Terry Gross

So you mentioned that Meeting Across the River is a companion to the final track on the album, Jungleland.

So can you elaborate on the connection you hear between the two?

And that is an unusual ending for an album, the perfect ending for an album inspired by film noir, because those films very rarely have a happy ending.

So here's what I want to do.

I want to play some of the narrative part of Jungle Land and then we'll come back and then we'll hear the howls.

So that's an excerpt of Jungle Land.

It's a long track from Born to Run.

Now we're going to skip ahead to the very end, which ends in wails or howls.

So let's hear that.

So that's the end of Jungleland.

It's also the very end of the album Born to Run.

Maybe because there was so much at stake with Born to Run.

Like Springsteen, it sounds like he was in such anguish during much of the making of the album because they would keep changing like the instrumentation and sometimes changing the lyrics and

And it never seemed perfect enough.

You know, like everything had to be perfect, but nothing's ever perfect.

So nothing was ever perfect enough.

And it took so long.

You said it took six months just to do the single Born to Run.

And I think the musicians started getting very frustrated with him at some point.

His new book is called Tonight in Jungleland, The Making of Born to Run.