THUNDER ROAD vs. BORN TO RUN

Easily "Born to Run" for me. There was a period during the reunion tour when Bruce seemed visibly bored (or as bored as he ever lets himself look) singing "Thunder Road," all but happy to cede it to the sing-alongers, but "Born to Run" was never less than fully engaged and exultant.

However, I do like listening to "Thunder Road" (still a great song!) as the precursor to its intended (though never fully realized) sequel "The Promise."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

The one that mentions Roy Orbison

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

intersting

thunder road

great thread but the answer is "backstreets"

that's my second fav

this album tho my god

Man "Thunder Road" for sure

Born to Run is cool but there aren't many songs that put you directly into the intensity of a scene/moment like Thunder Road.

TBH I have some trouble stomaching his singing and the band arrangement on both. What's with the constant piano tinkering in Bruce songs?

http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/every-bruce-springsteen-song-ranked.html

Results of this poll on the money, right down to the closeness.

Neat list of songs, Lift Me Up is too low, for the wrong reasons, but at least elsewhere the writer acknowledges failures of ambition, that even many of his lesser songs are worth a listen.

I can't understand why she dislikes synths.

voted Jungleland

Just listening to some tracks after a few years of no Springsteen and thinking that the piano player Roy Bittan most reminds me of the most is .... Paul Griffin. Something about that busy, catchy, gospel approach.

Ah, in fact just found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4XXv_gTHo

Continued listening only strengthens this association.

Was this ever sorted? Oh I see,

Like them both but "Thunder Road" just seems a little more specific and cinematic whereas "Born to Run" is a wee bit cartoonish, as somebody said upthread.

If by cartoonish you mean larger than life. "Born to Run" transcends so hard that calling it a song almost seems reductive.

No worries. It's just so famous hard to sometimes transcend that larger than life print the legend factor. But I will keep listening again with open ears on the open road because tramps like us, baby.

Ran up the block to get brunch and now BTR is playing over the sound system. Last time I heard it here was when I walking by the night AOC won. Her opponent Joe Crowley had rented out the place for his victory party but then ended up played “Born to Run” with his band as part of his concession. I ran into Outlaw Country Jeremy and his wife Laura outside as they were going in to offer condolences. I was kind of shocked when I looked up from my phone to see them since I had them in the front of my mind because I was at that instance reading an article by a mutual acquaintance in the neighborhood. I had come across this article whilst looking up information on the song “Bessie the Heifer” sung by Wayne Newton to an array of barnyard animals on an episode of The Lucy Show.
https://www.cmt.com/news/2s5nce/oxford-american-excerpt-felice-and-boudleaux-bryant

Imagine James Redd off to the left with his face pressed to the glass.

Now @JoeCrowleyNY is playing guitar. He dedicated the first song to @Ocasio2018 — “Born to Run”
@ pic.twitter.com/U3sx6mth90

— J. David Goodman (@jdavidgoodman) June 27, 2018

This is hard! Instinctively want to say Thunder Road because it's perfect, it gives me chills, it's a great and strange song that you can also recite like a poem. I feel like I could sit someone down who doesn't typically like Bruce and make them listen to it and they would at the very least respect it because it is Literature with a capital L.

BtR is a very different kind of masterpiece. It's a masterpiece of rock and roll, of trying too hard, of romanticism tipping all the way into camp. It's Bruce riding a motorcycle full speed along a narrow cliff path of Awesome, with a yawning abyss of Bad just inches away. It's not really my sort of song, I rarely seek it out, and yet every time I hear it, the ridiculous energy of it carries me along and I end up thinking "fuck yeah!" Whereas Thunder Road, perfect though it is, is not a song I can hear over and over again; the impact of that last line tends to wear off with familiarity. BtR never loses its impact.

So yeah, no idea.

Just passed by the restaurant I had brunch at and talked to one of the owners. The plot thickens...

"Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair" is one of the most magical moments . . . well, ever.

^OTM

...the owner told me that he in fact put BTR on that playlist ("because I wouldn't normally play that song") in honor of that incident.

