Barnes & Noble

In 1975, Bruce Springsteen had to put up or shut up. At 24, after two albums in three years, he'd been called everything from the new Dylan to the future of rock 'n' roll. The records -- Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle -- were involving, but they didn't live up to the promise. Suddenly, in 1975, everything hit: Born to Run was released, and Time and Newsweek, in a burst of journalistic one-upmanship, put Springsteen on the cover the same week. The payoff, still evident 25 years later, is that Born to Run delivered, and Springsteen deserved the hype. The album's reputation rests on four key songs: "Thunder Road," "Backstreets," "Jungleland," and the title track. Epic and anthemic, these songs are united by Springsteen's extraordinarily poetic lyrics -- hyperreal, hyperromantic, and centered around longing and faith -- and big, expansive arrangements full of piano and horns that create a shimmering wall of sound. The result is a stunning, timeless album that -- equal parts Phil Spector, Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones -- is absolutely essential. Bill Wyman

All Music Guide

Bruce Springsteen's make-or-break third album represented a sonic leap from his first two, which had been made for modest sums at a suburban studio; Born to Run was cut on a superstar budget, mostly at the Record Plant in New York. Springsteen's backup band had changed, with his two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg. The result was a full, highly produced sound that contained elements of Phil Spector's melodramatic work of the 1960s. Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums -- Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it. The overall theme of the album was similar to that of The E Street Shuffle; Springsteen was describing, and saying farewell to, a romanticized teenage street life. But where he had been affectionate, even humorous before, he was becoming increasingly bitter. If Springsteen had celebrated his dead-end kids on his first album and viewed them nostalgically on his second, on his third he seemed to despise their failure, perhaps because he was beginning to fear he was trapped himself. Nevertheless, he now felt removed, composing an updated West Side Story with spectacular music that owed more to Bernstein than to Berry. To call Born to Run overblown is to miss the point; Springsteen's precise intention is to blow things up, both in the sense of expanding them to gargantuan size and of exploding them. If The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was an accidental miracle, Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen's promise, and though some thought it took itself too seriously, many found that exalting. [Sony Japan issued a limited edition in 2008.] William Ruhlmann