Peter Ames Carlin

He's going, but he's pretty sure he ain't getting anything when he gets to the end of the road.

Whereas, you know, the existing Thunder Road is a completely different story.

Yeah, you know, his connection to what people are looking for in music and in particularly in his music and his performances is probably the strongest of any artist I can think of.

And as he says repeatedly on that record, and he describes the road, you know, and getting on the road and driving off.

But where they're going is somehow like barely relevant.

As he says in Born to Run, we'll get to that place that we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun.

It does not narrow it down in terms of a destination.

So what occurs to us as you listen is that it's not getting somewhere that matters as much as having the courage to go.

And start that process of recreation and discovery and getting away from the limitations and the boundaries of these towns that begin to feel, as he says, like a death trap.

Yeah, you know, it's an interesting note to strike on this record and one that Bruce wasn't at first convinced was going to work because the pianist in the E Street band, Roy Bitton, had come over to his house and

Bruce took a call and Roy had just seen a jazz artist play in some club in Green Greenwich Village and he just started playing these really spare kind of jazzy chords and when Bruce came back from his phone conversation he said what was that and Roy showed him you know sort of arpeggiating the chords to show him you know what these were they weren't really part of his usual musical vocabulary since he was more you know a straight rock and roll guy with you know a lot of different influences a few days later he showed up in the studio and

And he had taken some of those cords that Roy had shown him and

You know, made his own melody and added some other sections.

And it evoked that kind of cinema noir setting, this kind of grim black and white down and out world where you have these two kind of low level or at least aspiring, you know, crooks.

You know, the one guy's got a connection.

This is his last chance.

They're going to pull this off and then they're going to come back with enough dough to float them into, you know, wherever they need to go next.

But as you listen to it, you really get a sense of like, I've seen this movie before.

There's no way this is ending happily for these guys.

But what it sets up on the album itself is the climactic song Jungle Land, which tells another iteration of that same story.