 with the release of The Rising. I hated that album and felt betrayed by it. Turns out I can hold a grudge for a long time.

Finally, more than 20 years later, I decided to forgive him for his journey from working class prophet to global celebrity and woke weirdo. I softened after I saw him singing Tougher Than the Rest with his wife Patti Scialfa.

Yeah, the road is dark
And it’s a thin, thin line
But I want you to know, I’ll walk it for you anytime
Tougher Than the Rest, 1987

Despite what became of my devotion to Springsteen, one thing is certain: Dozens of his songs will always feel like memoir. These include Bobby Jean, Glory Days, No Surrender, Better Days, Little Girl I Wanna Marry You, Out in the Street, If I Should Fall Behind, Brilliant Disguise and others. But, surprisingly, not Born to Run. The runaway American dream. The weight that rips the bones from our backs. The endless effort to break the trap. All of these things are still unfolding for my husband Robert and me in real time.

Tramps Like Us

As I write this, major changes are happening in our family. Good things, yes, but permanent ones. Nothing will ever be the same. I feel the ache of what’s being left behind even as we move forward. The truth is, I’ve been waiting all my life for a chance to run and I think, maybe, here it is.

Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul…
But ’til then, tramps like us,
Baby, we were born to run.

Here I am in my college dorm hugging a poster of Bruce Springsteen, fall 1985. 

Deliver Me From Nowhere

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is an upcoming biographical drama that opens nationwide on October 24. Jeremy Allen White stars as Bruce Springsteen during the winter of 1982, when he retreated to a New Jersey bedroom with a four-track recorder and created Nebraska. This was following the peak of his fame after The River.

The Nebraska album’s stark, haunting stories of drifters, outlaws, and working-class strugglers reflected Springsteen’s own battles with isolation and fame. The film, which is based on the book by Warren Zanes, captures that creative solitude and the birth of one of rock’s most unlikely masterpieces — Nebraska.