Quarter Notes Magazine

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My Father Doesn’t Listen to Bruce Springsteen Anymore

by Corinne Cordasco-Pak

It’s been over a year since I’ve had a real conversation with my father, but we used to be close. When I was very small, before I could talk, I’m told that he would stand by my crib and sing “Woah-oh-oh,”1 imitating the expressive wails Bruce Springsteen uses to fill empty spaces in his songs, and I would sing back to him. Thirty something years later, in my third trimester of pregnancy, I learn that a fetus can hear sounds outside of the uterus by 27 weeks, so I may have first heard Springsteen’s music even earlier as my father listened to his favorite songs.

I was born in the fall of 1990,2 which means, by the time I was old enough to engage with music, most of The Boss’s defining canon was available to me, even before the convenience of streaming. My father owned every Springsteen studio album on vinyl, plus live albums and a few bootlegs. He owned cassettes, CDs, and even a videotape,3 which I begged to watch each day, causing arguments with my brother who just wanted to watch The Lion King.

When I moved out of state for college, I took many of his records with me. On each sleeve, my father wrote “C. Cordasco” in Sharpie, not knowing that one day the records would belong to a daughter who shared the same first initial and last name. Though I mostly listen to Springsteen digitally now, there’s something about the worn cardboard and the soft crackle before those familiar first notes that keeps me coming back to my father’s record collection.

The first time Bruce Springsteen heard himself on the radio, a passing car was playing “Spirit in the Night.” When asked about that moment,4 Springsteen recalled: “I wanted to run over to his car and say, ‘Hey, that’s me!’ but… I just stood there in shock and ecstasy.”

Like Bruce Springsteen, my father is from New Jersey; they were born in towns about an hour’s drive apart. Bruce is 11 years older than my father, putting the musician in the perfect age range to be both an idol and a surrogate older cousin—distant, but close enough to be imitated. My father turned 13 the year Bruce Springsteen released his first two albums,5 and I’ve often wondered if he noticed the first time he heard the artist who would come to mean so much to him. I imagine him just getting home from school when “Blinded by the Light” came tumbling through the speakers with its rhythmic guitar and assonant jumble of lyrics, or in a buddy’s car when Clarence Clemons’s explosive saxophone on “Rosalita” first set his pulse faster. Maybe it wasn’t until Born to Run6 that my father heard the gospel of Springsteen: when your big moment comes, hit the highway and don’t look back. Born to Run, 7 Springsteen’s third album, secured his legacy. On it, Springsteen elevates the prosaic to the romantic, creating a fantasy world with recognizable scenery, where the drama plays out on porches and bedrooms, side streets, highways. Track one, “Thunder Road,” poses a question that echoes across each subsequent song: “With a chance to make it good somehow / Baby, what else can we do now?”

The album feels like the formula8 for how Springsteen rose above humble beginnings. On Born to Run, he repackages heartbreak into gritty epics and kinetic guitar riffs. Even now, wealthy and successful, his name is synonymous with last-ditch efforts.9 Springsteen built a career trading on love, youth, and desperation. He sang, and people like my father listened.

Of his five siblings, my father is the only one who left New Jersey. Just like a Springsteen narrator,10 he fell in love with a girl and together they took a chance on a new life. His childhood was not an easy one. The oldest of six, he would have been the most aware of the tension and tragedy that plagued his family. When he started writing music, he imitated Bruce, who turned angst into an anthem. The stories that my father tells about his childhood are tinged with something unsaid, and I wonder if this is the result of my father leaving out the parts that he couldn’t romanticize. When my mother enters the picture, though, my father’s stories become more detailed. Their love story started with a meet-cute: after deciding to join the Newark police force, my father left a job at an insurance company the same week that my mother started there. Eventually, a mutual friend introduced them, and they were married within two years. Soon after, they moved to Connecticut, where I was born, in pursuit of a better life. There, they worked a series of cobbled-together gigs, including as caterers, substitute teachers, and other jobs. When my father found a job managing a CVS, my mother took me to visit him there. We would sing a silly song about that job, about a little horse who visited him at work to bring him food; it was one of many songs he would write for me over the course of my childhood. When I was two, my maternal grandparents relocated from Connecticut to Virginia to start a church and my parents followed. Although it was difficult at first, my father eventually found a career that took off when I was in elementary school. I remember the early years more clearly than my brothers do; by the time the youngest, six years my junior, was old enough to remember anything, my parents were financially secure. But even when they struggled, our home was a safe, happy place. My father worked hard and my mother sustained the family day-to-day.

