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The Bruce Springsteen album beset by “arrogance”

Bruce Springsteen - Twilight Hours - 2025

(Credits: Columbia)

Sun 29 June 2025 18:00, UK

All eyes were fixated towards the empty stage, as the music that had been filling the speakers turned down and curtains twitched on both sides of the stage entrances. Anfield was locked in anticipation, a thick wall of it so heavy I could reach out and touch it, tie it in a knot, and that atmosphere didn’t lift until the man himself, Bruce Springsteen, took to the stage.

“Hello Liverpool,” he said, “For us, this is where it all began.” I’ve never heard a cheer like it.

“Where it all began” was clearly a reference to the Beatles, the band that initially got him into making music. The story of him hearing them on the radio for the first time is one I’ll never tire of, as his Mum was driving him home and he made her stop the car so he could fully appreciate the magnitude of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. Once the song finished, he ran to a phone booth so he could call his girlfriend and tell her about it.

While the Beatles were certainly one of his first inspirations, they aren’t the only people who have influenced him throughout his career. He was so moved by Bob Dylan’s songwriting that he vowed to approach the craft in a similar way, with the mindset to tell stories that spoke the truth and revealed things to the listener he might not be aware of. He also obsessed over The Rolling Stones and the guitar work of Keith Richards, so much so that the first solo he ever learnt was the Stones track ‘It’s All Over Now’.

All of these influences bled into Bruce Springsteen’s music, and once his love for them was set in stone, there was no escaping that the only thing he was interested in doing was making music. He was in a few bands here and there, but eventually made a name for himself with the E Street Band, as they released some critically acclaimed debuts that were well-liked (but performed poorly).

How arrogance helped Bruce Springsteen finally break through

Springsteen’s first album was Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. It’s worth noting that people enjoyed this record. It received great reviews from those who listened, and it didn’t take long for Springsteen to make the connections with fans that he wanted. The only issue was that it didn’t perform well in the charts.

The same could be said for his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. People loved the record, especially songs like the E Street Shuffle, which painted a picture of his hometown in a way that was charming and fun. The formula was there, but Springsteen just needed to work out how to effectively present it so his work would be commercially successful as well as critically. The secret? Well, if you were to ask Bruce, he’d tell you it was arrogance.

His third album, Born to Run, remains one of his most successful records to date, with classics such as ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Thunder Road’ still being sung by stadiums to this day. His approach was similar to that he had with his first two records, but he had an arrogance built into him this time around, one that told him he was going to make the best rock record of all time. What was the result? Well, history will tell you that he succeeded.

“[W]ith [Born to Run] I was shooting for the moon,” he admitted, “I said, ‘I don’t wanna make a good record, I wanna make the greatest record somebody’s ever heard’. I was filled with arrogance and thought, I can do that, y’know?”