Ran up the block to get brunch and now BTR is playing over the sound system. Last time I heard it here was when I walking by the night AOC won. Her opponent Joe Crowley had rented out the place for his victory party but then ended up played “Born to Run” with his band as part of his concession. I ran into Outlaw Country Jeremy and his wife Laura outside as they were going in to offer condolences. I was kind of shocked when I looked up from my phone to see them since I had them in the front of my mind because I was at that instance reading an article by a mutual acquaintance in the neighborhood. I had come across this article whilst looking up information on the song “Bessie the Heifer” sung by Wayne Newton to an array of barnyard animals on an episode of The Lucy Show.
https://www.cmt.com/news/2s5nce/oxford-american-excerpt-felice-and-boudleaux-bryant

This sounds like the plot of a new Bruce song if he was still writing in his verbose early '70s style.

Ha, yes, exactly! This story was all jumbled up in my mind until I was finally able to channel Bruce himself to try to tell it.

"Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair" is one of the most magical moments . . . well, ever.

This is one of those posts very much in character, but Kipling liked to put the line "What else could I have done?" at key moments in his stories because he called it "the plinth of all structures." So it always pleases me that in TR "What else can we do now?" marks the moment where the band surges in and the whole song just takes off, like this line is Bruce finding solid ground from which to launch himself into space.

There was a period during the reunion tour when Bruce seemed visibly bored (or as bored as he ever lets himself look) singing "Thunder Road," all but happy to cede it to the sing-alongers, but "Born to Run" was never less than fully engaged and exultant.

Looking at this Josh in Chicago post from ten years ago, I wonder if Thunder Road needs Bruce less than Born to Run does? Like, Thunder Road works great as a song, it works great on Born to Run, but it also works if you're reading it on the page, or - like I did half an hour ago - standing in your kitchen giving a dramatic recitation of it to your scrambled eggs. It's not that the impact of it is all in the lyrics - it's not a poem, it's a song - but it has this kind of doubled effect where everything the music and singing do, the lyrics also do, in parallel. So maybe there's a slight feeling of "This song will do just fine without me" with Thunder Road, whereas BTR is more of a feedback loop of Bruce pouring energy into the song and the song giving energy back to Bruce?

Narratively, "Thunder Road" is kind of like the perfect start of something great. A book, a story, a movie, and of course an album (I think it's in the documentary how most of the songs on the eecord start with cinematic scene-setting piano preambles). But "Born to Run" is pure climax.

I think of it almost as the opposite: Born to Run feels like pure beginning to me; there's a "now," that we start out in, but everything in the song is pure forward momentum. Whereas Thunder Road has got all this weight of past tries and failures behind it; it's Bruce summoning up the ghosts of the past so that he can casually sweep them all away at the end and start fresh. An ending and a beginning at the same time.

Loving everybody's posts on this thread.

Born to Run is the closest anyone else got to the "when you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose" feeling of Like a Rolling Stone.

One thing BTR has that TR doesn’t is Ernest “Boom” Carter.

Did we ever poll the songs on Born to Run?

otmfm re: Ernest “Boom” Carter. Are there any boots of shows with him in the band?

I think this one features him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axzlT92TgwE

Sounds like him, thanks!

And OMG at Richard Neer and the disgraced Dave Herman. The latter sounds a lot more like Lou Reed when talking than I remembered.

This image is bad enough.

(Don’t worry it’s SFW, just didn’t want to have to look at it in the thread)

I think this one features him:

📹

Ha, whoops, yeah, he also played at the Bottom Line a year earlier, August 1974. There must be recordings out there.

Supposedly the earliest available performance of BtR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJEmPVFAvM8

"Candy's Room" is one of those songs even people I know that don't like Springsteen like. He doesn't have many songs like it.

The funny thing is that blurb is from a playlist of the best songs of 1975 (fitted between "Better Off Dead" by Elton John and "Poker" by Electric Light Orchestra)! Although occasionally he'll include a song less out of musical excellence than to make a point about the historical context.

"Better Off Dead" from Captain Fantastic? Haven't thought about that one in ages.

Thunder Road come on

You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright