I wanted to collide with the times and create a voice that had musical, social and cultural impact. - Bruce Springsteen

The endorphin high of birth will fade, but its trace remains with you forever, its fingerprints indelible proof of love’s presence and daily grandeur. You have offered up your prayer. You have vowed service to a new world and laid a bedrock of earthly faith. You have chosen your sword, your shield, and where you will fall. Whatever the morrow brings, these things, these people, will be with you always. The power of choice, of a life, a lover, a place to stand, will be there to be called upon and make fresh sense of your tangled history. More important, it will also be there when you waver, when you’re lost, providing you with the elements of a new compass, encased within your heart. From here on, the hard gravitational pull of the past will have a formidable challenger: your current life. Together, Patti and I’d made one and one equal three. That’s rock ’n’ roll.

...The beat of her heart, the slow burning away...of the bitter fires of the devil's arcade.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream. At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines. Sprung from cages on Highway 9, Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected And steppin' out over the line. Baby this town rips the bones from your back. It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We gotta get out while we're young, 'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.