Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteenis an American musician, singer, songwriter, and humanitarian. He is best known for his work with his E Street Band. Nicknamed "The Boss", Springsteen is widely known for his brand of poetic lyrics, Americana, working class and sometimes political sentiments centered on his native New Jersey, his distinctive voice and his lengthy and energetic stage performances, with concerts from the 1970s to the present decade running over three hours in length...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth23 September 1949
CityLong Beach, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I'm just tired and bored with myself.
My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city's in ruins, my city's in ruins.
Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy.
Sometimes, at night you could hear the whole damn city crying.
Got a wife and kid in Baltimore Jack, I went out for a ride and I never went back. Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.
There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.
I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.
If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they're beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance.
In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.
My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.
No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work.
Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience.
Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.