My Life In 35 Songs, Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen

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Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

Saturday, May 30, 2009: that was the last night I ever performed on my high school stage. By that point, I’d set foot on that stage countless times: for musicals and choir concerts, for performances in front of school district administrators, for so many hours of rehearsals and practices. It got to be the kind of thing that you experience so many times you start to take it for granted. And then, suddenly, that story was over, and I was trying to wrap my head around how the place that had made me into a musician was about to be in my rearview.

“It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.”

Those were the last words I ever sang on that stage by myself. There were other words that I shared, singing in harmony with fellow classmates. But that line, the iconic sign-off of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest song, became my sign-off, at least for my musical journey at that school and, really, for my entire high school experience.

On paper, it’s an appropriate line for a big coming-of-age moment. Sequenced at the very top of 1975’s Born to Run, “Thunder Road” is the Boss’s bold, brash invitation for a girl to run away with him. “My car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk/From your front porch to my front seat,” he sings at one point. Later, as the song barrels into its final verse, Springsteen ups the stakes: this town is crawling with ghosts, and if you stay here, the promise of your youth will be spent; “Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.” So get in the car, baby, and let’s drive. Let’s drive so fast and so far that they can’t possibly follow us. Let’s get out of this town and never, ever look back.

“Thunder Road” is, to me, the most nakedly romantic song ever written – a funny thing to say about a tune that includes the not-so-sly flirtatious come-on of “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” Springsteen takes a song that starts with a slamming screen door and a summer breeze and turns it into a do-or-die love song – not just, “Hey girl, I like you a lot,” but literally “Hey girl, if we don’t run away together right now, theyare never going to let us be free of this place.”

The irony, for me, is that I didn’t much want to be free of my hometown, or my high school, or the stage I was about to leave behind forever. I don’t know if everyone else feels this way or not, but in life, I often find myself coming to the ends of things just a little before I’m ready. The end of high school was the epitome of that. I felt like I’d just finally gotten a handle on things – socially, academically, artistically – and now I was heading for the door. “Thunder Road” was one of the songs that helped me find the courage to do the one thing every young adult has to do at their coming-of-age moment: take a look at everything they know and everything they love – their families, their hometowns, their communities, their friends, their significant others, their schools, their teachers, and the status quo as they know it – and leave it behind. Ready or not, world; here I come.

Born to Run became the soundtrack of my life during those final weeks and months of high school, and I can’t think of a more serendipitous pairing of music or moment than that. This album came out in 1975 and had been sitting in my music collection for four-plus years. On Christmas Day 2004, after I unwrapped my first-ever iPod, I sorted through every CD in the house, ripping everything from my own collection, everything from my brother’s collection, and everything that interested me from my parents’ collection into my iTunes library. Born to Run was among the discs from my parents that I recognized and knew deserved a chance, but unlike other albums that I stole from them around that time – The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby from U2, for instance, or The Stranger by Billy Joel – I didn’t immediately click on to Bruce’s wavelength.

That changed around the holidays in 2008, and it happened almost completely by chance. At a family reunion in celebration of my uncle’s 60th birthday, I got to talking rock concerts with one of my cousins and he waxed poetic about his experiences seeing Springsteen. The way he talked about Bruce live was mythmaking magic: the three-hour shows, the ever-changing setlists, the stage banter, the rip-roaring talent of the band, especially Clarence Clemons on the saxophone. The next day, in the car on the way home, I pulled up Born to Run on my iPod and hit play. It changed my whole life.

That wasn’t the first time I’d listened to “Thunder Road” – not by a long shot – but it was the first time I felt like I really heard it, and I was utterly enchanted. The way the song surged forward with this kinetic energy, like a ball rolling down a hill and collecting speed with every passing second. The way the lyrics felt like this stream-of-consciousness blur, never repeating and eschewing the traditional verse-chorus structure for this wordy, wondrous, world-building poetry about summertime, young love, and escape. The way Springsteen crooned and belted and roared in turn, singing every word like he might not get to utter another sentence ever again after the song ended. The way Clemons’ reedy saxophone exploded out of the speakers as the track hit its outro.

I knew two things after those five minutes of listening to “Thunder Road”: one, Bruce Springsteen was now one of “my guys,” an artist whose work I was going to immerse myself in, learn like the back of my hand, and carry with me for the rest of my life. And two, I was going to perform “Thunder Road” at Rendezvous, my high school music department’s end-of-the-school-year pop music revue show.

Both of those premonitions came true. I spent the rest of that holiday season listening to little but Bruce – not just “Thunder Road” and Born to Run, but also the albums of his I’d never heard before: Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Nebraska, and Tunnel of Love. It wasn’t a passing fad, either. Just about every day for the rest of that school year, I pushed play on at least one Springsteen album. It didn’t hurt that Bruce had a new record coming out (Working on a Dream), or that he had a song in the Oscar conversation (“The Wrestler,” from the Darren Aronofsky film of the same name), or that he was about to play the Super Bowl halftime show. All these factors made it feel like I was getting into the Boss at the perfect time. They made Bruce feel “cool” – definitely cool enough for me to roll up to school every morning blaring cuts like “10th Avenue Freeze-Out” or “No Surrender” on my car stereo. “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school,” Bruce sang on the latter; it was maybe the most apt lyric about my life that I’d ever heard.

