THUNDER ROAD vs. BORN TO RUN

FUCK YOU THIS IS HARD

I <3 them both beyond words, but I'll vote Born to Run just because the one time I saw Bruce and band live, the performance of that track sort of took my breath away (as it probably does every time they play it).

straight up i go with born to run

but oh man live piano version makes thunder road get all dimensional

yeah the v that opens Live 75-85 is the greatest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTStMImOtuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb1bf-HpyD0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuThNgl3YA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYPSZiE0OAs

superchunk used to cover born to run, so i guess ned votes thunder road

born to run is like the essence of rock and roll distilled into four and a half minutes. thunder road is good, but that guitar lick right after 'i got this guitar and i learned how to make it talk' is kinda lame

this poll makes sense; these songs are opposites. born to run romantic, thunder road defeated. voting born to run.

love both but prefer "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" to either tbh

born to run is kind of hard for me to actually hear anymore because it's like listening to an idea or an image of a song but in theory i love it a lot. "tramps like us" still kills.

born to run lyrics are his best imo

this poll makes sense; these songs are opposites. born to run romantic, thunder road defeated.

Really? To me they scan like pretty much the same song: dude tryin to get Mary/Wendy to come out and jump in his car/on his bike, cuz life's short, you gotta get out while you're young, this town rips the bones from yer back, it's a town full of losers and he's pulling out of here to win.

Easy to overlook: how sexy and flirty they both are, there's magic in the night, strap your hands cross my engines. They're both big come-ons, just like "Rosalita."

Anyway, I prefer "Thunder Road," but love em both, because of and despite their ridiculousness.

i just feel like "thunder road" is the speaker of "born to run," but older and less hopeful. also the speaker of "born to run" would never say, "you ain't a beauty but hey you're all right" to his beloved; he's way too romantic for that. they're not the only springsteen songs that work that way, obvs. "opposite" was probably the wrong way to put it, but like romanticism v. disappointed romanticism.

romantic romantic romantic

i made my sister start listening to bruce this year and "born to run" was the first song she really hooked onto, and she was like, "bruce springsteen is so romantical!" and it was sort of cute, but it was also like have you been living under a rock?

TR is my favorite song ever, BTR only like #12

OH GOD

They are both romantic obv ("Backstreets" is the defeatist one), but "Born To Run" feels desperately hopeful while "Thunder Road" seems kind of wizened and accepting of "being older and less hopeful" ("you ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right"). Lyrically I think "Thunder Road" is superior, BTR's "velvet rims/engines" has always been a little goofy to me, while "The screen door slams/Mary's dress waves" is both perfect poetic image and the exact kind of opening phrase you want when you begin a short story.

I love them both but "Born To Run" always seems to cross into the cartoony side of melodrama while "Thunder Road" seems to skirt that line better. And yeah, the piano version!

yeah the opening lines of "thunder road" are really beautiful. cartoony melodrama is the whole point of "born to run" though and if you don't like melodrama why are you listening to bruce imo.

half of his songs are basically west side story

we should do DANCING IN THE DARK v. TOUGHER THAN THE REST next i will seriously have a nervous breakdown trying to decide

i guess they're on different albums but whatever

I mean yeah of course but there are times when it's like "haha OH BRUCE" and other times it's "YES I FEEL THAT I AM 16 AGAIN"

feel like Sondheim would do a great/appropriate musical out of "The River"

gonna listen to "Backstreets" and weep into my beer l8r

guys can we do a bruce springsteen tracks poll yes i am just trying to recreate the magic of the paul simes poll but i think it could be fun

he's already in the list pipeline if that's what you mean

Thunder Road for me. Mainly for the aforementioned Live 75-85 take, but really any live version. Don't like "Born To Run" much in any setting.

i'm confused at the notion of someone liking one but not the other

he's already in the list pipeline if that's what you mean

― NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land (zachlyon), Monday, August 13, 2012 12:16 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yay!

"Born to Run" as it is closer to Bat out of Hell (which I pull out way more often)

i'm confused at the notion of someone liking one but not the other

I'm not sure exactly why I like one but not the other; I think it's that BTR tips the scale a little too far toward Meat Loaf (which makes me the anti-Simon H). Even as I slowly warm to Born To Run the album, there has been no change in my dislike of the track itself.

They are both romantic obv ("Backstreets" is the defeatist one), but "Born To Run" feels desperately hopeful while "Thunder Road" seems kind of wizened and accepting of "being older and less hopeful" ("you ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right")

romanticism vs. pick up artist-style negging

Gotta go with BTR cause I'm a stan for balls-out production, especially the wall o' sound.

