It’s kind of an old joke these days about how every Springsteen song is really about a car. It’s still a good one, and has a lot of currency in the circles that really know his work. It might be said that he’s drifted away from that theme in favor of more existential ideas of life in the world right now. But looking closer at the body of work as a whole, there really is no big existential shift. The same kinds of alienation and longing that exist in the songs about folk heros and villains are also present in the earlier work.
It is car-centered stuff, though, especially in the Born to Run days. It’s a sentiment that appeals to the teenage memories of every gearhead, but also inspires us to fix up our cars with new rims today. They maintain a kind of raw power, then, and seem to even be based on his early capabilities to write great songs with a lot of passion. But the power is also certainly in his own inarticulateness, where some of the notions he explores later, in great depth and directness, are only touched on here.
The early songs seem to be written with the car as a metaphor, but he was writing as if he wasn’t sure what the metaphor is for. It’s a pleasure to listen to Springsteen, in all of his work, then and now. There’s something utlitiarian about hearing the descriptions of Chevrolets, the engines and the tires , that can make the die hard fans look at the machine in the garage with a longing that we sometimes only have for a love that’s turned sour. There’s also something we recognize here, somewhere deep in the lyrics, about a search, and about the impossibility of that search. We set out to find something, and we’re still looking, too, and we’re all at the edges of a desert with our cars, sensing that the great joy of anticipation that we sometimes feel, is actually the real joy.