Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen grew up in an average middle-class family; his mother, Adele, was a secretary, and his father, Douglas, was a bus driver.

He started playing guitar in high school and, at 14, formed his own band, The Castiles.

Influenced by Elvis Presley, Springsteen moved to New York City to try to break into the folk music scene, but failure forced him back across the river to New Jersey.

Despite a particularly unhappy relationship with his record company, Bruce Springsteen’s debut album Greetings From Asbury Park was released in 1973.

CBS had perceived him as a folkie, solo performer – “the new Bob Dylan” – but the recordings contradicted this notion with a horn section and girl backing singers. A somewhat confused marketing campaign reflected this misunderstanding, and initially, the record sold a mere 25,000 copies. The standout track was Blinded By The Light, which Manfred Mann covered and took to the top of the US charts in 1976.

Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle, also suffered poor sales although it received excellent reviews from American music critics.

Gone was the Dylan-esque, guitar-toting troubadour; in his place stood someone with a far grander musical vision. Despite a massive promotional push from CBS, Springsteen’s career still suffered because of confusion over his supposed status as a folkie.

The confusion was resolved in 1975 when Jon Landau took over as unofficial manager and co-producer of ongoing recording sessions.

Landau scotched CBS’s notion of promoting Bruce as a folk singer and engaged Steve Van Zandt to reintroduce a hard edge to the music. Five months on, the result was Born To Run and Springsteen’s rebirth as The Boss.

The album went almost immediately to #3 in the US, and his previous albums charted also for the first time.

Born To Run established Springsteen so firmly as a star that his career survived litigation from record producer and former manager Mike Appel, with whom Springsteen had signed an agreement on the hood of a car in a dark parking lot.

The agreement was sufficient, though, to prevent Springsteen from releasing another LP until 1978, which he did with Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Musically, Darkness… was a much more subdued affair than Born to Run, with the angst tempered with romance, particularly for the road – many songs involve driving, either for escape, for thrills or both.

The River (1980) catapulted Springsteen to international fame, while on 1982’s Nebraska he ditched the E Street Band and returned to his acoustic guitar, harmonica and trademark gravelly voice. The whole album was recorded on a 4-track at his home in New Jersey.

Springsteen’s seventh album, Born In The USA, a collection of all-American anthems, propelled him to mega-stardom.

It started its seven-week reign at #1 just as his tour began (with Nils Lofgren brought in to replace Steve Van Zandt, who left to form his own band). Born in the USA was also the first CD pressed in the United States for commercial release.

By 1987, Springsteen was in the midst of divorce, remarriage and fatherhood, and the album Tunnel Of Love was more intimate and personal. It received excellent reviews but was the last album to do so for some time.

The jointly released albums Lucky Town and Human Touch (1992) were written off as “bland and routine”.

Taking its name from a John Steinbeck hero, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) was seen as a return to form, with Springsteen claiming the mantle of Woody Guthrie.

In 2003, he reunited with The E Street Band for The Rising and, since then, has experienced a massive commercial and creative renaissance, marked by continuous studio output, historic chart milestones, record-breaking global tours, and ventures into film and theatre.

High Hopes (2014) earned him his 11th US #1 album, and with the release of Letter to You in 2020, he became the first artist in history to achieve top-five charting albums across six consecutive decades.

His early life and the making of his 1982 album were adapted into the biographical drama Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere in August 2025.