The Evolution of Springsteen Songwriting
(aka me trying to get decent at pandas)
With the possible exceptions of bald eagles and using pigs in a blanket as pizza crust, there’s nothing more American than Bruce Springsteen. For years, “The Boss” has been widely regarded as an American icon and champion of working class Americans. As President Obama put it: “The stories he has told, in lyrics and epic live concert performances, have helped shape American music and have challenged us to realize the American dream.”
Every legend has an origin story, and Bruce is no exception: his triumphant rise from the Jersey Shore to the top of rock-and-roll is well-documented. But in transitioning from a scrappy Jersey kid with big dreams to an American populist telling the stories and dreams of others, his songwriting undoubtedly changed as well.
When listening to Springsteen’s discography, it’s hard not to notice this change. As a huge E-Street Band fan motivated my recent move to New York and the release of Springsten’s autobiography, I decided to dig deeper into the evolution of the remarkably extensive, diverse, and iconic Springsteen discography. I framed my search by investigating two questions: (1) How has Springsteen’s song structure changed over time? and (2) How has the content of those songs changed?
You can check out the data and Python analysis behind my findings here.
Changes in Structure
There’s no question that Springsteen’s style has morphed over the years. On his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., songs like “Blinded by the Light”, “Does this Bus Stop on 82nd Street?”, and “For You” come off like stream of consciousness freeform poetry. In sharp contrast, post-2000’s anthems like “The Rising” and “We Take Care of Our Own” seem custom-tailored for the arenas the E-Street Band now regularly sells out.
Over several years of listening to Bruce, I’ve developed a hypothesis that the Boss has become more repetitive in his songwriting. The dense, lyrically-intense songs from his twenties (think “Racing in the Street” and “Backstreets”) radiate a youthful energy that is largely replaced by an underlying maturity and self-confidence in the simpler, chorus-heavy songs released later in his career (think “Working on a Dream”). In an attempt to quantify this change, I found the percentage of words in each song that are repeated, then plotted each song by its release date. In order to accurately weight repetitiveness, words are counted every time they appear. (For example, the word “Thunder”, which appears 5 times in “Thunder Road”, is counted 5 times, not twice.) This analysis excludes albums such as “The Promise” and “Chapter and Verse” that primarily feature and outtakes and rerecording of old material.
While there are abundant outliers- every album has a fairly wide range of repetitiveness- Springsteen’s discography does show a steady average increase in repeat word frequency. The 10 albums in the pre-2000’s Springsteen collection include only 1 song in above 80% repetitiveness (“All or Nothin’ At All” on Human Touch weighs in at 80.4%), while there are 15 such songs in the 7 albums released this century. This is not to imply that repetition is necessarily an element of bad songwriting; “Dream Baby Dream”, one of my favorite songs from High Hopes, includes just 2 words that are sung once (“darling” and “yeah”). However, it’s almost impossible to compare this song to “Does this Bus Stop at 82nd Street?”, another personal favorite and the most non-repetitive song in the Boss’ collection.
I also hypothesized that song length has decreased over time, but for the most part, this was proven to be untrue. While there’s a fairly large variation, length, as measured in time, has remained relatively consistent throughout Springsteen’s career.
What strikes me as interesting, however, is the the surfeit of “classic” long-form songs from the first few decade of Springsteen’s career. The seven 400+ second songs from The River and earlier are widely regarded as Springsteen essentials, but instead of continuing this pattern of success, Springsteen went more than 25 years before releasing another. While the two 400+ second songs released since then, “Outlaw Pete” and “Land of Hopes and Dreams” are good, they haven’t matched the widespread popularity and critical acclaim of fan favorites like “Rosalita” and “Jungleland”. (I’m excluding the extended versions of “41 Shots” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad” released on High Hopes, since these songs were created years before the album was released.)
Changes in Content
While Springsteen is a master guitarist and a legendary performer, he’s first and foremost a great storyteller. To quote Obama during the 2017 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony:
Once he told us about himself, he told us about everyone else: the steelworker in Youngstown, the Vietnam vet in Born in the U.S.A., the sick and marginalized on the streets of Philadelphia,the firefighter carrying the weight of a reeling but resilient nation on The Rising, the young soldier reckoning with devils and dust in Iraq, the communities knocked down by recklessness and greed in the Wrecking Ball.
In an attempt to extract the key thoughts and ideas from each album, I attempted to find characteristic key words for each album. First, I sorted the collection of words in each album by their frequency. Next, I examined the most frequent words: if an album contained a word that commonly appeared elsewhere in the discography, I removed it from the words list. After removing common words, I listed the 10 most frequent words from each album.
(This process required some tuning: removing too few words caused the representative word lists to become generic, but removing too many words allowed lower frequency words less indicative of overall content to make on the list. Ultimately, words that appeared an average of 4 or more times on other albums were removed.)
The table above provides an interesting glimpse into the themes behind each album. “Girls” and “boys” are uniquely common words on The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, recorded and released when Springsteen was just 23. Born to Run features a collection of memorable words that are easily associated with the roaring exuberance of the album (thunder, backstreets, run, tenth, avenue, freeze-out), but it’s clear that he’s digging in and facing hard realities on the sobering Darkness on the Edge of Town (prove, face, working, believe) and perhaps even giving up on the bleak and sparse Nebraska (dies, stop, please). Meanwhile, the inward-focused love songs on Tunnel of Love, Human Touch, and Lucky Town give us “honey”, “lovin”, “feelin”, and “beautiful”. Fast forward to The Rising, Springsteen’s response to 9/11, and the key words in his patriotic rallying cry rise to the top (faith, rise, strength, hope, sky, miracle).
Stay tuned for further analysis on changes in content over time using cosine similarity between albums.