Although my father attended church as a child, it wasn’t until his relationship with my mother, a pastor’s daughter, that he began to take Christianity seriously; as their relationship became more serious, they committed to building a life around their shared faith. In Virginia, in my grandfather’s church, my father was an active leader. He selected the songs for each service and then he and my mother led the congregation in song; our house was often filled with the sound of his guitar as he practiced. As we drove to church, my parents did vocal warmups.

While my father wrote songs with me and told epic bedtime stories, my mother was the primary parent. My father was my ally in making the ordinary things of life into something special and creative, but my mother valued action over fantasy. During an argument I had with her as a teenager, she once said to me, “You want everything to be an adventure, but that’s not how it is!” She wasn’t wrong—that was what I wanted—and that was exactly what Bruce Springsteen, and by extension, my father, had told me I could have. If Springsteen’s message of taking chances had led my father down a path of prosperity, why wouldn’t it work for me, too?

My father and I were always very close, probably because we are so similar. We are both eldest children and, among our siblings, we are the artists—dreamy and emotional—but also able to step easily into more professional personas. As a child, I tried to emulate him. I borrowed his clothes—baseball caps, concert tees, a New York Giants bomber jacket. When I ran for student government, my father, a skilled public speaker, helped me rehearse my speech. I wanted to be just like him, so his taste—in clothes, in food, in movies, in music—became mine.

When I got my license, my only request for my first car was that it had a cassette player so I could listen to my father’s tape collection. Among them, I found mixtapes that he made in college and in the years after, some of them for my mother. On one, the playlist11 fills the A-side, but the B-side is a recording of my dad, in his early twenties,12 singing a song he wrote. The track is clearly Springsteen-inspired: earnest vocals, a strummy guitar, and poetic word slinging, leaning heavily, as Springsteen’s early lyrics do, on assonance and alliteration. The tape is like a time machine holding a version of my father that doesn’t exist anymore—young, unsure in the face of his future, trying to style himself like someone who made something of himself.13

Around the time I was in middle school, my father began to get into country music, and my musical taste evolved with his. We would drive around with the windows down and I would select discs from the vinyl pages of a CD-binder. While my friends were listening to Britney Spears or NSYNC, my father and I sang along to Martina McBride, Rascal Flats, and Faith Hill. For my first concert, my father took me to see the Chicks.14 When one of the band members threw a feather boa into the crowd, he fought to grab it for me. (He caught it at the same time as another man and, after a brief tug of war, they split it; my half hung in my room for years.)

In adulthood, and even as a successful professional, my father has continued writing songs, although his style now resembles pop country more than the gritty romance of a young Bruce Springsteen. Over the years, he has invested more and more into his dream of becoming a professional songwriter, attending workshops, co-writing with other aspiring artists, and hiring industry insiders for critiques. When I was a preteen, he took me with him on a trip to Nashville, where I watched him play an open mic night at the Blue Bird Cafe. As I remember it, he gave me a callout from the mic, letting the crowd know that I was there and playing a song that he’d written about the day I was born. I beamed: he was living his dream, and I was there with him.

