Quotes & Sayings About Springsteen

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records, but if you were a kid, you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful. — Bruce Springsteen

For me, President Obama is our best choice because he has a vision of the United States as a place where we are all in this together. — Bruce Springsteen

[on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski. — Adam Sweeting

Music doesn't tell you where to go. It says, go find your own place. That's what it told me. — Bruce Springsteen

So I spoke to my old friend Bruce and told him I was feeling it, his loss of Clarence. We talked for quite a while, and there is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point, except to say that two old friends spoke to each other about their music, their muses, their partners in crime, their proof, their friendship, their souls and their lives. Ben Keith was my Clarence Clemons. Clarence Clemons was Bruce's Ben Keith. When he died last year it touched me to the core. I don't want to ever think of any one else playing his parts or occupying his space. No one could. I can't do those songs again unless it's solo. So I told Bruce, "Waylon once looked at me and said, 'There's very few of us left.'" He liked that. I told him when he looked to his right I would be there. That's enough. I'm not talking about that anymore. — Neil Young

Sherrif when the man pulls that switch, Sir
And snaps my poor head back,
You make sure my pretty baby
Is sittin' right there on my lap. — Bruce Springsteen

It's a fairytale so tragic there's no prince to break the spell. I don't believe in magic, but for you I will — Bruce Springsteen

My personal style depends on what I'm doing or where I am. I wear a lot of jeans and jean shorts and t-shirts, and I love leather jackets; it's pretty relaxed. — Jessica Springsteen

Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free? If you've ever seen a one trick pony then you've seen me Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making his way down the street? If you've ever seen a one-legged dog then you've seen me. — Bruce Springsteen

Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk. — Bruce Springsteen

We're gonna play some pool, skip some school, act real cool, stay out all night, it's gonna be alright. — Bruce Springsteen

I spot a little stranger standing across the room, my brain takes a vacation just to give my heart more room. — Bruce Springsteen

Bob Dylan and John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, these are soul guys. Bruce Springsteen might not sing like Otis Redding, but he sings with white soul. He's singing and he's writing songs from the bottom of his gut. — Robin Thicke

I admire Bruce Springsteen because he's a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The name 'Boss' started with people that worked for me ... It was not meant like Boss, capital B, it was meant like 'Boss, where's my dough this week?' And it was sort of just a term among friends. I never really liked it. — Bruce Springsteen

We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie; Home's a long, long way from us. I feel a dirty wind blowing; Devils and dust. — Bruce Springsteen

I grew up with a very big extended family, with a lot of aunts. We had about five or six houses on one street. — Bruce Springsteen

Somewhere along the way, the idea, which I think was initially to get some fair transaction between people, went out the window. And what came in was, the most you can get and the least you can give. That's why cars are the way they are nowadays. It's just an erosion of all the things that were true and right about the original idea. — Bruce Springsteen

No money shots! No shifting, grinding, joyfully thrusting crotch shots. It didn't matter. It was all there in his eyes, his face, the face of a Saturday night jukebox Dionysus, the shimmying eyebrows and rocking band. — Bruce Springsteen

Let there be sunshine, let there be rain, let the broken hearted love again. — Bruce Springsteen

I can feel the love I'm a part of surrounding me and flowing through me; I'm near home and I'm standing hand in hand with those I love, past and present, in the sun, on the outskirts of something that feels almost like... being free. — Bruce Springsteen

For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, were not really in it, are we? — John Mellencamp

I want to spit in the face of these badlands. — Bruce Springsteen

The best music ... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. — Bruce Springsteen

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier. — Bruce Springsteen

If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know. — Bruce Springsteen

In a restless heart the seed of betrayal lay. — Bruce Springsteen

The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah's life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being.
from short story ELIJAH'S SKIN — Aberjhani

cause down the shore everything's all right — Bruce Springsteen

The criminal ineptitude makes you furious. — Bruce Springsteen

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. — Bruce Springsteen

To me, my peers are Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger. I'm not talking age-wise, but in terms of careers. Madonna. Those are my peers. And I'm okay with that. — LL Cool J

