Bruce Springsteen talking about the early days of his career:

Everyone was finding their way. I was not interested in a strictly professional set up. I did not want to contain my talents in that box. Because I didn’t know where they were going to lead me at that time. At that time, my concern was this: I have these abilities. I don’t know what they are. But I know that they are there. I don’t know where they are going to lead me, but wherever that is I have to go, even if it is down a bunch of blind alleys, until I find one that I do want to go down. Give me room to do this particular thing. In my own fashion.

It was the classic kind of situation. You have people who have invested themselves in you. The record company. And now they have an idea of what they are looking to get from you. You have to be very suspicious. Very careful.

You have to know how the game is played. If you know how it works, you can protect yourself. And you will be able to defend and protect your work, your art, your spirit, your soul, your band. But you had better be very, very prepared to defend those things. 

…It was an incredible learning experience and one that many people don’t survive.

I look back on it, and go, “wow, you know the lyrics were beautiful. And the band dedicated themselves so deeply to my vision, which is a very touching thing for somebody to do for you. You can’t buy it, really. It can’t be bought.” It is just something that somebody does. So when I hear the record, I hear my friends. I hear my hopes and my dreams. And what I felt my life was going to be like as a 25, 24-year-old kid. I see it as the start of some of the most important and fundamental relationships in my life. It is filled with emotion. And memory. And a forward-looking-ness to it.

Today it provides for us, on stage, a great communion between myself and the band members. Without sounding too hokey about it or blown up about it, it is a bit sacramental. It is a bit sacramental when we play it. And it falls like that in the course of the evening. It is just a lovely feeling. It is a loving thing to have a part of my life. I am like a lot of the rest of the audience. Once you write it, after that you just sort of listen to it. It was just a little, blessed part of my work life.

For the primary questions that I would be writing about for the rest of my work life first took form in the songs on Born To Run. What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do when they don’t? Is love real? Born to Run was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom. It was the real dividing line.
- Bruce Springsteen - Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run