Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen tries too hard to make Born to Run a well-written literary memoir rather than a truly informative account of his life. He rarely goes deep enough or gets detailed enough, and instead writes in high-level generalities. Here for example is his description of the production process for the Born to Run album:

While the lyrics were being written we struggled with the recorded sounds of the instruments, the drum sounds, the guitar sounds. We layered instrument upon instrument, mixing down and down, track to track, combining sections of instruments until we could fit our seventy-two tracks of rock ‘n’ roll overkill on the sixteen available tracks at 914 Studios. It would be Boom Carter’s only recorded E Street appearance on drums. He picked a good one. It would be the last recording I’d do with Davey Sancious.

Still, his story is so remarkable and so *American* (especially the way in which he willed himself to success) that many parts of it are deeply moving, especially his early years growing up in Freehold, N.J.