Only now, on the other side of his success, Bruce had come to understand what time and experience can do to the most closely held dreams. The point in your late twenties when you're grown up enough to realize that 'life is no longer wide open'. — Peter Ames Carlin

I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in. — Bruce Springsteen

If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with. — Bruce Springsteen

I was signed to a record label at the same time as my friend Elliot Murphy, who makes great records to this day. — Bruce Springsteen

From the beginning, I imagined I would have a long work life. — Bruce Springsteen

We could survive as musicians only on our little sliver of the East Coast. We had to get back. — Bruce Springsteen

To stand in the pit, shoulder to shoulder, sweating and singing with people you hardly know is an amazing thing. "I'm such a bad singer that I hardly sing around my own home but I have no trouble screeching at the top of my lungs in a huge stadium. In that sense a Springsteen concert is kind of a religious thing. Everyone knows what and when to sing, when to raise their arms, to pogo-dance, when to be silent and respectful. The music of course also makes you feel connected to something 'higher'. — Greg Lewis

I'm younger than Rod Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, but I'm still getting up there in age. — Eddie Money

Needless to say, the song ["Hallelujah"] was now a climax in every show [of the 2009 Leonard Cohen tour], received like holy scripture. It belonged in a category with seeing Bob Dylan sing "Like a Rolling Stone" or watching Bruce Springsteen perform "Born to Run" - it was an event that people simply wanted to witness, to say they had seen. It took on a power that had to do with the song's history first, its feeling second, and its details hardly at all. Every performance carried with it a sense of where this song had been, who had sung it,where and how every listener had first encountered it; it had reached a place where it was something to be experienced, rather than listened to. — Alan Light

You can't save the world with music. But I can try. I have the same job as Bruce Springsteen. I have to go as far as I can with it. — Brandon Flowers

I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio. — Bruce Springsteen

Nobody went out to pasture, and a lot of people are doing their best work. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Sting are at the top of their game. I mean, Tony Bennett is the coolest guy I ever met! We have to figure out how to break out of this age ghetto. — Bonnie Raitt

We said we'd walk together baby come what may.That come the twilight should we lose our way.If as we're walkin a hand should slip free,I'll wait for you
And should I fall behind,Wait for me.
— Bruce Springsteen

I love the intimate, single spotlight, troubadour-y quiet, delicate moments. But I also love Springsteen and screaming and shouting. — James Bay

You make your music, then you try to find whatever audience is out there for it. — Bruce Springsteen

At Bob Dylan's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Bruce Springsteen described hearing Dylan's music for the very first time. Springsteen was fifteen, he said, riding in the car with his mother, idly listening to the radio, when "Like a Rolling Stone" came on. It was as though, Springsteen recalled, "somebody took his boot and kicked open the door to your mind." His mother's verdict: "That man can't sing." Mrs. Springsteen's response reminds us that we don't all react the same way to the same experience - and her son's reminds us that life holds moments when our perspective dramatically shifts, when our assumptions are deeply challenged, when we see new possibilities or sense for the first time that whatever has been holding us back from freedom or creativity or new ventures might actually be overcome. There — Sharon Salzberg

I had a long talk with Bruce Springsteen on a rooftop during the Vote for Change tour (in 2004). And it boiled down to this: That guy you used to be, he's still in the car. He'll always be in the car. Just don't let him drive. He might be shouting out directions. But whatever you do, don't let him get behind the wheel. — Eddie Vedder

The future is now. Roll up your sleeves and let your passion flow. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting. — Bruce Springsteen

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along. — Bruce Springsteen

Outside the street's on fire In a real death waltz Between what's flesh and fantasy And the poets down here Don't write nothin at all They just stand back and let it all be And in the quick of the night They reach for their moment And try to make an honest stand But they wind up wounded Not even dead Tonight in Jungle Land. - Bruce Springsteen — Stephen King

You can't start a fire
Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancing in the dark — Bruce Springsteen

I came up in a time when Springsteen, the Stones, Dylan, and the Beatles were still dominant. For every magazine cover with a new band, there were five covers with one of those guys. — Beck

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days. — Bruce Springsteen

Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those."
"Jesus?"
"No, Bruce Springsteen. — Cecelia Ahern

