Bruce Springsteen Opens Up About Struggle With Depression

Bruce Springsteen is on the cover of October's Vanity Fair magazine where he’s promoting his upcoming biography, “Born To Run,” which drops September 27^th. In the article, the Boss opens up about his struggles with depression, noting that he was “crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four.” 

Bruce writes about getting help in the book, and says his wife, Patti Scialfa, is the one person who makes sure he gets the treatment he needs. “Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track,” Bruce says. “If I’m being honest, I’m not completely comfortable with that part of the book, but that’s O.K.”

• On a happier note, Bruce tells the mag that his next album is already in the can, although he doesn’t know when it will be released. “It’s a solo record, more of a singer-songwriter kind of record,” he says, noting that it isn’t like his past solo projects like “Nebraska’ or “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

• And while the next album will be a solo record, that doesn’t mean he and the E Street Band are calling it quits. Bruce’s manager Jon Landau shares, “We’ve never talked, not one sentence that I can recall, about ‘When does this stop?’”

And about his signature hit "Born To Run", Bruce says he will never tire of it, as this excerpt from the article attests:

It is not uncommon for an artist to grow wary of a signature song—Robert Plant has referred to “Stairway to Heaven” as “that wedding song,” and Frank Sinatra called “Strangers in the Night” a “piece of shit”—but Springsteen has never tired of “Born to Run,” which he wrote at age 24 in a small rental cottage in West Long Branch, New Jersey.

 

Expressly conceived as an important work, it took him six months to piece together all of its elements, from the twangy, Duane Eddy-inspired guitar figure with which it announces itself, to its “tramps like us” refrain, to its appropriations of imagery from the B movies that Springsteen adored as a kid, pulpy road pictures like Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins.