Bruce Springsteen’s eagerly awaited memoir, Born to Run, won’t be hitting stores until later this month, but the 66-year-old superstar offered fans a considerable sneak preview of his thoughts during a recently released interview with Vanity Fair. In the book, Springsteen opens up about his ongoing battle with clinical depression. “Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerine and running quickly out of track”, he writes.
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Then, when Springsteen wasn’t quite 20 years old, his father chose to pull up roots and move from Freehold, New Jersey, to California, taking Springsteen’s mother and seven-year-old sister with him. “Not a good record”.
The album Wrecking Ball, released when Springsteen was 62, featured a song called This Depression, but he told the magazine his bandmates did not realise he was in trouble. “She gets me to the doctors and says, ‘This man needs a pill.'” Though Patti told Vanity Fair that she wasn’t “completely comfortable with that part of the book”, she did admit that putting his struggles on paper would help Bruce cope with his depression.
“I knew I was gonna “go there” in the book”, he adds.
“I think it’s great for him to write about depression.”
“A lot of his work comes from him trying to overcome that part of himself”.
The Born to Run book hits stores on September 27.
“One of the points I’m making in the book is that, whoever you’ve been and wherever you’ve been, it never leaves you.”
“The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?”
“Bruce, you’ve been very good to us”, Springsteen said his dad told him in 1990, shortly before Springsteen’s son Evan was born.
Another topic in the interview was a surgery that Springsteen underwent three years ago, an invasive procedure that required replacing disks in his neck by cutting into his throat.
“That was it”, the singer writes.
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Meanwhile, Springsteen also shares some details about his forthcoming solo album, which he describes as “more of a singer-songwriter kind of record”.