I wanted to be a voice that reflected experience and the world I lived in. So I knew in 1972 that to do this I would need to write very well and more individually than I had ever written before. — Bruce Springsteen

The star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention. — Bruce Springsteen

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. — Bruce Springsteen

I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart
Will never again, sir, tear us from each other's hearts. — Bruce Springsteen

I never did use earphones until into the Eighties or Nineties. I don't like to use earphones. I've never heard anybody sing with earphones effectively. They just give you a false sense of security. A lot of us don't need earphones. I don't think Springsteen or Mick do. But other people more or less have given in. But they ought not to. They don't need to. Especially if they have a good band. — Bob Dylan

When I die throw my body in the back and drive me to the junk yard in my Cadillac. — Bruce Springsteen

Well, I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. — Nick Hornby

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad. — Bruce Springsteen

I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me. — Bruce Springsteen

Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man, and i believe in a promised land. — Bruce Springsteen

It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine. — Bruce Springsteen

We struggled together and sometimes with one another. We took care of one another. In the end, we kept faith in each other. — Bruce Springsteen

Someone made the mistake of telling me the safest place in a lightning storm was in a car because of the grounding of the rubber tires. After that, at the first sound of thunder, I caterwauled until my parents would take me in the car until the storm subsided. I then proceeded to write about cars for the rest of my life. — Bruce Springsteen

I got Mary pregnant and man that's all she wrote. And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a factory coat. — Bruce Springsteen

I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them. — Clive Davis

'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs. — Bruce Springsteen

Hey, little dolly with the blue jeans on, I want to ramrod with you, honey, 'til half past dawn. — Bruce Springsteen

My friends are Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, and we're singing about mortality, getting older. It's an interesting time. — Sting

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless. — Bruce Springsteen

Your legs were heaven, your breasts were the alter, your body was the holy land. — Bruce Springsteen

This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for. — Bruce Springsteen

Well let there be sunlight, let there be rain Let the brokenhearted love again Sherry, we can run with our arms open before the tide. — Bruce Springsteen

James Ralston, my guitar player, has performed with Tina Turner for about 22 years. Jim Hanson on bass has played with Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell and Bruce Springsteen, and they're fantastic musicians and amazing singers they get a really cool vocal sound together. — Vonda Shepard

Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning. — Bruce Springsteen

If you're an artist, you try to keep an ear to the ground and an ear to your heart. — Bruce Springsteen

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. — Bruce Springsteen

It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company. — Bruce Springsteen

There's a beauty in work and I love it, all different kinds of work. That's what I consider it. Rock is my job, and that's my work. And I work my ass off, you know. — Bruce Springsteen

For one kiss, darling, I swear everything I would give. Cause you're a walking, talking reason to live. — Bruce Springsteen

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession. — Bruce Springsteen

I was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles. — Bruce Springsteen

I love the freedom you feel on horseback, and enjoy the discipline of competition. — Jessica Springsteen

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny. — Bruce Springsteen

Back 20 years ago, I was recording with Bruce Springsteen, and his producer called me and said I had to be in the studio the next day to finish the sessions, and I couldn't. I had to be in court, in California. All this took like 10 years out of my life. — Ronnie Spector

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down That ain't got the faith to stand its ground Blow away the dreams that tear you apart Blow away the dreams that break your heart Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted. — Bruce Springsteen

The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power. — Bruce Springsteen

So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes, is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise? — Bruce Springsteen

I understand that it's the music that keeps me alive ... That's my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses - that's not the American dream. That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them - if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself - then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away. — Bruce Springsteen

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. — Bruce Springsteen

We're here to re-dedicate you to The Power, The Passion, The Mystery, and The Ministry of Rock and Roll. — Bruce Springsteen

Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why. — Bruce Springsteen

Nirvana's amazing, but they're just never going to find another one, there's no artist development anymore, you're never going to have a U2, you're never going to have a Bruce Springsteen, those guys didn't make it off of their first single and real artists probably won't make it off of their first singles. — Richard Patrick

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business. — Bruce Springsteen

Somehow all you ever need's never really quite enough. — Bruce Springsteen