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… - Bruce Springsteen

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

Then I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote. And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat. We went down to the courthouse and the judge put it all to rest. No wedding day smiles no walk down the aisle, No flowers no wedding dress.<p>That night we went down to the river. And into the river we'd dive. Oh down to the river we did ride.

The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice — not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children — but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.