More than twenty years later, he’s still at it. He’s built a network of other singers and songwriters and, between business trips and professional development (right now, he is pursuing a PhD in his field), he makes notes whenever ideas come to him, a habit I echo in my own writing life. Very little about his life looks the same as it did in his youth, but he still finds time to write songs. As I work on this essay late into the night, stealing moments amidst the demands of my own life, it’s obvious that our shared creativity still bonds us.

As a teenager, my interest in country music faded, but my love for Bruce Springsteen only grew. My father’s CDs migrated into my butterfly-patterned CD holder. My favorite was Springsteen’s 1995 Greatest Hits15 compilation, and I kept the case16 by my boombox.

Aside from their connection to my father, it’s hard to identify what about Springsteen’s songs attracted me: I was too sheltered to really understand them. I was still more than a decade away from premarital sex, raised in a religious culture that demanded virginity, but I sang along to “The River,” interpreting the lyrics17 as a morality tale. Songs about violence and despair like “Atlantic City” and “Murder Incorporated” fascinated me, stories of a world that looked nothing like the suburb where I was shuttled between school and ballet in my parents’ minivan.

The songs became my own, just as they once had for my father, and helped me name my feelings of restlessness. I trusted Bruce because I trusted my father, and I swore that I would protect my dreams and, when I had my own chance, my do-or-die moment, I would take it.

In 2002, when I was 12, Bruce Springsteen released his first album with the E-Street Band in 18 years.18 The Rising was released at a time of surging nationalism, a rock-n-roll elegy that wove mournful ballads and hopeful songs. My father and his brothers had all worked in New Jersey as police officers or firefighters, several of them still serving as of September 11, so the album hit close to home. It’s also the last Springsteen album that I remember my father buying.

Fourteen years later, in 2016, when I was living in Virginia after college, Springsteen was touring nearby. I saw my chance to finally go to my first Springsteen concert, but my father wouldn’t go. “He’s gotten too political,” he said, and I was hurt. I couldn’t understand why my father would pass up the chance to take me to my first Springsteen show, but now I do.

It wasn’t Springsteen who had become more political. Even before becoming active in national politics, his music tackled controversial issues—war and veteran’s affairs,19 police brutality,20 and the AIDS crisis21—and he surrounded himself with other artists who sang political songs.22 It made sense, then, that in the years that followed September 11, that Springsteen, among other artists,23 would become more vocal about politics, going so far as to endorse every Democratic presidential nominee since 2004, allowing his songs to be used by candidates who he supported24 and campaigning for Barack Obama in several key states.25 Meanwhile, my mother was launching a political career of her own as a conservative Republican, and no one was more supportive of her than my father. Up until this point, she had primarily been a stay-at-home mom, as my father built a career. With all of her children old enough to need less supervision, my mother saw her chance to do something more with her life. She ran for a series of offices, starting with local non-partisan roles before running for state House of Delegates. With each race, my father threw himself into campaigning, canvassing each weekend and posting on Facebook about how deeply he believed in her.

The first few times that my mother ran for office, I helped her campaign too, flying home from college to man a table outside of one of the polling locations on election day. At that point, I was still largely politically aligned with my family. But, by the concert that my father and I didn’t go to in 2016, my beliefs were changing. That fall, my mother would lose her first of three unsuccessful bids for a seat in the House of Delegates, Donald Trump would win the presidency, and I would move nine hours away from my parents for my own fresh start.

