AKARSH SHEKHAR
How to Write Songs like
Bruce
Springsteen?
Bruce Springsteen sold millions of
albums over his 4-plus-decade career.
Combining wonderful imagery with
lyrical commentary on blue-collar
life has earned him a spot on the Mt.
Rushmore of American songwriters.
Study Your Emotions
The appeal of Springsteen’s songs
is his connection with his audience
on an intensely personal level.
“You’re always writing about
yourself,” Springsteen said in a
2005 interview, “…you hide it in
a variety of ways, and you meld
your voice with other lives.”
When he was a child, Springsteen’s
parents struggled to make ends meet,
his mother worked as a legal secretary
and his father employed sporadically
in a succession of blue-collar jobs.
This experience fuels songs like
“Factory,” “Youngstown,” and “Jack
of All Trades.” “The River” is a song
written explicitly about his sister,
who married in her teens and dealt
with adult issues at a young age.
Springsteen’s difficult relationship
(with his father) is explored
in “Adam Raised a Cain,”
“Independence Day,” and “My
Father’s House” and his marriage
in the “Tunnel of Love” album.
Inspiration is in literature and poetry.
Springsteen is extremely well read,
and that level of intellect fuels his
songwriting. Some references are
obvious, such as “A Good Man Is Hard
to Find” (ripped directly from Flannery
O’Connor’s short story of the same
name) and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
(referring to the character in John
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath).
Give your audience a place to escape
to when they listen to your music:
Springstein provides the listener with
compelling narratives that extend
between songs. There are countless
stories contained within his massive
body of work, but a back-to-back
listening of “Thunder Road,” “Racing
in the Street,” “Darkness on the Edge
of Town,” and “The Promise” is a
great entry point for the uninitiated.
When played sequentially, these
songs follow a man who escapes a
dead-end town with his girlfriend to
chase his dreams. When they reach
their destination, they’re crushed by
the bleakness of the real world, and
the man seeks redemption in street
racing. His girlfriend eventually tires
of their dreary working-class existence
and leaves him. In the end, the man
recognizes that his dreams aren’t going
to come true, and his heart breaks.
Look at your body of work as a whole
Springsteen is known to jot down ideas
into a notebook then refer to them later
when he’s piecing his songs together.
All songwriters should follow this.
That idea that you’ve buried inside of
a mediocre song might be what takes
one of your better songs over the top!
In a review of Springsteen’s 2010
collection of unreleased songs, The
Promise, Pitchfork remarked that he’s
“a brilliant editor of his own material.”
The 1977 Darkness on the Edge of Town
outtake “Spanish Eyes” contains lyrics
that popped up later in his 1985 Top
10 hit “I’m on Fire.” Lines from the
unreleased song “Santa Ana” appeared
on his 1975 breakthrough Born to
Run album in the song “She’s the
One.” And the 1979 The River outtake,
“Living on the Edge of the World,”
appeared almost word for word on
Nebraska’s “Open All Night” in 1982.
Confidently Embrace What You’ve Got
When artists are self-conscious
about their abilities, it’s an absolute
creativity killer. It’s not vocal or
instrumental prowess that sets a
songwriter apart from everyone
else; it’s their unique story.
In his autobiography Springsteen
writes, “My voice was never
going to win any prizes. My guitar
accompaniment on acoustic was
rudimentary, so that left the songs.
The songs would have to be fireworks,
the world was filled with plenty of
good guitar players, many of them
my match or better, but how many
good songwriters were there?”
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
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