Bruce Springsteen has given an in-depth interview to American National Public Radio, which can be downloaded and listened to here.
In it, he talks at length about his often-troubled Catholic upbringing.
“I think when you're a child, you just cling to the basics, which is the story of Jesus and the crucifixion and hell and eternal punishment and the flames,” Bruce reflects. “This was all stuff that was - forget when you're young. This is very tangible and is as real as the gas station next door to you, you know?
“This was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers. And as a child, you just - you know, these things were very, very - they were very, very terrifying.”
He moves on then to his music, and the town that so heavily influenced it in the early days.
“Asbury was down on its luck but not as bad as it would get,” he resumes. “And so there was a lot of room to move. You know, clubs were open till 5 a.m. There were gay clubs. In even the late '60s, it was a bit of an open city. So as young ne'er-do-wells, we fit very - you know, we fit very comfortably in that picture. And then when I went to write, I just wrote about what was around me. It fired my imagination. It was - of course, was a colorful locale. The city was filled with characters and plenty of people at loose ends. And so it just became a very natural thing to write about. I didn't give it too much thought at the time. But I did think that it gave me a very individual identity in that if I was going to go out into the musical world on a national level, I was very interested in being connected to my home, my home state. There wasn't anyone else writing in this way about these things at that time. So it was something I did very - intentionally in the sense as creating a certain very, very specific and original identity.
“I looked at myself, and I just said, well, you know, ‘I can sing but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world,’” The Boss continues. “What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.”