I’m certainly not the only one who associates Bruce Springsteen’s music with their father, and there’s a good reason for that, beyond just his classification as “Dad Rock.”26 Springsteen’s songs are filled with tenuous father/son relationships,27 which reflect his relationship with his own father.28 In almost every instance that a father is mentioned in one of his songs, there’s a sense of something inescapable being passed from generation to generation: love for a dying town,29 a propensity for anger or even wickedness,30 and disappointing legacies.31 Springsteen songs glorify beginnings, but when it comes to what comes next, they tally the costs of breaking away.32 The break in my relationship with my father was a fight, devastating in its scope and precision. It had all of the classic elements of a Springsteen song: a father and his firstborn (both of them stubborn), the inevitability of a conflict that’s simmered for too long (a political issue that bled into our family life), and an iconic setting33 (Christmas Eve). At first, I held our estrangement against him, but the more I reflect on the songs we sang together, the more I understand. Though my father and I are no longer as close as we once were, it’s because we’re alike, not different.34 Just like my father saw his chance to, in the spirit of Springsteen, break away from his past and start something new, so did I. For me, as for him, that would eventually look like meeting someone who I could build a life with, moving south, and shedding many of my family’s beliefs. From Springsteen’s songs, I learned there was freedom in distance and that, when someone leaves in search of their fresh start, it’s best to let them go.

Almost a year after our fight, in my 36th week of pregnancy, my father sends me a text. “How are you feeling today?” it said. “I was just thinking that the first born of a first born is about to experience her first born.” The message surprises me with its arrival, but the tone is familiar.

This is the way my father has always expressed himself—in pattern, sentiment, and story. Soon after, my parents send a gift befitting the child of an errant daughter: a car seat.35 When my son is born, I buckle him into the seat in for the journey home from the hospital, and my father and I slowly began to speak again.

One day, after all of my speculation, I learn how my father discovered Bruce Springsteen. The answer comes as I work to finish this essay, serendipitously, as if to validate our enduring connection. It wasn’t Springsteen’s early albums or Born to Run, but Darkness on the Edge of Town.36 When I post on my Instagram story about a newly-released playlist of recordings from the tour to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Darkness, my father responds to the post: “I turned down a ticket to the Capitol Theater show37 because I had early classes and practice the next day and was not a fan yet. I listened to it live on the radio and was captivated.”

I start the playlist and “Badlands” bursts from the speakers. As the song builds, I sing along: “Talk about a dream, try to make it real / You wake up in the night with a fear so real / You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come / Well, don’t waste your time waiting…”

And although I’m in my 30s, in Atlanta, with my newborn looking up at me—for a moment, I’m with my father too. He’s there as he is now, but also as a younger version of himself—almost 18, in New Jersey, uncertain what his life will hold but ready to chase it. Impossibly, through years of shared experience and estrangement, and in a world that now includes a third generation of eldest children—these versions of us exist, brought together again by Bruce Springsteen. And in the same moment, all of our selves—past, present, and maybe even future—sing along.

