Song Review: Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road"

After my Beatles phase, which lasted from about fifth grade until eighth grade, I started listening to Bruce Springsteen's 1995 Greatest Hits album.  I usually only listened to the first song, "Born to Run," because I was a runner.  At that point, I didn't care to look into any deeper meanings the song may have held.  The second song on the album, "Thunder Road" bored me with its slow harmonica prelude, and I didn't even give it a full listen for months. I finally decided to give the song, and the rest of the album, a chance after my mom told me about a project she was assigned in a college art class.  She had to construct a display inspired by a song, and she chose "Thunder Road."

To this day, "Thunder Road" is my favorite Springsteen song and one of my favorite songs of all time.  The opening verse unfolds like a black and white film:  the reluctant creak of the harmonica symbolizes a screen door opening to a wooden porch; the piano represents the song playing on the radio.  The tension between the man in the car and the woman on the porch is established.  Will she jump in the car and leave with him, or will she remain and live a life that's already been planned for generations? This theme of escape, of weighing the costs and potential benefits of leaving a life behind, is paralleled in several other songs of note, including Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car."  The more important question the characters in the songs must ask is whether they have a choice.

The most poignant verse, in my opinion, is the second.  I interpret the verse as a flashback to the dark days of the couple's relationship, when they had separated for a while:

You can hide 'neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now I'm no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now...

I think everyone must hold an ideal vision as to what their life could be and what the future could hold.  Sometimes the vision can be blinding, unattainable, or both, causing one to become discouraged and waste time chasing something that doesn't exist.  The girl is "praying in vain" for her vision to become a reality, for her "savior to rise."  However, the savior is a construct of her mind, so he cannot logically exist.  Left with the self-proclaimed next best thing, the man claiming himself as "no hero," she has to decide whether to keep waiting for a fictional savior or accept the journey ahead of her with this nobody, with no guarantees.  There may be no chance of a savior, but there is a concrete opportunity with this man, a "chance to make it good," and we never actually find out what she chooses.  

The rest of the song launches into a possible scenario of escape and freedom, but at the end, she is still standing on the porch.

And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone on the wind
So Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.

The young man is trying to tell her that the footholds of reality can be much more satisfying than mourning an illusion, but nearly the entire song was a description of his fantasy of escape.  So at the end, they are back where they began: with each other, and with themselves.  

Image: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/tag/bruce-springsteen/