FUCK YOU THIS IS HARD

― Johnny Fever, Sunday, August 12, 2012 10:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love both but whatever BTR all the way.

When I was 17 and very gullible (as if I'm less so now) my then boyfriend had me believing that BTR was the New Jersey state song which makes no sense but NJ really loves Bruce and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about so I believed him. For, like, a year.

The Frankie Goes to Hollywood vid of them doing B2R is one of my favorite things in the whole world.

I'm From New Jersey
Written & Music by Red Mascara

Verse (Ad lib)
I know of a state that's a perfect playland with white sandy beaches by the sea;
With fun-filled mountains, lakes and parks, and folks with hospitality;
With historic towns where battles were fought, and presidents have made their home;
It's called New Jersey, and I toast and tout it wherever I may roam. 'Cause . . .

First Chorus
I'M FROM NEW JERSEY and I'm proud about it, I love the Garden State.
I'M FROM NEW JERSEY and I want to shout it, I think it's simply great.
All of the other states throughout the nation may mean a lot to some;
But I wouldn't want another, Jersey is like no other, I'm glad that's where I'm from.

Second Chorus
If you want glamour, try Atlantic City or Wildwood by the sea;
Then there is Trenton, Princeton, and Fort Monmouth, they all made history.
Each little town has got that certain something, from High Point to Cape May;
And some place like Mantoloking, Phillipsburg, or Hoboken will steal your heart away.

New Jersey's Unofficial State Song "I'm From New Jersey," passed both Legislative Houses in 1972. However it was not signed into law by the Governor. It remains popular statewide and on the Web.
Copyright © 1961, 1989 By Red Mascara-All Rights Reserved

not as cool.

Governor otm

Yeah, I know it's "I'm from NJ" because obv I've since looked it up and my God what a dumb song.

also lol @ Wildwood being glamorous.

http://www.wildwoodsnj.com/images/homeImages/beach-coasters.jpg

"On June 12, 1979, 'Born to Run' was named New Jersey's "Unofficial Youth Rock Anthem" by the New Jersey State Legislature." Can't find the bill but there's that.

lol waht?! I don't think he knew that. Not gonna tell him.

Thunder Road without a doubt.

Thunder Road. TR draws you into the song and story. You have listen closely to put the pieces together. BTR just hits you over the head. Not that there's anything wrong with it but it's not what I reach for.

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

I found a few early "Born to Run" cuts from '74. Here's a '74 "Jungleland"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICJr6lSGS3c

And then there's this:

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

I think they all feature Carter, but I could be wrong

I’m not gonna take the bait again!

Scott Miller had some interesting things to say about "Thunder Road":

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this song. For the most part, I think the album is overrated; there's just not enough there there in the composition. "Thunder Road" is the one that stretches out the most, and it's the one I like the most, but from the first sung lyric it stays a little aimless. The final always gives me chills, and makes the road straighten behind it as it were- but I'm not sure I'm proud of that reaction. Really the singer is feeding this poor girl such a banquet of self-mythologizing nonsense as to make one weep. The message is: "Trade in these wings on some wheels...It's a town full of losers/I'm pulling out of here to win." Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity are for suckers; it's all about cobbling together an elitist worldview from whole cloth and putting it over for material advantage. So, this is good wild-oatsy stuff, but I'll say it again: if you want world-class lyrics with a reasonable ethical grounding, go try that joke of a flitty chimera David Bowie.

For me, I'd be satisfied with this album if it were a single of "Night" b/w "Meeting Across the River". Gets straight to the point.

Half of rock is singers feeding self-mythologizing nonsense to poor girls. Kind of a dumb take.

Maybe Bruce didn't flirt with fascist iconography enough for Scott Miller.

"go try" this other guy who sucks? what lol

Did we ever poll the songs on Born to Run?

I don't think so!

Really the singer is feeding this poor girl such a banquet of self-mythologizing nonsense as to make one weep. The message is: "Trade in these wings on some wheels...It's a town full of losers/I'm pulling out of here to win." Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity are for suckers

I suppose this is a helpful warning for anyone who had "Thunder Road" confused with Middlemarch.

Supposedly the earliest available performance of BtR:

That sounds like it might be Carter, based on the bit at 2:45 -- Weinberg sometimes attempted it, but soon gave up. Doesn't sound like Max.

And that's DEFINITELY Carter on the '74 "Jungleland."

Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity

we should do a pox songs about quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity

Miller's got an unconventional take on Springsteen; the other two songs he writes about in his book are "Candy's Room" and "Girls in Their Summer Clothes", probably not general top three fan favourites.

*raises hand*

Meaning I’m a huge fan of “Candy’s Room.”

I’m not minding Scott Miller’s contrarian take tbh.

"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