As spring broke throughout my hometown, Springsteen’s records felt even more appropriate. Born to Run spoke to this insatiable hunger – for motion, for escape, for dreams, for whatever was waiting around the next bend in the highway. Born in the U.S.A. was stacked with songs about nostalgia and friendship, and it felt extra poignant as my friends and I neared the moment when we’d have to split apart. Darkness on the Edge of Town had a lot of doubts and broken dreams lurking in its songs, but in tracks like “Badlands,” “Candy’s Room,” “The Promised Land,” and “Prove It All Night,” I heard tales of wild, unpredictable nights and unforgettable adventures with friends and lovers. Bruce’s records were filled to the brim with things that I either wanted to experience or was already experiencing as my days in high school dwindled, and I listened to little else throughout the spring.

And when I wasn’t listening to Springsteen songs, I was learning to play them. Every day that spring, I’d get home from school and beeline for the piano, where I was working to master “Thunder Road.” I didn’t just want to sing the song at Rendezvous; I also wanted to join the band, leading the way on the keys amidst a thrum of bass and drums and guitar and sax. I’d been playing piano since first grade, and in a lot of ways, it felt like everything I’d learned had built to this: a big, full-band song with cool piano fills that I could play and sing at the same time in an auditorium packed with friends and family. My piano teacher, a career jazz musician, was fully on board and pushed me to play with more precision, feeling, and confidence. By the time the show rolled around in late May, I felt like I’d never known a song as inside and out as I knew “Thunder Road.” To this day, when I sit down at the piano, my hands go automatically to the “Thunder Road” chord positions. The song, for me, is literal muscle memory.

Life doesn’t usually feel like the movies, but getting to take the stage to uproarious applause and put a capper on my high school experience by performing “Thunder Road” absolutely felt like the stuff of cinema. I remember, so vividly, hearing my voice echo through the auditorium on my favorite line in the song – “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night” – and feeling like it perfectly encapsulated the wild hope of being young and having your whole life ahead of you. I’d had a lot of magic nights on that stage, and here I was, celebrating the last one. It felt like a climactic moment – the kind that brings the audience to their feet shortly before the movie cuts to black. Roll credits; we’re done.

But of course, it wasn’t the finale. There’s a song I love from the band Dawes called “Stories Don’t End,” and it’s about how life doesn’t have those neat, pat conclusions the way that movies or books do. “If you’re telling a story, at some point you stop/But stories don’t end,” the song goes. “They go on and on, just someone stops listening.”

In time, a lot of people stop listening to your life story at big forks in the road, like high school graduations. You crash into other people throughout your life because of shared circumstance – shared hometowns, shared neighborhoods, shared schools – and then fling off into different orbits when you lose that common ground. That night, singing “Thunder Road,” I think I was most concerned about leaving behind the stage, and the music program that had meant the world to me. I probably should have been more concerned about losing touch with a lot of my friends. I didn’t realize, then, that a lot of us were about to click off each other’s frequencies and stop listening to one another’s life stories. Looking back, it seems obvious. But in the moment, as you near those big endings in life, you figure you’ll find a way to beat the odds: to stay connected, to stay good friends, to bridge the distance even as you travel further and further away from one another. Sometimes, you do. Usually, you don’t.

One of the saddest things about personal progress and growth, at least as we define those terms in our society, is that they often involve cutting ties with the things that matter most to you. It feels akin to cutting off your own arm at first; then you learn to live with it. And so, I left my high school experience behind, and my friends, and what we’d shared together, and I learned to live without seeing most of them more than once or twice every few years. When I listen to “Thunder Road” and Born to Run, it still takes me back to those last weeks before we all split apart, never to be all in the same room again. I’ve never quite gotten over leaving those people and things behind, and I dislike the notion that I should have. Everyone tells you that you should get past high school, but you spend so much time with those people – so many hours, across so many classes and random hangout sessions, spread out over so many days – and then are expected to just move on from them. I never wanted that, and I still don’t. A lot of those people I never see anymore, but they’re still a part of me on a soul-deep level. Music is one of the things that will always bring them back.

If you asked me to name my favorite song of all time, it would be “Thunder Road.” It’s “Thunder Road” because of those end of high school memories – fond recollections from a period that I consider to be one of the happiest of my life. But this song has also continued to travel with me in the way that a favorite song should. In November 2009, just shy of six months after I performed “Thunder Road” on the Rendezvous stage, I saw Bruce Springsteen perform it himself during part of a full-album run-through of Born to Run at a show in Detroit, Michigan. I remember being overcome with emotion as Bruce played the opening harmonica line, and as the arena crowd shouted out “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night” with riotous enthusiasm. I couldn’t recall ever having felt more joy. It took 11 months, but I’d finally made good on the promise I’d made to myself the previous Christmas, as my cousin and I had talked through legendary concert memories: I’d finally seen the Boss live.

There have been so many other joyful nights with “Thunder Road” since. My brother and I caught the E Street Band on two additional occasions – once on the Wrecking Ball tour in the spring of 2012 and once on The River tour in February 2016 – and both were unforgettable, life-affirming experiences. The night I got married, my mom and I danced to “Thunder Road” as our mother-son dance, our choreography giving way to a sing-along on the dance floor with my family and friends. We did that again when my wife and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary. And I’ve sung the song so many times at karaoke that a friend of mine recently told me she associates it more with me than with Bruce Springsteen himself. I cannot imagine a better compliment.

I started this series with an essay about “One Headlight,” the first track I ever dubbed “my favorite song.” If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I ever felt comfortable bestowing another song with that title until “Thunder Road” came along and knocked me on my ass on that cold, snowy drive in December 2008. My “favorite song” answer hasn’t wavered since, and I doubt it ever will. Until the day I die, the lyrics of “Thunder Road” will be tattooed on my heart and soul. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You can hear my 2009 cover of “Thunder Road” right here.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin'” by Jack’s Mannequin

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