But this week, Springsteen is on the cover of Vanity Fair, for a long feature which includes a new interview.
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“You don’t know the illness’s parameters”, Bruce, 66, told Vanity Fair ahead of the release of his memoir, Born To Run.
“That’s Bruce. He approached the book the way he would approach writing a song, and a lot of times, you solve something that you’re trying to figure out through the process of writing”, she said.
The interview with the magazine also contained serialised extracts from the book, in which Bruce revealed how the disease had impacted his life in recent years.
Bruce’s father, Doug Springsteen, came from a working-class Irish Catholic family and was a drinker, and while not physically abusive, treated young Bruce alternately with cold indifference or verbal scorn. “I was crushed between [age] sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four”, he writes in the book.
“Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track”.
Do you know anyone suffering from this like Bruce?
“One of the points I’m making in the book is that, whoever you’ve been and wherever you’ve been, it (depression) never leaves you”, Springsteen said.
Scialfa told Vanity Fair she did not enjoy that anecdote being included in the book, but added: ‘I think it’s great for him to write about depression’.
He talks of his father, from whom he claims he inherited the illness, and admits to undergoing both conventional therapy as well as the use of medication.
“I never connected this song particularly to my father”, he says, before adding, “In a amusing way, my parents actually lived this song”.
‘The best you could get was, “Love you, Pops”.
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The singer mused to Vanity Fair that his parents’ unhappy but stable marriage – which lasted until his dad’s passing in 1998 – has parallels to what is likely his most iconic hit, “Born to Run”, a tale of a loner who promises his lover “we’ll live with the sadness” and “someday walk in the sun”. “Even after he had a stroke and he’d be crying, he’d still go, ‘Me, too.’ You’d hear his voice breaking up, but he couldn’t get out the words”.
