Born to Run Review

The making of it is famous because it was agony: six months on the title track alone, take after take, an engineer replaced, the artist reportedly wanting to throw the tapes in a canal. What came out is one of the very few records where the production is inseparable from the meaning. The songs are about escape and the arrangements are enormous, so the escape sounds possible. Thunder Road opens with a harmonica and a screen door and ends with a saxophone taking the whole town with it.

Backstreets is seven minutes of loyalty and betrayal on a piano figure that keeps threatening to break. Jungleland closes the album with a solo that took sixteen hours to record and a final verse where everybody loses. Only eight songs, none wasted, and the sequencing runs day into night across the two sides deliberately. Grand, sincere, absurdly ambitious for a man of twenty five, and it earns every bit of that ambition.