Bruce Springsteen knew ‘Born In The USA’ was going to be a hit.
The Boss says he knew his best-known song had something special about it, but he could never have imagined where it took his career.
Recalling working on the 1984 album of the same name and its 1982 predecessor ‘Nebraska’, he told MOJO magazine: “I mean, the bottom line is I’ve had to deal with the fact that those albums are both the signs of my creative capacity and my creative life. Which has caused me some consternation over the years. Like, whoa, I feel really comfortable in here, but then I want to go out there too.
“That part of my work life is just something that I got used to. As soon as we recorded [the song] ‘Born In The USA’, I knew the record was going to be some kind of a hit. It just sounded like one. I didn’t know it was going to do what it did. But I felt sure it was going to be something like what we experienced with ‘The River’, maybe a little more. It seemed like such an iconic piece of music. Cut it in two or three takes. But I spent much more time worrying over the ‘Born In The USA’ album than I did over ‘Nebraska’. ‘Nebraska’ | never gave a second thought as to whether it was what I wanted.”
The 73-year-old rock legend says that some albums are just meant to be just him in “solitary” and not be “channelled” by his E Street Band.
He explained: “There are songs that shouldn’t be channelled through the group. It’s just not their nature. The kind of American character that I’m interested in is very often solitary. That’s how those records have to be made. That’s just … a very different kind of record. A record like ‘Letter To You’ [featuring his backing band] is, you know, that’s a communal album. It’s about the kind of community built around friendships and life experiences you’ve had within a group of people. Western Stars or Devils Dust, those kinds of records I made on my own, it really had to be that way.”