Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview

The creative roll you're on now is relatively recent, given the scope of your career. There was a period eight to ten years ago where you were still making records and putting them away.
Yeah, I made one for "Streets of Philadelphia" that I didn't put out, which I'd like to. It was interesting, it had a lot of little loops and things. A good record, written pretty well. It wasn't a complete record in the end, which is why I would sit down and feel great for four or five songs and in the end get up with some sense of dissatisfaction.

What were those songs about?
Mostly personal relationships. I'd come off Tunnel of Love, and it would have been my fourth record about those things, and I thought that was one too many. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had to break the narrative that I was in, break the context and move to L.A. for three or four years, get away from all things connected to myself. We went to Los Angeles, and the change of scenery was good. I love that city, actually. I love the mountains and the desert, and up there I can have my cars and my motorcycles. I tried to live in New York for a while, but I couldn't deal with a place where you had to catch a car. It's too late for me for that. So I moved out West, where I had a little house in the Hollywood Hills from the middle of the Eighties, and I felt real comfortable there. My sister lives there, my younger sister, my parents lived up north in San Francisco, and it was a fascinating time to be there, because it's what the East Coast looks like now. If you go to my hometown, in Freehold, there's tremendous Hispanic influence, and that was California fifteen years ago. So when I wrote The Ghost of Tom Joad and wrote a lot about what was going on, it felt like "This is what the country's going to look like in another ten or fifteen years." All those immigration issues that people are trying to ride right now to wherever they think they're going were all in the news and in your face in the early Nineties in California. I wrote things that I wouldn't have if I stayed back East. Two or three albums of Western songs. Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust and another record of Western songs that I've been working on. So it was really a great geographical change, a place to find new stories. But I also took ten years and I learned how to live, which I didn't know how to do. Thirty-five years old, and I didn't have a clue about it. I learned how to live, and I found the joy in those things.

What did you learn?
I guess life outside of work. This is a very satisfying work life, but it's a part of your overall life. How do you have relationships? How do you commit to things that are forever? How do you break all your old habits, or some of them?

If you can share some secrets, you can save me a lot of money in therapy.
I spent a lot of money there myself, and I learned a lot. I had to work on it the way that I had to work on playing the guitar when I first started — many, many hours and a lot of intense devotion. I realized that some people may come to that naturally, but I was somebody that was going to have to learn it, because all my instincts were wrong. All my instincts drove me away from things.

Sometimes you're running in a different direction because you don't know how to do things differently than what you've seen growing up.
Yeah, that's it. So you realize you've got to make your own map, and in so doing, you honor your parents by taking the good things they gave you and carrying them forth, and taking burdens and weights and putting them down so your children don't have to run with them. But that break was really extreme for me, and Patti was, and has been, patient beyond patient. I couldn't get up in the morning, I couldn't go to bed at night. The basic things that set the clock. The kids were young — it was "It's six-thirty now." That took about four or five years to figure out.

Was that from having to unlearn the rhythm on the road?
It goes back to my childhood. I had a weird upbringing where I was up for all hours at night when I was, like, six years old. We had a very eccentric household. My clock got thrown off when I was really young. Five and six, I was up until 3 a.m. I'm sure it's no coincidence I ended up a musician, so I could be up to 3 a.m., just like I was. When your own kids come along, I said, "Good, you've got to change that." So many basic things. So I spent a lot of that time learning how to live. I suppose Patti would say I've reached a tolerable level of competency.

What brought you back to New Jersey?
I grew up around a very big extended family. I think Patti and I have maybe seventy family members, just in this area, and there's a lot of Italians and also an Irish side. At some point, when the children got to school age, we decided we wanted that for the kids. We were always here half the year anyway, even then. So when we came back, my kids grew up around my uncle that hunts, the one that owns the dry-cleaning business Ð people who do all different kinds of work and bring all kinds of things to them. It took away the weirdness of my job, and it allowed them to look other places for all different kinds of role models. That was important. Then we came back, and I re-found the freedom in some of my early narrative, and that includes here in this building and this town and in my band. I feel the freest I've ever felt in my life creatively. I feel like I've picked up a thread that I never let go of but just let sit for a while. And I feel like we're very on it right now. This is going to be the best E Street Band somebody's ever seen. You may have a favorite part of my work, you may have a favorite show, but if you're a young kid and your brother or your dad saw us, and you come and see us now, you can say, "I saw them when they were at their best." I like that. I like the fact that all my guys are out there and that they're all alive. I like that a lot. It could have gone many other ways. There were struggles, the same type of troubles that many other bands have, but people took care of one another, and everybody's there. I can't tell you the joy of standing next to those same people.

Some of whom have been with you for more than three decades.
I met Steve [Van Zandt] when I was sixteen. Now I'm fifty-eight. So that's more than forty years. It's an amazing thing to be up there with your best friends and your wife. Your whole world's up there. I think for a lot of our fans, part of the thing is when the world's falling apart, we're not. That's why people come to us. There was always a sense of stability and continuity and connection.

It sounds like something you've been able to provide for both your families — your family onstage and your kids.
You've got to have the whole picture at this point. You need the fullness of life. Without that, it's an exercise. You don't want the things that you're writing and singing about to remain an abstraction to yourself. I always liked the scene at the end of The Searchers: John Wayne brings the girl back home, but he can't enter the house himself. Very tragic. That was always really resonant for me. I grew up with a lot of that, people not being able to get in, and that was always my natural state. I think that because I had a bit of a chaotic heart myself, I always was in search of that stability. It's in "Leah," on Devils & Dust: "I walk this road with a hammer and a fiery lantern/With this hand I've built, and with this I've burned." I think everybody feels those two things. It's just how you balance them. There's a lot of fire in the burning, but it don't do you any good if you ain't got the hammer for the building.