When Bruce Springsteen enters a room, he fills it up -- even when it's just a room in the guesthouse turned studio on his own property. It was late October 1998, and through the windows you could see the bursting colors of the trees beyond the nearby fields -- peak foliage in southern New Jersey. Springsteen, who had just turned forty-nine, was about to release Tracks, a sprawling, four-CD retrospective that consists of fifty-six unreleased performances and ten B-sides spanning his entire career.

This excerpt is from a greatly expanded version of a story than ran in Rolling Stone in 1998. It's from a section of In Other Words called "The Songwriters," which also includes interviews with Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Lucinda Williams, Sting, Billy Joel and Elton John.

What material on Tracks was the most fun for you to hear?

I had the most fun with the wild stuff from The Wild, the Innocent, where I just enjoyed hearing the eccentricity of both the band and myself at the time. That song "Thundercrack" was my showstopper. You'd pull it out at the end of the night and it was a big, long production. We played it once in the studio, and I remember listening to it and saying, "This is too much work." So we put it away and never went back to it until this record. I pulled it out, and we didn't have the vocal parts. So I called up Vini [former E Street Band drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez] and I said, "Vini, it's about twenty-three years later, but I got some singing for you to do." So he comes in and, of course, he remembers his part exactly with no coaching whatsoever. He just steps up and sings all those high notes, and says, "Hey, thanks, that was fun," and walks out. You realize once you've done it, it stays in there!

The last disc articulates a little clearer some of the things I was trying to get at when I began to write about relationships between men and women. When I began to try to figure these things out in my own life, when I began to write about them -- Tunnel of Love, Lucky Town -- there was this music, which is almost another record.

It was an issue that was a natural extension of the things I'd written about earlier -- community, people finding their place. Finding your power within family and friends, neighborhood, the country you live in. Ultimately that power is nurtured by these essential relationships that give meaning to your actions, your ideas, and your work. I went into that very intensely. I dogged that trail as hard as I could.

It was extremely compelling.

When you watch the end of The Searchers, you see a classic moment where John Wayne is in the doorway at the end of the film. He's reconstituted this family and he comes to the house, and then he steps back and moves away. That's a very powerful moment, and a great failure. Artists create in a good deal of isolation, and your isolation may have been what initially spurred your imagination and your creative life. You needed a world to go into. But if you get lost in that world, then that's what you are -- you're lost. There are plenty of people that that has happened to.

How do you walk through the door that leads into the house? And what do you do when you get in there? That was real important once I got down the road myself. It was an essential link in the things I had been writing about.

So this last CD [on Tracks] is about fear, paranoia, mistrust, doubt, the lack of faith people have in themselves to be capable of creating those kinds of relationships. And also making your peace with it and finding your place in it, which happens toward the end -- in "Happy," "Back in Your Arms." I don't know how well I've articulated it, but that was the arc of the albums I released and it's also the arc of this material.

These days, you don't see a lot of rock & roll at the top of the charts. I'd be curious to get your read on what's going on out there and how you feel you fit into it.

The trendy part of the music business is fun. I enjoy it. That's always an essential part of pop music -- its disposability, its being of the moment, right here, right now. It just didn't fit me. I had a different take on it, just because of who I was, what I wanted to do, how I saw myself, and what I thought.

And what had made an impact on you.

When I was young, in my teens, I was probably more in tune with trends. That's when it's important to your identity, when having the right shoes and the right haircut is essential. It's everything. Later on, it's not everything. It can be something you want to do or don't want to do, but your life changes and you're not living in that same context.

I've created a long body of work that fundamentally expresses who I am. That's what I go out to present. That's the only way I know how to do it, and the way I approach it now isn't any different to when I started.

I haven't really had a work life where I tried to fit myself into what's out there. I try to do my best job, and think as hard as I can about the things that interest me, and write and perform as well as I can and then try to find the audience that's out there for it. I am interested in presenting what I do to anybody who wants to hear it.

But that doesn't fundamentally alter anything I do at this point. Basically, I've been pretty consistent with my approach since I started. Hey, you have faith in what you do. And then you do it.

From Anthony DeCurtis' collection of interviews, In Other Words.

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