  1. Examples: “Badlands” at 3:38, “Backstreets” at 5:58, “Born to Run” at 4:05, “Something in the Night” at 4:21, and “I’m on Fire” at 1:58, among many others. ↩︎
  2. Tucked between Tunnel of Love, which released in October 1987, and the simultaneous release of Human Touch and Lucky Town on March 31, 1992, and just before The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995. ↩︎
  3. I think it may have been Bruce Springsteen Video Anthology, 1978-88, released in 1989. ↩︎
  4. In a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 1 ↩︎
  5. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. ↩︎
  6. On August 25, 1975. ↩︎
  7. Named after the title track, which the singer wrote sitting alone in his bedroom at 24 years old. ↩︎
  8. Buy first guitar for $18 after seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show + sit alone and write songs + bounce from band to band until finally forming The E Street Band + take chance after chance until you finally hit it big. ↩︎
  9. In “Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink”, Chuck Klosterman wrote that one could almost believe “when not recording or touring—Springsteen…went back to New Jersey to work at a car wash.” ↩︎
  10. For example, the narrators of “Born to Run”, “Thunder Road”, “Atlantic City”, “Two Hearts”, “Rosalita”, etc. ↩︎
  11. Dire Straights’s “Skateaway” fades into “Athena” by The Who, then “Love Me Two Times” by The Doors. ↩︎
  12. Close to Springsteen’s age when he reports writing “Born to Run,” one nigh sitting alone in his bedroom. ↩︎
  13. Or, as Springsteen would put it in “Backstreets”, “Trying to learn to walk like the heroes [he] thought [he] had to be. The track concludes Side One of Born to Run on the original vinyl release. On the cassette version, where the tracks were rearranged to save tape space (an industry-standard practice), it’s track three of four on Side One. ↩︎
  14. At that point, still known as the Dixie Chicks. ↩︎
  15. Track listing: “Born to Run”, “Thunder Road”, “Badlands”, “The River”, “Hungry Heart”, “Atlantic City” “Dancing in the Dark”, “Born in the U.S.A.”, “My Hometown”, “Glory Days”, “Brilliant Disguise”, “Human Touch”, “Better Days”, “Streets of Philadelphia”, “Secret Garden”, “Murder Incorporated, “Blood Brothers”, “This Hard Land” ↩︎
  16. Which features a photo of Springsteen from behind in tight jeans, a leather jacket, guitar slung across his back. ↩︎
  17. “Then I got Mary pregnant / And, man, that was all she wrote…” ↩︎
  18. Since 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. ↩︎
  19. “Born in the USA” ↩︎
  20. “Ghost of Tom Joad” and “41 Shots (American Skin)” ↩︎
  21. “Streets of Philadelphia” ↩︎
  22. For example, Steve Van Zandt, whose song “Sun City“ took on apartheid in South Africa and Patti Smith who’s performed “People Have the Power” in support of countless political causes, including singing it to voters in New York City as they waited on the street to cast their ballots in the 2020 presidential election. ↩︎
  23. Such as The Chicks, whose criticism of George W. Bush during a 2003 performance derailed their career. ↩︎
  24. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden used “We Take Care of Our Own” as a theme song for their respective campaigns, and Biden also used “My Hometown” and “The Rising” in campaign ads. ↩︎
  25. including Virginia. ↩︎
  26. “This one is just too easy,” Will Schube writes in Spin about Springsteen’s inclusion on 40 Bands That Define “Dad Rock”. “He embodies the ethos of what dad rock is all about. He is the dad of dad rock. Long live the Dad Boss.”
    ↩︎
  27. “Adam Raised a Cain”, “My Father’s House”, “My Hometown”, and “The River” ↩︎
  28. Bruce is a fellow eldest child, with two younger sisters. ↩︎
  29. “My Hometown”, Born in the USA: “I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick/ And steer as we drove through town / He’d tousle my hair /And say, “Son, take a good look around” ↩︎
  30. “Adam Raised a Cain”, Darkness on the Edge of Town: “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain/ Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame/ But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames” ↩︎
  31. “The River”, The River: “I come from down in the valley/ Where, mister, when you’re young/ They bring you up to do like your daddy done”. ↩︎
  32. Like “Racing in the Street” where the narrator follows the romantic story of how he met his girl with, “But now there’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes / And she cries herself to sleep at night.” ↩︎
  33. Like “Atlantic City”, “Tunnel of Love” or “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” ↩︎
  34. “Independence Day”, The River: “There was just no way this house could hold the two of us / I guess that we were just too much of the same kind.” ↩︎
  35. An incomplete list of Springsteen songs featuring cars: “Thunder Road”, “Stolen Car”, “My Hometown”, “Born to Run,” “Backstreet”, “Jungleland,” “Pink Cadillac”, “Racing in the Street”, “Hungry Heart”, “Nebraska”, “Used Cars,”…
    ↩︎
  36. Released three years after Born to Run, on June 2, 1978 ↩︎
  37. September 20, 1978 Passaic, NJ ↩︎
Corinne cordasco-Pak (she/her) holds an MFA from Randolph College. Most recently, her work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Oyster River Pages, and Identity Theory, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Corinne is a former fiction editor of Revolute and a member of the Wildcat Writing Group, as well as an interview contributor to Write or Die. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, toddler, and their two rescue dogs. You can find her online @CECordasco.

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