Born to Run

Everything about this song is about scale — the production enormous, the ambition barely contained, the guitar sound the sonic equivalent of a wide open night highway. Springsteen throws orchestration and saxophone and multiple guitar tracks at this track in a way that could easily tip into bombast, but it never does, because underneath all that size is a very small, urgent, human feeling: the desire to escape, together. The saxophone solo that runs through the song is one of the great moments in rock — played by Clarence Clemons with the kind of authority that makes you feel something sacred is being performed. Springsteen's vocal is physical and desperate, the delivery of someone who understands that words alone aren't enough and has decided to use his entire body as an instrument. The lyric is an extended metaphor — the road as salvation, the car as a kind of church, a girl as both the thing he's running toward and the companion for the running — but Springsteen earns the metaphor by making it feel specific rather than mythological. This is the sound of New Jersey and industrial America and young people for whom rock and roll genuinely was the escape hatch. It's music for the feeling that your real life is somewhere ahead of you, that if you just drive far enough and fast enough you'll find it.